By Angus MacSwan

SAO PAULO, Brazil, May 25 (Reuters) - Brazil's government should stop blaming industrialized countries for global warming and come up with its own strategy to combat climate change, the head of the Greenpeace environmental group said.

Brazil, home to the world's largest rain forest, the Amazon, has a crucial role to play in the world environmental debate but President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's government has been a disappointment, said Greenpeace's international executive director, Gerd Leipold.

"The absence of a national climate strategy and energy strategy and the reopening of discussions on nuclear power, we find very disappointing," he told Reuters in an interview.

At next month's Group of Eight summit in Germany, the host country wants to discuss ways to cut climate warming carbon emissions and to widen the fight to include the United States, Brazil, China and others.

Leipold said he met officials from Brazil's foreign and environmental ministries during his visit here and told them they should come up with binding targets on climate change.

"We did not get a yes," he said.

Officials said it was impossible to put forward targets because the rain forest was unpredictable. They also complained that rich nations who now advocate the protection of the forest were most responsible for climate change, Leipold said.

"The undoubted fact that climate change has so far been caused by industrialized countries will not help the victims, even if they feel it is not their fault," he said.

"You need to have targets. We cannot get these targets worldwide unless we have movement from the important players -- the G8, China, India and Brazil."

The Amazon rain forest stores carbon dioxide that causes global warming but deforestation causes it to be released into the atmosphere. Legal and illegal loggers have cleared swathes of trees in recent decades, threatening the ecosystem.

Soaring world demand for agricultural products has prompted farmers and ranchers to grab more land. Although the deforestation rate slowed last year, Brazil's government sees the farm boom as vital to economic growth.

"It seems to us at least in parts of the government and maybe even coming from the president ... that environmental issues are less important than social issues and only if enough wealth is created can a country deal with environmental destruction," Leipold said.

He warned that Amazon deforestation had done very little for development and the economic gains were short term.

"It is not growth first then environmental protection. The two go hand-in-hand. Environmental destruction is increasingly threatening development and the survival of people."

He praised China for being more advanced than Brazil on the issue, although he said environmentalists had a lot of respect for Brazil's environment minister, Marina Silva.

But moves to reinvigorate Brazil's nuclear power programmed and the construction of huge new dams were worrying, he said.

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