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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The thing is, "paying Brazil to not raze the Amazon" has already been tried and failed. The government sees it as a way to fleece rich environmentalists and has no interest in abandoning their meal ticket.

Even if the government was aligned on keeping the Amazon as it was, they have their own enforcement struggles. Once an illegal developer has razed a plot of land, there's not really much the government can do to stop them. The damage has already been done. Even worse, by the time the government is even aware of a particular section of illegally cleared land, it's already been sold off, developed, and has people living in it. The only option now is to either:

1. Grandfather in the illegal land

2. Forcibly evict and ruin the lives of people who bought into the illegal purchase so that the scarred land can remain fallow for decades

Overwhelmingly Brazilian courts have chosen #1 over #2. Enforcement is too far behind land development to make any sort of "pay to save" scheme work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ah perfect, then we're in agreement.

A lot of people assume I'm being a radical and saying Brazil should stop exporting meat/soy/etc. I'm not.

What I'm saying is that Brazil needs is a plan that's not simply "keep fucking the country even though it's not really working".

I'm not a fan of people from richer countries saying "Brazil should keep doing what it seems to want to do", because this is also way too favourable to them.

I'm not a fan of richer (or poorer!) countries saying much of anything about what other countries should or should not do. :) Everyone is biased. Everyone is hypocritical to some degree. We should find common ground, not impose or be imposed on.

Agree.

I think it's kinda easy to find common ground, but everyone should be allowed a voice. With the "shut up, let Brazil destroy forests, we did it too", the only people that seem to be getting a voice are politically-correct privileged people from rich countries (who want to keep taking advantage of Brazil), criminals in Brazil destroying the forest and the corrupt current Brazilian government.

There's a lot of people working in that automation. That earn much more and make the country more efficient, more production means more jobs down the road.

Also, countries like brasil don't export commodities just because they want, there 's a web of tariff to keep producing countries from industrializing those products.

> There's a lot of people working in that automation.

Sorry for the pun, but Brazil isn't really reaping the benefits of agricultural automation to compensate for the issues being an exclusively primary-sector exporter causes. Automation scales very well. Also notice that I'm not saying Brazil shouldn't keep doing what it is doing, I'm saying that other more developed-country-ish sectors should be expanded too.

> Also, countries like brasil don't export commodities just because they want, there 's a web of tariff to keep producing countries from industrializing those products.

If that's the case, then saying "Brazil needs to import primary sector stuff before they grow fo' real like us" is even worse :) They want Brazil to suffer before it has a chance to become a developed country.

They don't want more developed countries. Period.

Also, I don't know where you are from, but brazil has a healthy agritech industry selling know-how and technology to other countries.

The only people who "don't want more developed countries" are the people that want Brazil to keep being a primary sector exporter that suffers from Resource curse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse).

I'm from Brazil but I have lived abroad for a while. And what I said before doesn't negate the fact that Brazil has a healthy agritech industry. This industry still doesn't make up for the problems caused by the current policies. And one thing doesn't really negate the other. We don't have to kill the primary sector for others to develop.

The alternative to "not enrich the country" will be "make it even poorer and unequal than it already is".

Bullshit.

Brasil has >70% people working in the service sector. The percentage of people working in agriculture has actually shrunk since the Lula years. Mechanization and automation will guarantee it keeps shrinking.

The current economic measures are favouring only the primary sector to the detriment of others.

I'm not even calling for ceasing imports of agricultural stuff, all I'm saying is that the current madness is already making the people poorer.

It is precisely because so many people working in the service sector that the country does not get rich. Doesn't build any wealth, doesn't get to export anything.

And also, it is not the amount of people working that determines how to enrich the country. It is the overall output. Brazil has nothing but the agro sector at the moment. To build a stronger industry, they need to come up with the resources from somewhere. And agro is as good as any of the alternatives.

Yes, and? My point is precisely that those people aren't going to start working in agriculture. The number of people working in agriculture is only shrinking, and there's several labour problems with agricultural work in Brazil that won't cause farm/livestock workers to see the money.

I'm not suggesting people move to the services sector.

> The number of people working in agriculture is only shrinking

The number of people working doesn't matter. What matters is that the country gets through agriculture the resources needed to invest in the other sectors.

In theory that makes a lot of sense. Truly. In reality, believing that and going froward with this plan was an immense setback to the country and the population.

Europe/US/etc letting Brazil keep doing what it's doing is mostly helping Europe/US/etc at the expense of Brazilians and the environment.

I am not arguing in favor of the US or Europe, and I am also not arguing that Brazil should keep putting down trees just to sell more soybeans for the US and China.

What I am saying is that the rich countries need to quit their double standard. The EU keeps putting absurd trade barriers to protect their own farmers. The US subsidizes their corn farms, effectively killing the Brazilian industry for biofuels. European NGOs are financed to disparage Brazil's investments in hydropower, while depending on Putin for gas and coal.

So, yeah, agro business is far from ideal, but now is the only feasible alternative for Brazil to come up with any chance of development, and they will also work against that? I'd be more than willing to listen what they have to say if they were setting the example...

Alright then we're in agreement.

> What I am saying is that the rich countries need to quit their double standard. The EU keeps putting absurd trade barriers to protect their own farmers. The US subsidizes their corn farms, effectively killing the Brazilian industry for biofuels. European NGOs are financed to disparage Brazil's investments in hydropower, while depending on Putin for gas and coal.

Oh, I agree with all that. That's an important post.

> So, yeah, agro business is far from ideal, but now is the only feasible alternative for Brazil to come up with any chance of development, and they will also work against that? I'd be more than willing to listen what they have to say if they were setting the example...

I guess my whole point is that foreigners saying "we did it before to grow, Brazil should do it too" is nonsensical, hypocritical and very self-serving, precisely because of your second paragraph. At the same time, I'm ok with foreigners telling Brazil to stop cutting trees because it opens the door to us at least replying with something like the second paragraph.

You just described what basically goes on in every country.. some more blatantly than others.

Not exactly. What is happening now wasn't the reality in Brazil for some time before. Things were getting better.

Brazil is a rich country though. It's considered 2nd world due to violence, income/wealth inequality and sanitation problems, which are mainly political and not due to lack of money

Brazil is a top 10 economy only because of its population size. Per capita, it sits smack in the middle of the table and is behind "poor" countries from Eastern Europe and the Caribean.

Due to its inequality, I'd venture that a chart compared median income levels would put us below most African countries. Brazil can be an amazing place to live if you are already wealthy (and if you are willing to live surrounded by private security and completely removed from the reality of the population at large), but no one in their right mind would risk trading their lives with that of the median Brazilian.

It's considered "3rd world" actually, as much as the term is a bit useless. The term "2nd world" is reserved to former Soviet-aligned countries.

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