Look at the Amazon's fires of economics and politics

The result is a behavior that we have been developing since we were hunter-gatherers, characterized by unlimited consumption without worrying about waste or scarcity. However, although they have not yet changed their clbadification in economic books, these goods are not as free as they are supposed to be, as the symptoms of their exhaustion begin to manifest themselves and the threat of the survival of civilization is increasingly threatening. more true.

But the proposals made in Brazil regarding its obligation to preserve the Amazon, formulated by some of the G7 presidents, clearly show that these goods would not be free goods, but rather, at least partially, global public goods. What is a public good? Whoever, from the point of view of consumption, can not be excluded, can be consumed by several simultaneously and simultaneously, there may be some rivalry in consumption (my consumption may leave less for another consumer). But a characteristic of public goods is that they have production costs.

Applied to the case under badysis, one could say that the cost of preserving the Amazon for Brazil is the cost of non-production of soybeans or cattle that feeds the rodeos and consumers of the G7 + China countries, etc. In other words, countries that pay for products exported by Brazil do not want to pay for environmental goods that Brazil also produces. For Brazil, the environment or agricultural production are alternatives. On the other hand, consumers do not see the contradiction because they do not internalize the costs of their actions against the environment. For this reason, they raise the problem as a moral and not an economic issue.

The demand for Brazil and the other countries in the region that deal with the environment and keep the Amazon as "common heritage of humanity" comes from countries that, since the industrial revolution, have been depleting resources and have deforested a large part of their territories to make it agriculture, which consumes on average more than three times the natural resources available per year and adopts an environmental policy promoting the use of electric cars driven by the. electrical energy produced from oil or coal.

This same group of countries does not agree to comply with the Paris Agreement, but agrees to put pressure on a developing country to badume the costs of producing the environmental goods it consumes for free.

Clearly, cynicism about world politics and the moral declarations of the countries responsible for the global catastrophe we are heading to distract attention from a moral sphere and make the rational response of consumers of goods invisible. The environmental costs of these same countries are responsible for these costs, that is, the main countries responsible for environmental problems pay in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Suriname and other developing countries. the region the cost of producing environmental goods while maintaining land in the biosphere reserve.

As history shows again, our species is more likely to use stick than carrot, free rider before paying the costs of the actions themselves and hiding their interests and responsibilities in a humanist language and defender of the common good. Clearly, this is not the way to find a solution, but to deepen the problem.

(*) Bachelor of Economics from the University of Buenos Aires