A funding crisis at a Brazilian science agency could leave 80,000 researchers and students without pay | Science

A major fiscal crisis in Brazil's largest science funding agency could disrupt the lives of thousands of early-stage students and scientists. In September, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) in Brasilia could be running out of money to continue funding the grants and scholarships it offers to more than 80,000 Brazilians.

On August 15, the agency announced to Twitter that the financial support granted to its beneficiaries was suspended – a move that many feared since the government decided to cut by 21% the budget of CNPq scholarships from 998 million reais ($ 249 million) in 2018. R $ 785 million ($ 196 million) this year. "We are taking the necessary steps to minimize the consequences of this restriction," the statement said. Up to now, however, the CNPq has not specified how many people would be affected next month nor how long the suspension of payments would be.

The CNPq's fiscal problems are just the latest in a long series of cuts to Brazil's federal science budget. "But there has never been a crisis like this," said José Alexandre Diniz-Filho, ecologist at the Federal University of Goiás in Goiânia.

The CNPq administration had warned that this year's budget would not be enough. To pass until 2019, the agency asked for 330 million additional reais, which the Congress approved in June. But the Ministry of Economy has not yet authorized the allocation of these funds; in an email to Science, a spokesman said the ministry had not yet made a decision at the request of the CNPq and had no time to do so.

The unrest has alarmed the Brazilian scientific community. At the end of July, seven former CNPq presidents circulated a manifesto calling on the government to "do everything in its power to reverse this gloomy situation". An online petition aimed at allocating more funds to the CNPq, supported by dozens of Brazilian research organizations, 270,000 signatures.

I can not [see] a way to continue to do good research for Brazil inside Brazil I can not.

CNPq scholars are not allowed to collect other types of income, which means that many students risk being deprived of any means of livelihood, said Diniz-Filho. "It's pretty depressing," he says. In a graduate program in ecology and evolution, he coordinates: "We all have these mental health problems more and more common. The students are a bit lost.

The CNPq crisis could also have a wider impact on the scientific community. "It's about everyone doing science in Brazil, no matter how much our CNPq salary or not," says Lilianne Nakazono, Ph.D. student in astronomy at the University of São Paulo in São Paulo. who is collaborating on a major international project to study the southern sky with the aid of a robotic telescope in Chile. "If we can not have students and post-docs working with us, it's hard to get the project moving forward," says Nakazono, who is funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation.

Luisa Diele-Viegas, ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, says losing her scholarship to the CNPq would prevent her from continuing her research on the influence of climate change and climate change. biodiversity loss on human happiness. "I have to pay my bills," she says. But she had already decided that, for the moment, her future was not in Brazil. Diele-Viegas accepted a postdoctoral position at the University of Maryland at College Park as of January 2020. "I love my country. That's where I work in the field, where I built my whole life, "she says. "But I can not [see] a way to continue to do good research for Brazil in the interior of Brazil. I just can not. "