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> So it is hard to criticize. Even areas that are now heavily forested like Vermont were clear cut almost entirely by the turn of the century. As someone born

• deleted 4y ago
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• lvass 4y ago
  >mistakes Yeah, that's a very hard sell, when your country is in such a shameful state, your economy is hanging by a thread that's agriculture, and without it your currency would be so messed up you'd be unlikely to be able to pay for the device you're typing that on. When you pledge for your own country that's suffering from hunger to reduce agriculture, you're part of the problem.
  • ratww 4y ago
    What does it have to do with anything? Import oriented agriculture/livestock is not really serving the local economy or making the country grow. Like other poster said, "Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation". People used to eat meat in Brazil every day, now even some middle class people had to reduce due to prices. The same goes for gas. That's because the economy changed heavily to favour primary sector exports at the detriment of every other activity. Agriculture and Livestock were benefited at the detriment of every other sector. EDIT: I wouldn't be able to even dream about buying the device I'm currently using if I were still working as a software engineer in Brazil, dude! I had to immigrate, as have about >60% of the co-workers I had in the last 10-ish years. The economical bullshit you're currently defending was shit even for people in well paying positions. However I was lucky, as my parents were immigrants themselves and I have foreign citizenship due to that. Some people weren't as lucky!
    • lvass 4y ago
      If you don't understand how the vast majority of goods made in your country helps your economy, you terribly need to read some economic theory. I suggest Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Brazil didn't suddenly deinvest other sectors out of a whim, they became less relevant thanks to economic pressure. To assume otherwise is accusing the entire country of incredible stupidity, which is laughable when you demonstrate so much lack of knowledge.
      • ratww 4y ago
        Oh nice, more condescension. I'll let it pass. Here's a real reply: This might work in aggregate, but doesn't really help the average Brazilian, nor makes the country become developed. If the economic measures are only favouring the primary sector, the "vast majority of goods made in [my] country" is only making money for an extremely small part of the population. Plus, these measures are causing shrinkage of other sectors that actually would help the population richness grow. What is happening only favours people in the primary sector (which isn't really employing that much people despite continuous growth) and richer countries buying cheaply for us. Hypocrites who want Brazil to keep being a giant farm/ranch of the world selling cheap stuff are a problem as big as the country's government. Go away with your colonialism.
        • lvass 4y ago
          • ratww 4y ago
            Alright, so now it seems I want Zimbabwe-style Socialism in Brazil, whatever that means. It seems you're too busy putting words in my mouth to care about what I wrote, so goodbye I guess. EDIT: Rightfully flagged/dead and I didn't even had to flag it myself. Nice. There should be no room for this type of discourse on HN.
• is_true 4y ago
  Think of it this way: The countries pointing fingers at Brazil all did the same to become more developed and to make their population richer, they just want to stop Brazil from doing the same so they can keep the prices of commodities they sell higher. They cheated but now don't want you to do the same in order to keep other countries in check, I mean, Europe is burning more and more coal, they are just a bunch of hypocrites. Fun fact: That "newspaper*" that published the article is from Argentina, which is destroying the "Chaco" region as we speak and burning large areas of wetlands to increase the area for growing cattle, a market in which it's competing with Brazil. Even thought the article is from another source, the BA Times belong to a company aligned with the Argentinian government which supports Lula in Brazil.
  • jdasdf 4y ago
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  • 411111111111111 4y ago
    > They cheated but now don't want you to do the same in order to keep other countries in check, I mean, Europe is burning more and more coal, they are just a bunch of hypocrites. It's even worse in my opinion, because people here actually do seem to think that "the west" has it under control nowadays, which is one of the dumbest things I learned recently. There are so many factors which were omitted in order to create that misinformation, but there is only one thing you can trust the industry to do: suppress any information which could negatively impact them, even if it could very well become an existential threat ...
  • ratww 4y ago
    > The countries pointing fingers at Brazil all did the same to become more developed and to make their population richer, they just want to stop Brazil from doing the same so they can keep the prices of commodities they sell higher. My point is that what made US/EU rich isn't what Brazil is doing. And even if it were, what makes a country rich pre-1900 won't exactly work in 2022. Brazilians could buy machinery from other countries. They don't have to go trough some mini industrial revolution again.
• rglullis 4y ago
  The point is that every rich country first became rich, then started worrying about the environment. It is hypocritical from rich countries to ask Brazil to stop deforestation if that means halting its economic development. If the rich countries really believe that preserving the environment is more important than the economy, then they need to either (a) pay underdeveloped countries to preserve their forests or (b) sacrifice their own economy and spend their own resources to re-grow their forest land. Ideally both.
  • ratww 4y ago
    And my point is that Brazil won't get rich by doing what it is currently doing. The primary sector won't enrich the general population or make the country more developed. Only some people favoured by the current government. That's what's currently happening, not some cuckoo theory.
    • cassianoleal 4y ago
      Brazil is rich though, and largely because of those things. The fact that such richness is so unjustly distributed across the population is an orthogonal problem.
      • ratww 4y ago
        Yep. But one way of distributing this across the population is by favouring other sectors rather than strangling them to favour the primary. The number of people working in the agricultural sector has only shrunk and will keep shrinking due to mechanisation/automation. The general population won't see the benefits of the primary sector growing, unless we have a Soviet-style wealth redistribution.
        • cassianoleal 4y ago
          We can agree on that. My point was not that the current model is a good one, but rather that its problem is not one of generating wealth but rather one of distributing it, which you just demonstrated as well. I guarantee you, I was not defending the current focus on developing /latifúndios/ at the expense of everything else.