Download Report - Independent Evaluation Group - World Bank

Summary
tegic level in Brazil than in other countries, or even at the project level
within Brazil. But this has not led to a sustained productive dialogue
with the Brazilian government on the future of the Amazon. The Government
of Brazil has perceived the Bank’s and the international
community’s objective of conserving the Amazon forest without commensurate
financial transfers as being fundamentally at odds with national
economic and political development objectives. It has therefore
preferred to keep the Bank and the international donor community at
arm’s length on issues that, for understandable reasons, it considers to
be of internal concern.
The interests of indigenous populations do not always coincide with
those of non-indigenous populations, nor do those of the poor nonindigenous
coincide with those of the well-off, even within the Amazon.
The same applies for the Amazon vis-à-vis the rest of Brazil, making
these interactions even more complex and highly dynamic. At the
same time, however, the government has been keen to project a “greener”
image, particularly since agreeing to host the high-profile 1992 Earth
Summit, when it began making policy changes. Macroeconomic difficulties
also made it necessary for the government to remove subsidies.
The Government of Brazil has recently become more proactive in enforcing
laws with regard to forest protection. In this context, the Bank’s
non-lending activities may have helped move along processes of policy
reforms that were underway in Brazil for other reasons.
In project financing, the World Bank has largely taken a less direct
approach since 1991. It has financed poverty alleviation and land reform
projects in northeast Brazil that might slow migration to the Amazon,
but these are pilot efforts. The Bank has not proactively involved
itself directly in addressing the issues of poverty or land tenure in the
Amazon. Indeed, the Bank has consciously avoided covering the Amazon
region in its land tenure and rural development activities. This may
be because it is not clear that security of tenure or increased access to
rural credit, even to small farmers, would help slow deforestation. The
Bank has been out of the business of giving credit to large farmers and
ranchers altogether. The Bank’s project experience with regard to zoning
in coping with the powerful political and economic forces at the
municipal and state levels in Rondonia and Mato Grosso has prompted
it to operate more cautiously. The Rondonia project, PLANAFLORO,
has built on lessons learned in the POLONOROESTE projects of the
1980s, but has had problems of its own.
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