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WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: Pan-Amazonian Meet Highlights Diversity

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 17 2005 (IPS) - Many will be arriving by water, after travelling for days in dug-out canoes or other rustic watercraft. The novel form of transport is just one of the peculiarities that sets the Pan-Amazonian Social Forum apart from the other social forums held around the world since 2001.

The fourth Pan-Amazonian Social Forum, to take place Jan. 18-22 in Manaus, the capital of the northwestern Brazilian state of Amazonas, is expected to draw more than 8,000 representatives of communities that live in the midst of the world’s greatest reserves of fresh water, forests and biodiversity.

It is thus only natural that environmental issues, especially the question of how to defend these abundant natural resources, will be the overarching theme of the dozens of conferences, seminars and workshops that will make up the forum.

But participants will also focus on sustainable development at a local level, and respect for the traditional knowledge and diverse ethnic and cultural realities of Amazon communities.

Around 30 million people live in the Amazon jungle, a territory of 7.5 million square km shared by Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, French Guiana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela.

The human settlements in the vast Amazon jungle range from cities like Manaus, population 1.6 million, to tiny riverbank hamlets, indigenous villages, “quilombos” (isolated settlements of people of African descent), and communities of “seringueiros” (rubber-tappers).

In the Pan-Amazonian Social Forum, “the quilombolas (the people of the quilombos) will have a heavy presence”, reflecting the Brazilian movement for the recognition of the rights of these communities and of the large number of black people living in other countries that share the Amazon jungle, José Arnaldo de Oliveira, one of the meeting’s organisers, told IPS.

“Diversity, sovereignty and peace” will be the main thematic areas of the upcoming gathering, which will debate, for example, “mega-projects and international agreements” that pose a threat to the environment and local peoples, he said.

The negotiations for the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), projects for physical integration among the countries of South America, and the growing “militarisation” that most directly affects civil war-torn Colombia are among the “international threats” that will be discussed.

But local, and especially Brazilian, phenomena will also be on the agenda, such as the encroachment by soy – mainly transgenic – plantations on the Amazon jungle, and major hydropower or highway projects.

Soy cultivation as a major cause of deforestation in the Amazon will be one of the most controversial issues, to be discussed in workshops that will bring together representatives of several of Brazil’s Amazon jungle states, which have become a new agricultural frontier.

The governmental Institute of Applied Economic Research released a study Tuesday that denies that the expansion of soy cultivation causes deforestation, on the argument that soy has been planted on the country’s extensive “degraded grasslands”.

But a group of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) said that this claim is contradicted by the results of their own study, due to be completed next month.

In the NGO report, aerial photos of dozens of properties in the western state of Mato Grosso, where the greatest soy production is currently concentrated in Brazil, and whose northern portion is in the Amazon, show that areas where the forests have been cleared are later occupied by soy plantations.

“We believed that there was an interval of five years between the deforestation and the arrival of soy crops, but we found that it takes only two to three years on average, and in some cases just one year,” Roberto Smeraldi, the head of Friends of the Earth/Brazilian Amazon, told IPS.

It is true that stockbreeding activities have shrunk in the areas where soy crops have expanded the most, but in neighbouring areas there has been a great expansion of grasslands, said the activist.

That finding backs up an argument set forth by environmentalists: that soy farmers do not directly clear forests, but “push” other activities, like cattle breeding, into Amazon jungle areas.

The main aim of next week’s social forum is to promote alliances, solidarity and links between the various movements and traditional populations in the Amazon, to confront the threats and foment sustainable development, said Oliveira.

The Pan-Amazonian Social Forum was hosted by another major Amazon city, Belém – the capital of the northern state of Pará, with a population of 1.4 million – in 2002 and 2003. Last year it was held in Ciudad Guayana, in northeastern Venezuela.

The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation (ACTO) “is very interested in developing mechanisms that would allow these expressions of civil society to be incorporated into decision-making processes,” said Francisco Ruiz, executive director of the Brasilia-based ACTO, which was created by the governments of the eight Amazon jungle countries in 1995.

“Social movements are a fundamental factor” in the sustainable development of the Amazon jungle region, which means it is “very useful to learn about their views,” he said in an interview with IPS.

The fourth Pan-Amazonian Social Forum is being organised by the Amazon Working Group, a network of 500 associations and NGOs, the Central Unica dos Trabalhadores – Brazil’s main labour federation – and the union of Amazon writers.

Besides the “convoys that will be arriving by water, land and air” from within Brazil and from the rest of the Amazon countries, delegations from Europe, the United States “and even India” will be taking part in next week’s gathering, said Oliveira, a sociologist and adviser to the Amazon Working Group.

The foreign participants will take advantage of the Pan-Amazonian meeting to visit the “mythical” Amazon jungle before heading to Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, to participate in the Jan. 26-31 World Social Forum, he noted.