President Lula’s participation in the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg last week emphasised the claim that ‘Brazil is back’ as a partner for African countries. It highlighted the extent to which his government’s renewed foreign policy commitment to the Global South places a focus on African countries as well as Brazil’s Latin American neighbours.
This two-part contribution to the ‘Brazil is Back’ blog series explores what this could mean for Brazil’s future role in development in Africa and for South-South Cooperation (SSC) as a whole. In this first part we examine the implications of President Lula’s efforts to show global leadership in tackling climate change for SSC between Brazil and African countries. In Part Two we explore some of the challenges that Brazilian SSC will need to overcome to return to its former prominence in the fields of food security and social protection.
By contrast with his previous periods in office, when he attracted criticism from indigenous movements and environmental groups for emphasising infrastructure investment and agribusiness expansion as drivers of growth, Lula has said that combating climate change and biodiversity loss will be a core focus of his third term as President of Brazil. As noted in the first blog in this series, this has included granting much greater political recognition to the indigenous peoples whose territories are on the front line of climate and environmental justice struggles, as well as resuming the Amazon deforestation control efforts that had been abandoned by his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
A key moment for Lula’s new phase of international climate policy engagement was the Amazon Summit held last month in the Brazilian city of Belém, which is also the proposed venue for the COP30 climate summit in 2025. This was framed as an effort to set out a common policy for the sustainable development of the region as a whole – but although it did secure important joint commitments from the eight Amazonian countries, it failed to meet pre-summit expectations in several areas.
The summit had been expected to emphasise the importance of the participation of the Amazonian indigenous peoples and traditional communities whose territories have been a bulwark against deforestation in recent years. In Brazil these territories have maintained much lower rates of forest loss than even strictly protected areas like national parks, despite the intensified violence to which their traditional inhabitants were subjected during the Bolsonaro years and the ongoing threat to weaken the legal basis for recognition of their land rights from the agribusiness lobby in Congress. However, key indigenous leaders (including the legendary Chief Raoni) were left frustrated by the lack of opportunities for them to participate directly in the summit.
Moreover, Brazil’s renowned commitment to incorporating citizen participation into policy processes also failed to deliver the hoped-for paradigm shift in civil society engagement with the summit process. The timing of the dialogues with civil society that preceded the summit made it impossible for the participating governments to take on board their recommendations. These recommendations were a result of over 400 parallel activities organised by civil society groups, but by the time these activities took place, most of the content of the official Belém Declaration had already been negotiated.
Internal divisions within the Brazilian government over proposals to drill for oil off the mouth of the Amazon also left Lula unable to match the clarity of the commitment to end fossil fuel extraction in the region offered by President Gustavo Petro of Colombia. This led to criticism from climate policy experts towards the Brazilian president.
Lula was not able to capitalise on his government’s notable success in curbing deforestation within Amazonian regions of Brazil (though not in the seriously threatened Cerrado biome) to secure a regional-level agreement to achieve zero deforestation across the Amazon. A joint commitment to ending deforestation by 2030 had to be removed from the final communiqué, thanks to dissent from Bolivia.
Given that tackling deforestation and preserving rainforest biodiversity is the stated aim of a tripartite alliance established by Brazil with Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, it will be important to monitor whether this failure to secure unity among Brazil’s Amazonian neighbours will reduce Lula’s credibility as a convenor of collective action among high-biodiversity countries in Africa and beyond.
Equally important for Brazilian engagement with Africa on climate change, the summit was a missed opportunity to explore the nexus between food and environmental issues. The realisation of Amazonian communities’ right to sufficient, healthy and culturally appropriate food as means to protect and even regenerate forest biodiversity was acknowledged by the Amazon Summit, as Saulo Arantes Ceolin and Luiz Carlos Keppe Nogueira point out in their contribution to this blog series. However, given Brazil’s rich range of local experiences and policy innovations in this field, it could potentially have provided a focus for the launch of a new range of South-South Cooperation (SSC) activities. Despite the high political visibility of the green agenda, environmental and climate-related initiatives have not thus far featured prominently in Brazil’s SSC portfolio.
During the ‘golden age’ of Brazil-Africa cooperation when Lula was last in office, Brazil was often a contributor to African countries’ climate and environmental problems as well as a source of valuable know-how in fields like climate-smart agriculture. This is because of the scale of Brazilian investments in African fossil fuel industries, including oil in Angola and coal in Mozambique. These investments have now been scaled back, both because of the corruption scandals that led to a domestic Brazilian backlash against government provision of subsidised credit for overseas ventures and because of changes in strategy on the part of key Brazilian corporations such as the mining giant Vale.
Ironically, however, the withdrawal of Brazilian corporations from key extractive sector regions (such as the Tete coalfield in Mozambique, in which Vale had been the biggest investor) and the drying up of Brazilian development bank finance for construction projects in Africa has meant that Brazil has lost much of the economic heft that had complemented the country’s technical and political credibility as a development cooperation partner during the ‘golden age’. Despite the continent’s huge unmet demand for electricity, this has not been replaced by a rush of Brazilian investment in renewable energy projects in Africa.
Brazil has therefore lost some of the leverage that it might have enjoyed with African countries that are subject to increasing international pressure to scale back their investments in fossil fuel extraction at the same time as they try to respond to popular demands for access to affordable energy. Although Brazilian negotiating principles (such as the country’s emphasis on common but differentiated responsibilities) still leave space for establishing shared positions with African nations at the international level, the fact that the country is not a significant energy sector partner for most African countries reduces the scope for national-level SSC initiatives that align with these positions.
If the promise of Brazil’s transformation into a global climate champion is to be reflected in the country’s relationships with African countries, it will need to move fast to develop a stronger offer for South-South Cooperation in this field. This will require turning domestic policy successes like the curbing of Amazonian deforestation and grassroots innovations like those that have enabled communities across Brazil to achieve food security while preserving biodiversity into a set of ‘products for export’ that can achieve the same recognition as the renowned social protection programmes that were a key centre piece of Brazilian SSC during Lula’s previous period in office. It will also require doing this in a way that is attentive to the challenge of reframing climate justice and fully engages with the country’s strong and globally-networked social movements, as otherwise future government-led SSC efforts in the field of climate change will attract criticism for neglecting the organic link with civil society that has been a key component of so many of Brazil’s domestic policy successes.
