Despite the crisis, there is a light at the end of the tunnel for the Brazilian culture sector, signaled, today, 18, the Secretary of Culture and Creative Economy of São Paulo, Sérgio Sá Leitão, in a webinar conducted by ABPI – Brazilian Association of Intellectual Property through its Copyright and Personality Studies Commission. Hope meets PL 1,075 / 2020, which allocates R $ 3 billion in financial aid to artists and cultural establishments during the Covid-19 pandemic. The bill, already approved by the Federal Senate, goes for presidential sanction. “If approved, then, we will be able to say with pride: yes, Brazil has eyes for one of the main vectors of development and has implemented a mechanism that matches the context and the need”, said Sá Leitão.
According to him, the PL will result in the largest investment in the area of culture, being the first time that the federal government will transfer resources from this sector directly to states, the Federal District and municipalities, which, in turn, will apply the funds in emergency income to the sector workers, maintenance of spaces, notices, public calls and awards. “The project will create jurisprudence making it continue,” he said, in a debate mediated by the coordinators of the ABPI’s Committee on Copyright and Personality studies, Ygor Valério, Ana Erika Marotta and Paula Mena Barreto. “We are focused on preparing the PL’s resources,” added Sá Leitão.
The injection of resources into the culture is the answer to mitigate the deficit in the sector, which, according to Sá Leitão, was already, even before the pandemic, in a state of poverty. “There is a lack of management and public policy in the cultural area,” he said. He recalled that the Brazilian cultural sector involves more than 300 thousand companies, handles 2.6% of GDP and accounts for 4.9 million jobs. “With the estimated drop in the country’s GDP of seven points, the impact on the culture sector will be gigantic”, he added. Gigantic, however, he countered, is also the potential for untapped growth, in a sector that between 2012 and 2016 grew by an average of 9.6% per year.
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