SAO PAULO (Reuters) – The leader of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government in Brazil’s Congress announced on Thursday that he would quit his party as the fallout from environmental agency Ibama’s decision to block an oil project in the ‘Amazons shook Lula’s coalition.
Ibama on Wednesday afternoon said it would block an application by state oil giant Petrobras to drill at the mouth of the Amazon near Amapa, in a long-awaited decision that followed a technical recommendation from Ibama experts to reject the project.
Ibama’s decision, which is overseen by Lula’s environment minister, world-renowned environmentalist Marina Silva, has opened a major rift within Lula’s governing coalition.
Lula, who hails from the impoverished northeast, has staked his international reputation on reversing the environmental backsliding under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro. But he is also under pressure to deliver much-needed growth to the poor and underdeveloped regions of the north and northeast, and wants state-owned Petrobras to be a driver of that growth.
Senator Randolfe Rodrigues, who represents Amapa State, said Ibama had taken a decision with a huge economic impact on the state without considering the views of the people of Amapa or their state government.
“We will fight this decision,” Rodrigues wrote on Twitter, adding that “the people of Amapa want to have the right to be heard.” He later announced he was leaving his party, the centre-left Sustainability Network, in light of the decision.
The Sustainability Network was founded in the early 2010s by Silva, the Minister of the Environment, who appointed the head of Ibama Rodrigo Agostinho.
Agostinho told GloboNews TV on Thursday that Petrobras could submit a new application for drilling in the region, but noted that the studies submitted by the company so far were not sufficient to approve the move.
Shares in Petrobras, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, were down 0.5% on Thursday.
Neither Lula’s office nor the environment ministry immediately responded to requests for comment.
Environmental groups celebrated Ibama’s decision.
In a statement, Greenpeace said Ibama had stressed the need for “a just energy transition, rather than insisting on another oil exploration frontier in the context of the climate crisis”. Environmental group Observatorio do Clima said Ibama had “postponed the end of the world”.
Another Lula d’Amapa ally, Senator Davi Alcolumbre of the center-right Unió Brasil party, was less complimentary.
“It was disrespectful to the people of Amapa,” he said of Ibama’s sentence. “We will fight, supported by technical, legal and reasonable criteria, to reverse this erroneous and unjust decision.”
(Reporting by Eduardo Simoes; Editing by Steven Grattan and Chizu Nomiyama)
