African palm mixed with native vegetation along a road in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
MOJÚ/TOMÉ-AÇÚ, Pará, Brazil , Nov 13 2013 (IPS)

The green of the oil palm plantations is unbroken along kilometre after kilometre of red soil, devastated in the past by loggers and ranchers. The oil palm, a sign of alarm for some and of hope for others, is here to stay in the Amazon rainforest state of Pará in the extreme north of this country.

The vegetation along the road that sets out from Belém, the state capital, has lost the deep-green exuberance of the rainforest, which has been replaced by “dendê”, as the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) is known in Brazil.

The traffic jams in the city give way to over 150 km of paved and dirt roads, lined by oil palm plantations and the occasional cattle pasture, and interrupted every once in a while by a small town.

According to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil’s Amazon region lost 111,087 sq km of forest cover between 2004 and 2012, including 44,361 sq km in Pará.

The Agropalma company, which sells palm oil to the food, hygiene and cosmetics industries, set up shop 27 years ago on this land initially cleared to make way for cattle pasture. It now owns more than 39,000 km of dendê in Pará.

More recently it was followed by other companies, interested in biodiesel: Belém Bioenergia (BB), owned by the state-run Petrobras and the private Portuguese firm Galp Energia, and Biopalma, a palm oil producer that was purchased by the Vale mining company.

“It is an economically sustainable, environmentally correct and socially enriching project,” BB’ agribusiness director, Antônio Gonçalves Esmeraldo, told IPS.

According to the executive, BB chooses the land it buys based on agroecological mapping by the Brazilian governmental agricultural research agency, Embrapa, which highlights areas that have already been deforested and degraded by cattle ranchers.

Oil palm employs 10,914 people in this state of nearly eight million people.

An 8,500-hectare estate leased by BB, which employed five people when it was dedicated to cattle-raising, will give work to 850 locals once it has been planted in oil palm, Esmeraldo said.

The company aims to plant oil palm on a total of 60,000 hectares by 2015. It has planted half of that so far, including 6,000 hectares tended by family farmers who will sell the company their output, and the rest of which are leased to large landholders.

Biopalma, for its part, will obtain oil from 60,000 hectares of its own, and from the harvest of another 20,000 hectares farmed by 2,000 small producers.

The aim is biodiesel to mix in a proportion of 20 percent with the gasoil used to run the mining company’s machinery and the locomotives of Vale, César Abreu, the firm’s director of bioenergy, told IPS.

According to Melquíades Santos Filho, Biopalma’s communications manager, dendê helps restore the biological balance of degraded land by mixing with native flora. He said his company has managed to get native species that are nearly extinct, like the jaguar, to reappear in the plantation forests.

In 2012, oil palm covered 140,000 hectares in Pará, and 67 percent of the production went to the food and cosmetics industries and 33 percent to biofuels, according to a study by agronomist D’Alembert Jaccoud.

The private sector projects extending that surface area to 329,000 hectares by 2015 and expanding the portion destined to biofuel to 47 percent, Jaccoud told IPS.

The government of Pará says that by 2022, oil palm plantations for biofuel will cover 700,000 hectares.

The Programme for the Sustainable Production of Palm Oil determines which degraded areas are apt for planting with oil palm. According to Embrapa, some 10.4 million hectares of already deforested and degraded land are available.

Processing the fruit of the oil palm in Biopalma plant in Mojú, a municipality in the northern state of Pará. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

The expansion would make Brazil the world’s third-largest producer of palm oil, after Indonesia and Malaysia, according to the government of Pará.

But the fear is that this country will follow in the footsteps of Indonesia and Malaysia, which today supply 86 percent of the global market thanks to intense deforestation, partly by forest fires that create clouds of smoke that even affect the rest of Southeast Asia.

After Africa, where legal insecurity paves the way for land-grabbing by Chinese and European countries, “the other great frontier is the Amazon rainforest, where Brazil has the biggest stock of land,” Jaccoud said.

The National Biofuel Production Programme is fomenting the planting of oil palm. By law, gasoil vehicles in Brazil must use a mix of five percent biodiesel, and the goal is to reach seven percent. It would be “an obligatory captive market,” Jaccoud said.

The Ministry of Agrarian Development has staked its bets on biofuel, which is obtained from soy, sunflower, castor, canola and oil palm, among other species.

Proponents point out that biodiesel releases fewer greenhouse gases than fossil fuels and that it contributes to diversifying the country’s energy mix.

The government also hopes to reduce imports of gasoil.

And by promoting family farming of oil palm, it is working to generate income and jobs, while stimulating local economies in rural areas.

Jaccoud said that while the government’s programmes are well-intentioned, the necessary controls and oversight are still missing.

He said there is a danger that land ownership will become further concentrated, that consumption of pesticides will grow, and that the areas on the outskirts of large cities will become even poorer and more dangerous as a result of rural migration.

Guilherme Carvalho, an educator with the non-governmental programme FASE Amazônia, is worried that palm oil companies are trying “to force family farmers to invest in this monoculture crop and abandon food crops, which would create food insecurity, a loss of autonomy over their land and dependence on market prices.”

The contracts that Biopalma and BB sign with small farmers establish that they only have to use 10 hectares of their land for oil palm, while the rest remains free for growing food and other traditional crops.

But for now, family farms represent only a small part of the oil palm plantations in Pará.

João Meirelles, director of the Peabirú Institute, said oil palm is “an attempt to restore the jungle” in tropical areas, and is preferable to soy or cattle.

But he appealed to the “social responsibility” of companies, urging them to avoid the pitfalls of the sugar cane industry, where land is concentrated in a few hands and precarious labour conditions prevail among migrant workers.

Biopalma director Márcio Maia dismissed the argument that land ownership is overly concentrated.

“In the Amazon region there are major irregularities in land titling, which scares away important players who are interested in investing in this crop,” he said.

Road in Pará's Amazonian region shows only pasture where once there was rainforest. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
MARABÁ, Brazil, May 2 2013 (IPS)

A fresh outbreak of violence between large landowners and landless peasants is looming in the Amazonian state of Pará, in northern Brazil.

The large estate of Itacaiúnas, in the southeast of Pará, in the municipality of Marabá, 684 kilometres from the state capital, Belém, is owned by Agro Santa Bárbara (AGRO-SB), a company that possesses at least 600,000 hectares of land in the state of Pará.

Since 2002 the Federation of Agricultural Workers of Pará (FETAGRI) has demanded that the property be confiscated and the land redistributed under Brazil’s land reform laws. More than 300 families are living on the land, in an encampment.

In late April, the landless rural workers announced that they would carry out “definitive occupation” of the estate and on Monday Apr. 29 they started dividing it into lots in order to “build the settlement themselves,” according to a FETAGRI communiqué.

AGRO-SB regards the landless farmers as criminals and says it has reported their actions to the military police, in order to keep the peace and avoid conflict.

“This group of land invaders is planning to divide the property into lots. Its goal is to expand the illegal occupation. This is a new criminal action by the invaders, who have the estate under their control and are blocking access by other people,” AGRO-SB said in a communiqué.

There is a real possibility of imminent violent conflict, because heavily armed groups hired by the estate owners have been reported in the area.

José Batista, a lawyer for the Catholic Church Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) who is following developments closely, told IPS the conflict in Itacaiúnas is “quite serious.”

“These families have been waiting to be settled (with legal distribution of land under the land reform process) for a long time. The company has hired armed guards and we have received information that it has poisoned the pastures in order to force the families to leave. This has added to the tension, and now (the peasants) have decided to occupy a larger area,” he said.

Although the police were called in to prevent a direct clash between the rural workers and the armed guards, sometimes the police presence itself generates conflict.

According to Batista, the government decided to expropriate the estate in 2010, but AGRO-SB obtained a court injunction suspending the issuing of property titles to the settlers by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA).

“The encamped families will not give way, but they want a peaceful solution to the problem,” Batista said.

Meanwhile, there is a dispute over the value of the indemnity that the government should pay AGRO-SB for expropriating the estate. The company had negotiated with INCRA to accept the equivalent of 11.5 million dollars.

But the cost of the environmental damage caused by the company, which deforested the jungle area of the estate, estimated at three million dollars, was deducted from that sum. The company then presented a report valuing the property at 21 million dollars.
According to Batista, the estate has an area of 10,600 hectares. There are reports that over 60 percent of the land was publicly owned, and that the estate is unproductive.

A large proportion of the conflicts and deaths caused by land disputes have occurred in the Amazonian region, where the agricultural frontier is expanding and infrastructure and mining projects have intruded.

This is one of the main causes of violence in the south and southeast of Pará, the second largest state in the country and the national leader for human rights violations and murders over land conflicts.

According to the CPT, between 1964 and 2010 there were 914 murders of rural workers, trade unionists, lawyers and members of religious orders in Pará, of which 654 were perpetrated in the south and southeast of the state.

The figures are not precise, because many cases do not even make it to the light of day, according to the report “Violação de direitos humanos sul e sudeste do Pará” (Human Rights Violations in the South and Southeast of Pará) published by the CPT, FETAGRI, and other organisations in March 2013.

“Action by the justice system is also a distance of light-years away from the crimes committed and the punishment of offenders,” Batista said.

Of the 914 murders in Pará mentioned above, only 18 have come to trial.

Between 1980 and 2003, 35 massacres were committed in the south and southeast of Pará, with a death toll of 212 rural workers. Some of the trials in the courts have dragged on for more than 25 years.

Death threats are common currency. The report says that between 2000 and 2011, 165 people in the country received death threats, including 71 in Pará. Of those threatened, 42 have been murdered, 18 of them in Pará state.

“Land reform is a Utopia. Violence in Pará is increasing, impunity hinders any advance in the investigation of cases, and the targets of the murders are leaders of social organisations,” Adebral Lima Júnior, the representative in Pará of the human rights commission of the Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil, the Brazilian bar association, told IPS.

According to Marianne Andersson, a member of the board of trustees of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation who was part of a delegation that visited the area in April in solidarity with Brazilian activists, “internationalising” the issue is a way of pressuring for its solution.

“We should never keep silent about these injustices and deaths. Nowhere in the world are so many murders related to land and the environment committed as in Brazil. Half of the worldwide murders related to land conflicts take place in this country. This is unacceptable,” Andersson, a former member of the Swedish parliament, told IPS.

The Foundation, which awards what is known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” will encourage its global network to write letters of complaint to Brazilian embassies the world over. “We are calling on the Brazilian government to urgently implement land reform for the sake of justice,” Andersson said.

Children at the MST’s Frei Henri des Roziers Camp in Pará, Brazil. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
MARABÁ, Brazil, Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

Toiling beneath a blazing sun in the humid heat of the Amazon, Waldemar dos Santos, 60, tends the community garden he shares with other landless peasant farmers in the Brazilian state of Pará, as they wait for agrarian reform to provide them with the opportunity for a better life.

“My dream is a small plot of land. Our goal is to bring an end to hunger in this country, which is falling off the precipice of need,” he told Tierramérica*. As a child, Santos fled the drought-stricken northeast Brazilian state of Bahia and migrated to the northern state of Pará, in Brazil’s Amazon region.

His family is one of the 280 families living in the Frei Henri des Roziers Camp, established by the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Aug. 8, 2010. The camp is named after a Dominican friar and lawyer from the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission who continues to fight in defence of human rights in the region at the age of 82.

The landless peasants are occupying a 400-hectare estate known as Fazendinha, located off federal highway BR-155 roughly 100 kilometres from the city of Marabá. They say that the purported owners of the estate, formerly a cattle ranch, created it by invading and illegally deforesting public land, and that at the time of the occupation, it had been left idle and unproductive.

This is the justification for almost all of the land occupations by social movements demanding agrarian reform in Brazil.

In the southeast of Pará, where the struggle over land is most violent, over 500 settlements of small farmers have been legalised by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). But there are still more than 100 camps of families living in tents and straw huts waiting for the federal government to grant them legal ownership of the land.

It takes an average of five years to get the government to confiscate a property and allocate the land to agrarian reform.

To reach the Frei Henri camp, you need to drive along a long stretch of the dusty BR-155, full of potholes and trucks loaded with minerals that block the road day and night.

The region was once rich in cashew trees, which were razed to make way for cattle pastures. Right in the heart of the Amazon, the towering green canopies and exuberant vegetation of the rainforest were replaced with the flat monotony of grassland years ago.

The occupation of Fazendinha has led to bitter conflicts with local ranch owners, who have joined forces and hired private armed guards to intimidate the landless farmers and destroy their crops.

“We plant crops to grow healthy food. The ranch owners don’t produce anything and claim that their lands are productive. We face constant threats. Justice in Pará is very slow. We wait and despair,” said Dos Santos.

“Here, land is power,” declared Maria Raimunda César, 39, a member of the MST coordinating committee in Pará. “The conflict is never-ending. In Pará, people are gunned down like animals. A side of beef for export is worth more than a human life. There is tremendous injustice, and growing oppression and violence.”

According to César, agrarian reform is ignored in national policies. Both the current government of Dilma Rousseff and that of her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) “removed the issue from the agenda.”

Changes in land use tend to follow a similar perverse pattern, said César. First the rainforest is opened up to make way for mining and logging for charcoal production. This is followed by the invasion of public lands by private landholders, who destroy the forest and plant grasses for cattle grazing.

On average, there is one head of cattle per hectare, she noted.

Also along highway BR-155, but close to Marabá, there is another camp of landless peasant farmers, the Helenira Resende Camp, which was set up on Mar. 1, 2010 and is now home to 150 families. In addition to intimidation by armed men, these farmers also face airborne threats: toxic agricultural products sprayed over their homes and fields.

Raúl Montenegro, an Argentine activist who participated in an international mission in solidarity with the landless peasants of Pará, told Tierramérica that “the combined use of bullets and poisons is tantamount to chemical warfare against these communities.”

“The large landholders claim that they are spraying these chemicals on their own lands, but this is a way of evading responsibility,” said Montenegro, the president of the Foundation for the Defence of the Environment, based in Córdoba, Argentina, and a recipient in 2004 of the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”.

“We were not only able to confirm that groups of armed men laid siege to an entire community and subjected them to a nightly hail of gunfire and loud bombs at the Frei Henri des Roziers Camp. We also witnessed how companies like Santa Barbara conduct aerial spraying of pesticides,” he denounced.

“This poison reaches children, adolescents and adults, with total impunity, with no government control, and no epidemiological or environmental testing,” he added.

“Our motto is to occupy and resist, but they are an extremely powerful group. The men at the ranch are heavily armed and they shoot,” said Aldemir Monteiro de Souza, 28, a resident of the Helenira Resende Camp, which occupies 50 hectares within the Cedro ranch, an estate covering a total area of almost 15,000 hectares.

The “powerful group” he is referring to are the owners of the cattle company Agropecuária Santa Barbara. One of the company’s biggest shareholders is banker Daniel Dantas, who was arrested in 2008 for financial crimes and money laundering.

According to the MST and the Pastoral Land Commission, in the last 10 years alone, the Santa Barbara Group has bought up 800,000 hectares of land in six municipalities in Pará.

“The group appropriates public lands, uses slave labour, and commits environmental crimes,” said Charles Trocate, an MST coordinator in Pará.

The landless peasants are waiting for INCRA technicians to inspect the Cedro ranch to determine if it is productive and legal. If irregularities are detected, the process for its expropriation will begin, and the land will subsequently be allocated in parcels to the farmers.

A hearing with the INCRA agrarian oversight committee has been scheduled for May 22 at the Justice Forum in Marabá. This will be the first step, after years of occupation and the establishment of the landless farmers’ camp.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

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