- Brazilian environmental agents and the federal government have agreed a deal to end a months-long strike by the civil servants.
- The protests led to a sharp decrease in the number of environmental fines issued, and threatened Brazil’s commitment to zero deforestation.
- Despite the agreement, agents remain unhappy with how the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva conducted the negotiations.
A deal signed on Aug. 12 has ended an eight-month-long strike by environmental agents in Brazil, but doesn’t resolve their long-standing grievances over pay and work conditions.
“The agreement was made against the will of the civil servants,” ASCEMA, the association representing the agents, wrote in a public statement. “The servants were obliged to accept the proposal in order not to suffer even greater damage,” it added.
Employees of IBAMA, the federal environmental agency; ICMBio, which manages national protected areas; and the Brazilian Forest Service, which oversees forest concessions, went on strike in January to demand better salaries and work conditions. They also demanded a risk bonus for agents working in dangerous zones and a new public tender to hire new agents; according to ASCEMA, there should be twice the number of environmental agents as there are currently.
The agreement signed this week, however, focuses on pay raises. The Ministry of Management and Innovation in Public Services, MGI, which has led the negotiations, stated on its website that a working group will be created to discuss the unfulfilled demands.
“The strike should end, but the workers will continue to rally since the agreement is very far from the restructuring the workers want,” ASCEMA said.
The end of the strike will come as a relief to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, especially amid record fires in the Pantanal wetlands and another extreme drought in the Amazon Rainforest. The reduced presence of agents on the ground also threatened Lula’s environmental agenda and his promise to bring Amazon deforestation to zero by 2030.
According to Brazilian news outlet InfoAmazônia, the number of environmental fines issued by the government in the first half of 2024 fell by two-thirds compared to the same period last year, from 4,723 to 1,543. Despite the decrease in the overall rates of deforestation in the Amazon under Lula’s term, which began at the start of 2023, InfoAmazônia found that land clearings increased in municipalities where fewer fines were applied.
In its public statement, ASCEMA complained about the treatment received during the negotiations. In late June, MGI declared it had reached “the maximum limit” of what it could offer, prompting the workers to intensify their strike. In response, the federal government obtained a court ruling obliging the employees to partially resume work.
Banner image: After eight months of wrangling, environmental agents signed a deal with the federal government to end a strike over pay and work conditions. Image courtesy of Washington Costa/MGI.
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