Colombian President Gustavo Petro invited his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to reflect on the advisability of allowing oil and coal exploration in the Amazon. “The challenge of protecting life goes through very difficult discussions, for example, are we going to allow hydrocarbons to be explored in the Amazon Jungle?, to deliver them as exploration blocks?, is the wealth there or is the death of humanity there? That is a decision that we would have to make together,” Petro told Lula during the meeting between the two presidents this Saturday afternoon in Leticia, capital of the Amazonas department.
The objective of the meeting, in which environment ministers from the eight countries that make up the Amazon biome also participated, was to define the key points of the Amazon Summit, which will take place in the first days of August in Belem de Pará, Brazil. “Today we are aware that the world’s forests are fundamental climatic pillars. The Amazon Basin is the third. If this pillar is removed, like the Pillars of Hercules, humanity collapses,” added President Petro.
Although during his speech the Colombian president recognized that each country is autonomous and sovereign to decide what to do with its natural resources, he was emphatic in pointing out that the climate crisis and the deterioration of the Amazon Basin were reaching a point of no return that forced them to to change paradigm. “Each country has lived on these resources. We have lived on oil and coal for the last 40 years. If we change, then what are we going to live on? We can live from the brain, from science, from another type of development, opening paths of unity, from tourism, from the bio-economy”.
Lula da Silva, for his part, celebrated that for the first time in history the governments of Colombia and Brazil were progressive and agreed on their concern to protect the Amazon rainforest. “Brazil and Colombia have a lot in common. We are two great multicultural democracies, marked by the valuable contribution of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples. And we also share the commitment to put the Amazon at the center of our policies. That is what we started to build today,” Lula said.
Brazil and Colombia have a lot in common. We are two great multicultural democracies, marked by the valuable contribution of indigenous and Afro-descendants. And we also share the commitment to bring Amazonia to the center of our politics. And that’s when we started to… pic.twitter.com/D6qXkGRAHJ
– Lula (@LulaOficial) July 8, 2023
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The president of Brazil also assured that the Amazon countries have two main challenges. The first is to strengthen the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OTCA), which according to him “has not received enough attention.” The second is to build a joint vision of the Amazon among the eight South American countries that make up the Amazon biome. To achieve this, the Brazilian president proposed establishing a committee of experts for the Amazon similar to the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on climate change: “In Brazil we will correct the course”
Petro concluded his speech with a call to transform the global economic system: “Reason today tells us, through science, that the entire global economic system must be transformed; that’s the challenge. There is the revolution. We believed that progress was the destruction of the tree, we believed that this was underdevelopment, today the approach is to save those forests to save life”, said the president of Colombia. And he added: “There is another type of development that is to protect life. Transforming that economic system based on life is the revolution of today’s times. The revolution of life must start from the Amazon”.
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