A woman born in the Amazon, accustomed to confronting and overcoming challenges, Marina da Silva does not crumble when faced with a reality in which transgenic seeds are being smuggled into the country, almost 24,000 hectares of Amazon forest are destroyed each year, and the government itself invests in infrastructure works like diverting the São Francisco River and building the BR 163 highway that is connect Brasília to Santarém, crossing indigenous lands and sensitive ecosystems. "I don't admit defeat, just challenges that must be overcome," she says with confidence.

Community Oversight

Da Silva has laid out four guidelines for the Ministry's activities over the next two years. Social participation, through community involvement in formulating local environmental policies; sustainable development, with practical changes in the productive process; the National Environmental System, which will be created by hiring new teams for Ibama and other agencies; and carrying out an Integrated Environmental Policy, coordinating actions with other ministries and state and local governments. "Our ministry is new. It's only 13 years old, and it needs to be rebuilt," she says.

The main cards played by the Ministry of Environment in confronting the powerful economic interests behind the big infrastructure projects is prior licensing -- in which environmental permits must be obtained before any work begins -- and the incorporation of sustainability clauses, from the beginning of the project to the financing to project completion. "The financing agents, whether international institutions or Brazilian development banks, should be verifying the environmental impacts of what their money is paying for," says the minister.

She believes structural polices in the environmental arena could open the way to a more sustainable economy. One example is the two million hectares of tropical forest certified during her term. Da Silva says her ministry, along with the federal police, army, and federal highway police, conducted 32 investigative operations of activities in forested areas. The officials seized machinery and 170,000 square metres of illegal lumber in two years, she says.

However, some of the ministry's claims are being challenged by the coordinator of Greenpeace Brazil's Amazonian campaign, Paulo Adário, who says only one such operation had taken place as of October 2004. "We can't say anything about what happened in November and December, because we didn't monitor the activity then. But before we were tracking their work and we found only one major operation, in the municipality of Itaituba, in Pará," said Adário. He stressed that even the ministry had carried out the 32 operations, it would be half of what was called for under the National Plan to Combat Deforestation.