Recently appointed president of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Ricardo Galvão has had an unorthodox career. He specializes in plasma physics and nuclear fusion, with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was director of the Brazilian Center for Physical Research (2004-2011), president of the Brazilian Society of Physics (2013-2016) and director of the National Institute for Space Research, Inpe (2016-2019). In the same year that he was exonerated from his last post by then-president Jair Bolsonaro, who disagreed with data on deforestation in the Amazon, Galvão was chosen one of the ten most internationally renowned scientists by the journal Nature (2019). In 2021, he joined the Sustainability Network party to run for election as a federal deputy. Without enough votes for the position, he was invited to work in the Transitional Government and, in January, to lead the CNPq. “Science has returned,” he said at his inauguration. In this interview, he said how he intends to transform the hope of his speech into a scientific fact.
DINHEIRO – What was your first diagnosis when you joined the Transitional Government as a member of the Science and Technology technical group?
Ricardo Galvao — It was sad. We were asked to survey the past government and forecast emergency actions for the first 100 days of the Lula government. In science and technology I already knew that the situation would not be good, but it was much worse than I thought. A real breakout.
Is it possible to scale the damage?
In addition to the budget, which was drastically reduced, there was the dismantling of the structures. The Ministry of Science and Technology itself suffered almost total disorganization. But the worst was the introduction of the military mindset and hierarchy that is orthogonal to the scientific one. This caused several damages within the ministry, ranging from the approval of projects to the allocation of wrong resources.
Will Brazil manage to recover the dismantling of both science and the environmental area, in which you acted as president of INPE?
I hope so. Last week we had an inter-ministerial meeting to discuss the monitoring of forests in Brazil and adopt measures to curb deforestation, first in the Amazon, but which will embrace all biomes. I see in Lula’s government the understanding that our economic development will depend on clear and sustainable environmental policies. And it’s going to take a lot of science to work on that.
How will CNPq contribute to this sustainable development?
We are studying some ways to present to the board of directors who will be appointed very soon. But our intention is to make calls clearly targeting the environmental issue and sustainable development in partnership with the industry. Last week we sent CNPq’s Director of Technological Innovation to a meeting at Embraer about a proposal for generating energy using the flow of the oceans.
Is this synergy between the real economy, research entities and academia still too timid to meet the country’s needs?
When I started working with research in Brazil, in the mid-1970s, those who divided themselves into the more applied areas were not welcomed. That feeling is gone. The university environment is valuing, more than ever, academics who work in innovation. But there is the business side. It is necessary to be willing to include researchers in the frameworks. If we don’t move forward in this exchange, we won’t catch up with the rest of the world in the development of what I call technology driven by science, products that are only created if there is technological development. At CNPq we have a Doctors in Companies program in which the entity finances scholarships to place doctoral students working in a company’s laboratory. This is rarely used by entrepreneurs.
For what reason?
The entrepreneur still wants immediate results. A myopia. They prefer copying what already exists somewhere. They talk about buying cutting-edge technology. This is a deception. A fallacy. Nobody sells cutting-edge technology. If it really wants to have state-of-the-art technology, Brazil will need to create in a sovereign way. But, in the corporate world, investments in deeper research are still rare. If the country doesn’t move in that direction, I think it’s very difficult for us to become a protagonist on the international stage.
Does this apply to all sectors?
We are doing very well in information technology. But in areas like health, wind power generation, we are way behind. Here comes the strategic point of view, in which the government needs to act.
Is it the plan that is missing for the country to move away from the promise of the leader of the bioeconomy to actually be a protagonist?
We need an articulating action from the government. We have groups with available knowledge about the agenda, but they do not talk to each other and cannot count on the State even to approach the private sector. That’s when the government doesn’t get in the way, as was the case with the Electric Energy Research Center (Cepel). With 48 years of research, including in renewables, it runs the risk of closing because the relationship with its main sponsor, Eletrobrás, has changed: in the privatization law of the state-owned company it was established that the budget destined to the center will be cut by one sixth every year for the next six years. Afterwards, no more resources.
In Brazil, a dichotomy was created between profit and the environment. Can you change?
We have lived almost a century and a half of world economic development based on the availability of fossil fuels at low prices. This promoted a very rapid industrial rise. That reality no longer exists. In addition, we had no perception of the greenhouse effect. Bringing it to Brazil, in the case of the Amazon, the development took place in a military logic. There is an emblematic sentence by Delfim Netto: “The way to conquer the Amazon is first to make a western out of there, then we send the sheriff”. But the sheriff never arrived. But today we have technology, science and knowledge of biodiversity. We can make several public-private arrangements, with sustainable production. The dichotomy no longer exists. On the contrary.
And then we enter into wars of narratives, like the agribusiness one, when it’s the villain, and the solution. How to bring science into this debate?
The evil in Brazil is not agribusiness. It’s the agribusiness. In the serious agricultural activity we have several low carbon technologies that are profitable. We have Embrapa, a reference in science. But the producer needs to want to change.
On the other hand, the number of industries leaving Brazil grows. Do you believe that it is possible to reindustrialize the country?
I don’t know if it’s possible, but it’s absolutely necessary. I was at the inauguration of Vice President Geraldo Alckmin as Minister of Industry and Commerce. And he hit hard on the issue that if we don’t re-industrialize the country, we’re going to be in a terrible situation. We have to have a clear plan on which sectors we are going to focus our industry on.
In recent years we have seen an increase in fake news. You yourself suffered from this as president of Inpe. Could disinformation be eroding science and social cohesion in Brazil?
In the case of Brazil, the scientific literacy of the population is very low. There are few schools, even among the private ones, that have a laboratory. There is computer screen teaching, but no hands-on experience. And in science, theory and practice are one and the same. Another point is social media. They are shallow, making it difficult for a scientist to dismantle even simple ideas like the one that says the moon is stationary. And now with machine learning, all these chats, it’s going to get even harder. Unfortunately, denialists exploit this in a very cunning way and there is no positive side.
Is our democracy threatened?
I have my concerns. But I think that as the government starts to show results, we will get on the right track. It’s time to act.
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