Brazil and the Environment

As Brazil gets richer, inevitably the expansion into the rainforest rises. Unlike environmental damage in other countries, this one is guaranteed to affect the world since the Amazon rainforest absorbs 25% of global carbon dioxide.

From a moral side, it is hardly fair for the rest of the world to tell Brazilians to stay poor because the environment is important. Any forced solution in such a situation is sure to fail. And yet Brazil has framed the CAR, its rural environmental registry, to “promote sustainable land use and encourage environmental preservation”, writes Rahul Matthan. How did that happen? More importantly, does it work as intended?

The EU framed regulations that restrict the sale of unsustainably cultivated produce from other countries. This made it necessary for Brazilian farmers to demonstrate compliance to sell to the EU. Hence the establishment of CAR:

“(It is) a digital framework designed to map, monitor and regulate rural properties around the country to establish a baseline of agricultural activity that can then be used to demonstrate compliance with applicable environmental regulations.”

 

Here is how it works. Brazilian farmers had to self-declare the land they own, with geo-referenced information. This includes its boundaries, forest areas it extends into, and water bodies that pass through it. Such entries, after verification, becomes the environmental baseline. The government can take arial pictures and determine if violations occur. And issue certificates of compliance as appropriate. Which the farmers can use to sell to the EU.

 

Matthan is a big fan of digital infrastructure, and of the India Stack in particular (UPI, Digi Yatra, DigiLocker etc). He sees an opportunity here for Brazil to go further with their CAR similar to how India Stack uses different pieces of information as Lego blocks to build other things. For example, he says, the Brazilian government could use CAR compliance to decide which farmers should get subsidies. In fact, Brazil has already made CAR compliance a mandatory checklist item for banks issuing loans to farmers.

 

All of which is why Matthan says:

“The more I learnt about CAR, the more I realized that this was technology other countries could use to meet their own sustainability objectives. While few countries have anything even approaching the extent of forest cover that Brazil has the responsibility to preserve, they all have their own unique ecological challenges that need addressing.”

It is interesting how more and more of “systems” in the present era seem to be designed in emerging economies like India and Brazil…