Gisele Bündchen criticised by Brazilian minister after she accused government of gutting environment protection

Supermodel invited to become agriculture industry ambassador 

Tim Wyatt
Tuesday 15 January 2019 02:08 GMT
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Supermodel Gisele Bundchen has been arguing with her government
Supermodel Gisele Bundchen has been arguing with her government

Supermodel Gisele Bündchen has been criticised by Brazil’s agriculture minister after she accused the country's new far-right government of gutting environmental protections.

The 38-year-old supermodel attacked new president, Jair Bolsonaro and his plans to roll back safeguards which seek to preserve Brazil’s environment.

Shortly after Mr Bolsonaro – a populist nationalist who claimed the presidency on a deeply-conservative and divisive platform – won the election in October, Ms Bündchen attacked plans to merge the environment and agriculture ministries.

Combining the two departments would be “potentially disastrous and a path with no return”, she tweeted, although both currently remain separate.

Activists feared Mr Bolsonaro, who ran on promises to boost economic activity in the Amazon and reduce reserves for indigenous people, would allow Brazil’s powerful agri-business lobby to strip away regulations preventing further deforestation and damage to the environment.

Agriculture minister Tereza Cristina Dias, who was sworn in earlier this month, has hit out at Ms Bündchen and said she was damaging the image of Brazil around the world.

Speaking to a São Paolo radio station, Ms Dias said, contrary to the model’s claims, Brazil in fact was a world leader in protecting the environment.

“Sorry, Gisele Bündchen, you should be our ambassador, to say that your country preserves, that your country is on the global vanguard of preservation, and don’t come here saying bad things about Brazil without knowledge of the facts,” Ms Dias said.

“It’s absurd what they do today with the image of Brazil. For some reason they go out and paint a picture of Brazil and its industries that is not true.”

Ms Bündchen has also criticised previous Brazilian administrations over attempts to shrink the protected areas of the Amazon.

In 2017 she shamed the then-president Michel Temer on Twitter into abandoning plans to reduce the size of a national forest.

In a tweet after the radio interview, Ms Dias – who was previously head of the farmers’ caucus in Congress – said she would soon invite Ms Bündchen to become an ambassador for the agriculture sector.

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Rather than criticising, the model should show other countries how Brazil supposedly managed to “produce agriculture for the world while preserving the environment”, she said.

Ms Bündchen, who is already a United Nations environment goodwill ambassador and been given a Global Environmental Citizen award from Harvard, did not respond to requests for comment.

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