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There is no mathematical explanation for the ridiculously low budget for Science.

Lilian Sagan / Facebook da Marcha pela Ciência

Column by Marcelo Viana in Folha de S. Paulo
I went to the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation on Wednesday to give a lecture to girls and boys from schools in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The Fiocruz Museum of Life is celebrating National Science and Technology Week, and what I saw there was moving: children of all ages, in uniforms from municipal and state schools, smiles on their faces and a sparkle in their eyes, discovering secrets of the Universe, of life, and of humankind that only science can reveal.
But the future is, at best, uncertain .
The day before, at the City Park Pavilion in Brasília, Minister Gilberto Kassab (of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications, MCTIC) called on the scientific community and society to raise awareness among the government's economic sector and the National Congress about the importance of science for Brazil.
Just a few decades ago, Brazil was a chronically underdeveloped country, a victim of low productivity and the diseases of poverty, and condemned to import the knowledge and technology necessary for its survival.
It is to science, above all, that we owe the progress achieved. Institutions such as the National Observatory – which celebrates its 190th anniversary – Fiocruz, the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture, the Butantan Institute, among others, introduced Brazil to the knowledge age. Embrapa, Petrobras, Embraer and their counterparts have shown how scientific knowledge can be incorporated into production processes, and have changed the country.
All this investment, with its evident contributions to the country, is in serious danger. The budget of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications (MCTIC) approved in the 2017 Annual Budget Law was R$ 5 billion. But this amount was reduced to R$ 2.8 billion, the lowest in the historical series, with a brutal impact on the actions of the ministry, its agencies – such as CNPq and Finep – and its institutes, including IMPA, which I direct.
Some will say it's a logical consequence of the state of our economy, a mere lack of resources. But this argument doesn't hold up when faced with the disproportion between the relatively small amounts of money needed for Brazilian science – and the proven economic and social return on investment – and the size of the national government's expenditure.
Others will argue that we need to change the research funding model, that in other countries science is funded by private initiative. Let's be clear: this is not true. In any country in the world, basic science is funded by the public sector.
The spending cap law (Constitutional Amendment 95), approved in December 2016, stipulates that the federal budget can only increase in line with inflation. But, incredibly, the proposal under discussion in the National Congress foresees a smaller budget for the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications (MCTIC) in 2018 compared to 2017. There is no mathematical explanation for this absurdity.
If confirmed, this budget forecast will have a devastating effect on ongoing research in the country and, even more directly, on the institutes of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications (MCTIC), which occupy a central position in the national scientific system.
In the case of IMPA, for example, the current budget proposal jeopardizes the implementation next year of fundamental activities of the institute, with a great impact at the basic education level, such as the successful OBMEP (Brazilian Mathematics Olympiad for Public Schools). OBMEP annually involves more than 18 million children and 53,000 schools in practically every Brazilian municipality, at a cost of less than R$3 per student and with proven improvement in the academic performance of all students.
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