[ANPPOM-Lista] Nature: Demotion of science ministry angers beleaguered Brazilian researchers

[Carlos Palombini]

New President Michel Temer — who replaces impeached Dilma Rousseff — is
fusing the science and telecommunications ministries.

   - Claudio Angelo
   <http://www.nature.com/news/demotion-of-science-ministry-angers-beleaguered-brazilian-researchers-1.19910#auth-1>

12 May 2016

Brazil’s scientists, already struggling to absorb massive funding cuts
<http://www.nature.com/news/brazilian-science-paralysed-by-economic-slump-1.18458>,
are protesting against another blow: the country’s science ministry has
been demoted by interim president Michel Temer, who took over the
government on 12 May after a Senate impeachment vote ousted Dilma Rousseff
from the presidency.

Among Temer's first actions was to announce the fusion of the federal
Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) with the ministry
that deals with telecommunications and Internet regulations. Science is now
a main office within a ‘superministry’ led by Gilberto Kassab, a former
mayor of São Paulo.

The move, which Temer began hinting at a few days ago, has angered some
Brazilian researchers. On 11 May, 13 scientific associations, led by the
Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC) and the Brazilian
Academy of Sciences (ABC), sent a letter to Temer warning that the fusion
would be “detrimental to the country’s scientific and technological
development”. Researchers say that it would corrode the authority of the
MCTI, which has formed the backbone of federal support for science and
innovation in Brazil for the past three decades.

“An administrative reorganization should stem from a vision for the
country. It shouldn’t simply be an artificial lumping of disparate
activities,” says ABC president Luiz Davidovich. The move is “a step
backwards”, he says.

Temer had first raised concern among scientists last week, when he hinted
to local media that he might appoint a creationist evangelical bishop to
lead the science ministry — a suggestion that led both the SBPC and the ABC
to ask Temer to spare the agency in eventual reforms.

“Unfortunately, the science ministry is usually among the first bargaining
chips in every new government,” says José Eduardo Krieger, dean of research
at the University of São Paulo.

Brazil has had three science ministers in the past 16 months — and each was
seemingly appointed for political ends rather than for any particular
expertise. In January last year, Rousseff picked Aldo Rebelo, an avowed
climate sceptic
<http://www.nature.com/news/political-appointments-spur-concerns-for-amazon-1.16701>
in the Communist party (the closest ally of Rousseff’s centre–left Worker’s
Party). He was followed by Celso Pansera, whose nomination was regarded as
an attempt to lure votes from Temer’s Brazilian Democratic Movement Party
(PMDB) party against Rousseff’s impeachment. And Emília Ribeiro, former
vice-minister of the MCTI, has been science minister since April 2016.

Pansera admits that such high turnover is detrimental to research. “It
gives you a lot of discontinuity,” he says.
Funding slashed

The most hurtful discontinuity for Brazil’s researchers has been startling
cuts to federal funding. Last year, as the nation’s fiscal crisis began to
bite, the MCTI’s budget was chopped by some 1.9 billion reais (US$540
million), to 5.4 billion reais. Its budget for this year was set 37% lower
than last year’s — and its authorized spending has been chopped by another
6%. The collapse of oil prices and a bribery scandal that involves
Petrobras, the behemoth state-run oil company, have further reduced cash
flows for Brazilian research, which partly depends on oil revenue.

A major victim of the economic downturn is the flagship exchange programme
Science Without Borders, which by the end of 2015 had sent nearly 94,000
Brazilian undergraduate and postgraduate students to leading institutions
abroad. The programme intended to send a further 100,000 students abroad by
2018, but its second phase, scheduled to start this year, has been called
off.

To revive science spending, the government had authorized the MCTI to
negotiate a US$1.4 billion loan from the Inter-American Development Bank,
headquartered in Washington DC. But that operation has been reset because
of the impeachment, Pansera says. “Now we’ll have to renegotiate everything
with the new government’s economic team.”

Research institutes are struggling to survive. At the Brain Institute at
the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal, researchers split
basic maintenance expenses such as Internet bills among themselves and buy
equipment with their own money, says institute director Sidarta Ribeiro.

And some scientists are already planning to leave the country. Suzana
Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist at the Federal University of Rio de
Janeiro, launched a crowdfunding campaign last year to buy new parts for a
microscope. But she has now decided to move to Vanderbilt University in the
United States: this September, she will shut down her lab in Brazil, which
had been running for a decade.

Brazilian scientists are familiar with economic crises. In the 1990s,
budget constraints were the rule, recalls Paulo Artaxo, a physicist at the
University of São Paulo. But before the current crisis, the country’s
research had been experiencing unprecedented expansion, with funding on the
rise and the number of PhD students soaring. In 2011, Brazil jumped to 13th
in the world in terms of research-paper production, up from 17th in 2001.

That trend is already reversing, says Rogério Meneghini, a specialist in
science metrics and scientific director of SciELO, a subsidized collection
of mainly Latin American journals. Brazil’s research-paper production grew
at a steady rate of 16% between 2011 and 2014 — but his preliminary figures
suggest that it had dropped by 4% in 2015.

“What is cruel about this is that, when you cut off on science, you can
never resume from where you stopped”, Krieger says. “You lose position.”
Naturedoi:10.1038/nature.2016.19910

http://goo.gl/2svQHn
-- 
carlos palombini, ph.d. (dunelm)
professor de musicologia ufmg
professor colaborador ppgm-unirio
www.proibidao.org
ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini <http://goo.gl/KMV98I>
www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Palombini2
scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=YLmXN7AAAAAJ
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