Dhe rainforest starts right behind the village school. It rises like a green wall behind the wooden buildings of Tres Unidos, a village of 150 people in northwestern Brazil, about an hour by speedboat from Manaus on the Rio Negro. Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) had the welcome greeting of the indigenous population painted on his cheek, examined the solar panels on the roofs of the residential buildings, visited the small hotel painted purple and finally the school.
But Habeck would not be Habeck if he only took the intended route. Suddenly he is standing in the Brazilian jungle, black insects crawling over his sweaty white shirt. “We’re always in office buildings, driving company cars from A to B,” he muses. “One day you have to try to break through this surface.” In other words: don’t just talk about the rainforest, but drive there.
The Amazon region is the third stop on Habeck’s longest trip abroad to date. Their dominant topic is Mercosur, the long-negotiated but never implemented free trade agreement between the EU and four South American countries. It should finally come this year, with mandatory additional agreements to protect the rainforest, so the Europeans hope.
Advocate of a social-ecological market economy
But Habeck promotes more than just this agreement. He wants his understanding of a socio-ecological market economy to be imitated in other countries as well. First prosperity, then climate protection, that’s no longer the case, is his message at almost every appointment on this trip. Both must now go hand in hand. In Brazil, where in the past three years alone an area larger than that of Baden-Württemberg has been deforested, whether by gold prospectors or soybean farmers, Habeck has a lot to gain. Or lose, depending on how things go.
In Habeck’s words, it’s going great. Since he took office at the turn of the year, the federal government has showered the new Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with praise because he wants to stop the clearing of the rainforest by 2030. When Habeck, at the beginning of his journey, is standing in the hall of a medium-sized German company in Belo Horizonte that builds electrolysers for the production of hydrogen, his pathos is hard to beat: “I could get tears in my eyes that a government is turning things around like that.” , he says.
Habeck is bringing an additional 50 million euros to Brazil as a guest gift for the protection of the rainforest. But it has not yet been said whether Lula can actually implement his plan. He does not have his own majority in Parliament. And then there is the question of whether Mercosur is capable of winning a majority in Europe.
In Germany, both farmers and environmental organizations are already objecting, some out of fear of cheaper competition, others out of concern that the sustainability clauses cannot be checked anyway. There is also resistance in France and Austria. It is quite possible that Mercosur will become a second TTIP. Tens of thousands took to the streets against the planned free trade agreement with the United States until politicians buried the project.
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