The main street of Ressaca, a town of garimpeiros or artisanal gold miners, on the right bank of the Xingu River, along the stretch called the Volta Grande or Big Bend, where a large-scale mining project, promoted by the Canadian company Belo Sun, is causing concern among the local people in this part of Brazil’s Amazon region. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RESSACA, Brazil, Apr 7 2017 (IPS)

The decline of this town is seen in the rundown houses and shuttered stores, and the few people along the streets on a Sunday when the scorching sun alternates with frequent rains at this time of year in Brazil’s Amazon region.

“There is still a lot of gold here,” said Valdomiro Pereira Lima, pointing to the ground on a muddy street in the town of Ressaca, to emphasize that the riches underground extend along the right bank of the Xingu River at the 100-km stretch known as Volta Grande or Big Bend, which could restore the local economy.

This drew Belo Sun, a transnational Canadian mining corporation that intends to extract 60 tons of gold in 12 years through plants that separate gold from rock, in what is to be the largest open-pit gold mine in the country.

But the mine has given rise to a new wave of concern among the locals of Ressaca and other communities downstream, where the local population has already been affected by the impacts of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, operational since late 2015 and set to be completed in 2019.

Valdomiro Pereira Lima, a garimpeiro or informal miner, says there is gold beneath the streets of the town of Ressaca, as in many other areas along the Volta Grande of the Xingu River. But the residents of this rundown town in Brazil’s Amazon region are opposed to a large-scale gold mining project. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The 64-year-old Pereira Lima has been mining for gold since 1980, when at the age of 27 he left farming in Maranhão, his home state in northeastern Brazil, to become a “garimpeiro” or informal artisanal miner in Brazil’s Amazon region.

He worked in Sierra Pelada, in the northern state of Pará, and in Volta Grande, which lured near 100,000 miners in the 1980s, as well as in the state of Roraima, along the border with Venezuela, before settling in Ressaca.

But the gold that gave rise to this village and brought it prosperity, as well as to other towns and settlements that emerged around nearby mines, started to become less accessible, while the garimpeiro way of life deteriorated, IPS noted, talking with all the interested parties during a one-week tour of the Volta Grande.

“There were over 8,000 garimpeiros when I arrived here in 1992, today there are just 400 to 500 left,” said 53-year-old José Pereira Cunha, vice president of the Mixed Cooperative of Garimpeiros from Ressaca, Itatá, Galo, Ouro Verde and Ilha da Fazenda.

“We used to find up to two kg of gold per week, now it’s only one per year,” said the garimpeiro leader, known by the nickname of Pirulito, because he is a small man. He has been a miner since the age of 17, and also got his start in Sierra Pelada.

But everything collapsed after 2012, when the police and environmental inspectors began to crack down on the garimpeiros, driving out many of them, he said. Moreover, the mining authorities did not renew the operating permits for the cooperative, outlawing the miners, who are still active in some mines.

Dozens of them have filed lawsuits in faraway cities.

“We have turned to the justice system to secure our rights,” said Cunha, who blames the campaign on Belo Sun and the municipal and state governments, interested in collecting more taxes, since the persecution began two years after the company began investigating potential gold deposits along the Volta Grande.

The village of Ilha da Fazenda depends economically on the town of Ressaca, where many families have left due to the decline of small-scale gold mining, added to the impact of the nearby Belo Monte hydroelectric plant. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The company obtained an advance license in 2004, which recognises the environmental viability of the project. And on Feb. 2 the Environment and Sustainability department of the state of Pará granted it a permit to build the necessary plants.

But just two weeks later, the justice system suspended the permit for 180 days, demanding measures to relocate the affected population and clarification about the land acquired for the mine, presumably illegally.

Belo Sun claims that it has met all the requirements and conditions. The company keeps a register of the local population in the directly affected area, which it continually updates, because “the garimpeiros come and go,” according to Mauro Barros, the director of the company in Brazil.

João Lisboa Sobrinho, 85, a baker from Ilha da Fazenda who “only” has ten children. Until recently, he used 50 kg of flour a day to make bread, but now uses just three – a reflection of the decline and depopulation of this island village along the Xingu River, in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“It is not necessary to remove the population, we can even operate with everybody staying in their homes, if that’s what they want. All over the world there are active mines next to cities,” said Barros, a lawyer with previous experience in other mining companies.

But he said, in an interview at the company’s headquarters in the nearby city of Altamira, that those who are relocated will be provided with all the services, access to the river and support to earn an income. “We want to develop the region,” he said, adding that at least 80 per cent of the company’s employees will be locals.

The company will generate 2,100 direct jobs at the peak of the installation phase, and 526 once the mine is operational, he said. The promise is to train the garimpeiros to work in mechanized mining.

According to estimates from Belo Sun, there are probable reserves of 108.7 tons of gold.

It takes a ton of rocks to obtain a gram of gold.

Barros ruled out the risk, which has raised concern among the local population and environmentalists, that the mine will pollute the waters of the Xingu River, which has already been contaminated and has a reduced water level due to the Belo Monte mine. He guaranteed that Belo Sun would only use rainwater, and would hold its waste products safely.

But the conflict with the miners’ cooperative, community leaders and indigenous people who live along the Volta Grande has already begun.

“Either Belo Sun throws us out of here or we throw them out,” said Cunha, vice president of the cooperative.

The town has not received the promised compensation from Norte Energía, the company that holds the concession to run Belo Monte, nor services from the municipality, because “it would be pointless, since we are supposed to be resettled,” said Francisco Pereira, head of the Association of Ressaca Residents.

A map from Belo Sun showing the area where the Canadian mining company intends to extract 60 tons of gold. In blue, the Volta Grande or Big Bend in the Xingu River, where the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant has been built, in Brazil’s Amazon region. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The town of about 200 families still has no basic sewage. “The wastewater runs into the river, we have no drinking water or sports field, and at the school the heat is unbearable,” and nothing will be done because of the uncertainty created by Belo Sun, said Pereira, a 58-year-old garimpeiro who is now working as a farm labourer.

The uncertainty and decline are also affecting the roughly 50 families that live in Ilha da Fazenda, a village dependent on Ressaca and separated from it by a two-kilometre stretch of a tributary of the Xingu River. Children from the fifth grade and up and sick people can only go to school or receive healthcare in the town of Ressaca, which they reach in small boats.

“In the good old days of the ‘garimpo’ (informal mining), there were dozens of bars in Ilha da Fazenda. They extracted gold in Ressaca and came here to spend their money,” said 85-year-old baker João Lisboa Sobrinho, who has “only ten children” and is a living history of the island village.

“I used to use 50 kg of flour a day to make bread, now I use three at the most,” he said, standing next to the brick oven made by his father in 1952.

“Ninety-five per cent of the people on the island want to move away,” because if Ressaca disappears, it will be impossible to live in Ilha da Fazenda,” said Sebastião Almeida da Silva, who owns the only general store on the island.

More than 20 families have already left the village.

But “I will only leave if I am the only one left,” said Adelir Sampaio dos Santos, a nurse from José Porfirio, the municipality where the mining area is located. “We will only be left isolated if we don’t take action,” she said, urging her fellow villagers to struggle for the school, medical post, water and electricity that are needed in the village.

“With the garimpo in better conditions, supported by the government, with state banks buying our gold, we could bring life back to local cities and towns, we could pay taxes, we could all stay and prosper,” said Divino Gomes, a surveyor who worked with environmentalist organisations before becoming a garimpeiro.

“I have seen mining companies elsewhere, they take all the wealth and leave craters. We have to think about it ten times over before accepting their projects,” he concluded.

By Mario Osava
MEDICILÂNDIA, Brazil, Jun 11 2015 (IPS)

“Now we realise what a paradise we live in,” said Darcirio Wronski, a leader of the organic cacao producers in the region where the Trans-Amazonian highway cuts across the Xingú river basin in northern Brazil.

Besides cacao, on their 100 hectares of land he grows bananas, passion fruit, cupuazú (Theobroma grandiflorum), pineapples and other native or exotic fruit with which his wife, Rosalina Brighanti, makes preserves that she sells as jams or jellies or uses as filling in homemade chocolate bars that she and her assistants make.

All of the products are labeled as certifiably organic.

But the situation they found in the 1970s was more like hell than paradise, they said, when they migrated separately from southern Brazil to Medicilândia, a town known as the “capital of cacao”, where they met, married in 1980 and had four children, who work with them on the farm.

They were drawn to the Amazon rainforest by misleading ads published by the then military dictatorship, which promised land with infrastructure and healthcare and schools in settlements created by the National Institute of Colonisation and Agrarian Reform.

The aim was to populate the Amazon, which the de facto government considered a demographic vacuum vulnerable to invasions from abroad or to international machinations that could undermine Brazil’s sovereignty over the immense jungle with its rivers and possible mineral wealth.

The Trans-Amazonian highway, which was to run 4,965 km horizontally across the country from the northeast all the way to the west, was to link the rainforest to the rest of the nation. And thousands of rural families from other regions settled along the road.

The unfinished highway, unpaved and without proper bridges, became impassable along many stretches, especially in the rainy season. The settlers ended up isolated and abandoned, practically cut off from the rest of the world, and large swathes of land were deforested.

Rosalina Brighanti or Doña Rosa in her kitchen, where she makes jams and preserves, holding a sign advertising the organic chocolates made with the family’s special recipes, which are popular with consumers and businesses in Brazil and abroad. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Medicilândia is a product of that process. The city’s name pays homage to General Garrastazú Médici, president from 1969 to 1974, who inaugurated the Trans-Amazonian highway in 1972. The town emerged on kilometer 90 of the highway, and was recognised in 1989 as a municipality, home today to some 29,000 people.

“For the pioneers of the colonisation process it was torture, there was nothing to buy or sell here,” said 55-year-old Rosalina Brighanti, who everyone knows as Doña Rosa. “Some foods we could only get in Altamira, 100 km away along an unpaved road.”

Her husband Wronski, originally from the southern state of Santa Catarina, where his father had a small farm, impossible to divide between 10 sons and daughters, followed “the Amazonian dream.”

After running into failure with traditional crops like rice and beans, Wronski ended up buying a farm and planting cacao, a local crop encouraged by the government by means of incentives.

His decision to go organic accelerated the reforestation of his land, where sugarcane used to grow.

Cacao is increasingly looking like an alternative for the generation of jobs and incomes to mitigate local unemployment once construction is completed on the giant Belo Monte hydropower dam on the Xingú river, near Altamira, the capital of the region which encompasses 11 municipalities.

The dam’s turbines will gradually begin operating, from this year to 2019.

A cacao tree laden with beans, in the shade of banana trees on the Wronski family farm in Medicilândia, a municipality in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest state of Pará, where organic farmers are helping to reforest the jungle. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The Belo Monte construction project has drawn labour power away from cacao production. “That has caused the loss of 30 percent of Medicilândia’s cacao harvest this year,” Wronski told IPS during a tour of his farm.

“I know a family that has 70,000 cacao plants, whose son is working on Belo Monte and not in the harvest,” the 64-year-old farmer said.

The hope is that workers will return to the cacao crop once large numbers of people start to be laid off as the construction of the dam comes to a close. For routine maintenance of the plants, only the families who live on the farms are needed, but additional workers are necessary at harvest time.

Wronski and his wife Brighanti don’t have a seasonal labour problem. Six families – some of them relatives and others sharecroppers – live on their farm and take care of the cacao trees in exchange for half of the harvest.

They also hire seasonal workers from a nearby rural village where some 40 families live, most of whom do not grow their own crops.

Cacao farms employ large numbers of people because “the work is 100 percent manual; there are no machines to harvest and smash the beans,” local agricultural technician Alino Zavarise Bis, with the Executive Commission of the Cacao Cultivation Plan (CEPLAC), a state body that provides technical assistance and does research, told IPS.

Besides providing jobs and incomes for people in the countryside, cacao farming drives reforestation. Two-thirds of the population of the municipality of Medicilândia is still rural, and a view from the air shows that it has conserved the native forests.

That is because cacao trees need shade from taller trees. When the bushes are still small, banana trees are used for shade – which has led to a major increase in local production of bananas.

“We have the privilege of working in the shade,” joked Jedielcio Oliveira, sales and marketing coordinator of the Organic Production Programme carried out in the Trans-Amazonian/Xingú region by CEPLAC, other national institutions and the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GTZ).

But organic production is still small-scale, accounting for just one percent of total cacao output in the Amazon state of Pará, where Medicilândia is located.

“That’s around 800,000 tons a year of cacao beans grown by a niche of 120 families, grouped in six cooperatives,” said Bis.

Wronski presides over one of them, the Organic Production Cooperative of Amazonia, and he was just elected to head the Central Cooperative, recently created to coordinate the activities of the six organic cacao cooperatives, including marketing and sales.

“Organic cacao farmers are different – they are more aware of the need to preserve the environment, more focused on sustainability,” said CEPLAC’s Bis. “While conventional farmers are looking at productivity and profits, organic growers are interested in taking care of the family’s health and well-being, and preserving nature, although without ignoring profit margins, since they get better prices.”

New members have to be invited by a member of one of the cooperatives and approved in assembly, “and the process of conversion to organic takes three years, which is the time needed to detoxify the soil from the effects of chemical fertilisers and poisons,” he said.

Cacao farmer José Tinte Zeferino, known as “Cido”, in front of his house, which is hidden by dense vegetation and surrounded by his cacao trees, in the municipality of Brasil Novo, near the Xingú river and the Trans-Amazonian highway. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“The entire production system has to be organic, and not just the final product,” another cacao producer, Raimundo Silva from Uruará, a municipality to the west of Medicilândia, who is responsible for commercial operations in the new Central Cooperative, told IPS.

Organic cacao from Pará supplies, for example, the Austrian firm Zotter Chocolate, which boasts 365 different flavours and sells only organic, fair trade chocolate. Among its clients in Brazil is Harald, which exports chocolates to more than 30 countries, and Natura Cosméticos.

The industry in general, although it prefers the more abundant and less costly standard cacao butter, also adds the richer organic cacao to produce the best quality chocolates.

Conventional cacao, which uses pesticides and other chemical products, is still predominant in Pará. A small chocolate factory, Cacauway, was founded in 2010 in Medicilândia by the Trans-Amazonian Agroindustrial Cooperative, which groups traditional producers of non-organic cacao.

“The future of cacao is in Pará, which has favourable conditions for production, like abundant rains, fertile soil, and family farmers who live on the land, unlike the large landowners who live in the cities,” said Bis.

Pará is surpassed by another northern state, Bahia, which accounts for two-thirds of national cacao production. But productivity in Pará averages 800 kg per tree – double the productivity of Bahia, the expert noted.

And cacao trees in the Amazon rainforest are more resistant to witch’s broom, a fungus that reduced the harvest in Bahia by 60 percent in the 1990s. At the time, Brazil was the world’s second-biggest producer, but it fell to sixth place, behind countries of West Africa, Indonesia and even neighbouring Ecuador.

This article forms part of a reporting series conceived in collaboration with Ecosocialist Horizons.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Dawn on the border of the Juma Reserve in the Brazilian Amazon. Activists say some new conservation policies are undermining traditional approaches to forest management and alienating forest-dwellers from their traditional activities. Credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT)/cc by 2.0

By Jeff Conant
BERKELEY, California, Dec 18 2014 (IPS)

Dercy Teles de Carvalho Cunha is a rubber-tapper and union organiser from the state of Acre in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, with a lifelong love of the forest from which she earns her livelihood – and she is deeply confounded by what her government and policymakers around the world call “the green economy.”

“The primary impact of green economy projects is the loss of all rights that people have as citizens,” says Teles de Carvalho Cunha in a report released last week by a group of Brazilian NGOs. “They lose all control of their lands, they can no longer practice traditional agriculture, and they can no longer engage in their everyday activities.”The whole concept fails to appreciate that it is industrial polluters in rich countries, not peasant farmers in poor countries, who most need to reduce their climate impacts.

Referring to a state-run programme called the “Bolsa Verde” that pays forest dwellers a small monthly stipend in exchange for a commitment not to damage the forest through subsistence activities, Teles de Carvalho Cunha says, “Now people just receive small grants to watch the forest, unable to do anything. This essentially strips their lives of meaning. ”

Her words are especially chilling because Teles de Carvalho Cunha is not just any rubber tapper – she is the president of the Rural Workers Union of Xapuri – the union made famous in Brazil when its founder, Chico Mendes, was murdered in 1988 for defending the forest against loggers and ranchers.

Mendes’ gains have been consolidated in tens of thousands of hectares of ‘extractive reserves,’ where communities earn a living from harvesting natural rubber from the forest while keeping the trees standing. But new policies and programmes being established to conserve forests in Acre seem to be having perverse results that the iconic leader’s union is none too happy about.

Conflicting views on the green economy

As Brazil has become a leader in fighting deforestation through a mix of  public and private sector actions, Acre has become known for market-based climate policies such as Payment for Environmental Services (PES) and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) schemes, that seek to harmonise economic development and environmental preservation.

Over the past decade, Acre has put into place policies favouring sustainable rural production and taxes and credits to support rural livelihoods. In 2010, the state began implementing a system of forest conservation incentives that proponents say have “begun to pay off abundantly”.

Especially as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change continues to fail in its mission of bringing nations together around a binding emissions reduction target – the latest failure being COP20 in Lima earlier this month – REDD proponents highlight the value of “subnational” approaches to REDD based on agreements between states and provinces, rather than nations.

The approach is best represented by an agreement between the states of California, Chiapas (Mexico), and Acre (Brazil).

In 2010, California – the world’s eighth largest economy – signed an agreement with Acre, and Chiapas, whereby REDD and PES projects in the two tropical forest provinces would supply carbon offset credits to California to help the state’s polluters meet emission reduction targets.

California policymakers have been meeting with officials from Acre, and from Chiapas, for several years, with hopes of making a partnership work, but the agreement has yet to attain the status of law.

Attempts by the government of Chiapas to implement a version of REDD in 2011, shortly after the agreement with California was signed, met strong resistance in that famously rebellious Mexican state, leading organisations there to send a series of letters to CARB and California Governor Jerry Brown asking them to cease and desist.

Groups in Acre, too, sent an open letter to California officials in 2013, denouncing the effort as “neocolonial,”:  “Once again,” the letter read, “the former colonial powers are seeking to invest in an activity that represents the ‘theft’ of yet another ‘raw material’ from the territories of the peoples of the South: the ‘carbon reserves’ in their forests.”

This view appears to be backed up now by a  new report on the Green Economy  from the Brazilian Platform for Human, Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights. The 26-page summary of a much larger set of findings to be published in 2015 describes Acre as a state suffering extreme inequality, deepened by a lack of information about green economy projects, which results in communities being coerced to accept “top-down” proposals as substitutes for a lack of public policies to address basic needs.

Numerous testimonies taken in indigenous, peasant farmer and rubber-tapper communities show how private REDD projects and public PES projects have deepened territorial conflicts, affected communities’ ability to sustain their livelihoods, and violated international human rights conventions.

The Earth Innovation Institute, a strong backer of REDD generally and of the Acre-Chiapas-California agreement specifically, has thoroughly documented Brazil’s deforestation success, and argues that existing incentives – farmers’ fear of losing access to markets or public finance or of being punished by green public policies – have been powerful motivators, but need to be accompanied by economic incentives that reward sustainable land-use.

But the testimonies from Acre raise concerns that such economic incentives can deepen existing inequalities. The Bolsa Verde programme is a case in point: according to Teles de Carvalho Cunha, the payments are paltry, the enforcement criminalises already-impoverished peasants, and the whole concept fails to appreciate that it is industrial polluters in rich countries, not peasant farmers in poor countries, who most need to reduce their climate impacts.

A related impact of purely economic incentives is to undermine traditional approaches to forest management and to alienate forest-dwellers from their traditional activities.

“We don’t see land as income,” one anonymous indigenous informant to the Acre report said. “Our bond with the land is sacred because it is where we come from and where we will return.”

Another indigenous leader from Acre, Ninawa Huni Kui of the Huni Kui Federation, appeared at the United Nations climate summit in Lima, Peru this month to explain his people’s opposition to REDD for having divided and co-opted indigenous leaders; preventing communities from practicing traditional livelihood activities; and violating the Huni Kui’s right to Free, Prior and Informed Consents as guaranteed by Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization.

One of the REDD projects the report documents (also documented here) is the Purus Project, the first private environmental services incentive project registered with Acre’s Institute on Climate Change (Instituto de Mudanças Climáticas, IMC), in June 2012.

The project, designed to conserve 35,000 hectares of forest, is jointly run by the U.S.-based Carbonfund.org Foundation and a Brazilian company called Carbon Securities. The project is certified by the two leading REDD certifiers, the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and the Climate, Community, Biodiversity Standard (CCBS).

But despite meeting apparently high standards for social and environmental credibility, field research detected “the community’s lack of understanding of the project, as well as divisions in the community and an escalation of conflicts.”

One rubber tapper who makes his living within the project area told researchers, “I want someone to explain to me what carbon is, because all I know is that this carbon isn’t any good to us. It’s no use to us. They’re removing it from here to take it to the U.S… They will sell it there and walk all over us. And us? What are we going to do? They’re going to make money, but we won’t?”

A second project called the Russas/Valparaiso project, seems to suffer similar discrepancies between what proponents describe and what local communities experience, characterised by researchers as “fears regarding land use, uncertainty about the future, suspicion about land ownership issues, and threats of expulsion.”

The company’s apparent failure to leave a copy of the project contract with the community did not help to build trust. Like the Purus Project – and like many REDD projects in other parts of the world whose track record of social engagement is severely lacking – this project is also on the road to certification by VCS and CCB.

Concerns like criminalising subsistence livelihoods and asserting private control over community forest resources, whether these resources be timber or CO2, is more than a misstep of a poorly implemented policy – it violates human rights conventions that Brazil has ratified, as well as national policies such as Brazil’s National Policy for the Sustainable Development of Traditional Peoples and Communities.

The report’s conclusion sums up its findings: “In the territories they have historically occupied, forest peoples are excluded from decisions about their own future or—of even greater concern – they are considered obstacles to development and progress. As such, green economy policies can also be described as a way of integrating them into the dominant system of production and consumption.

“Yet, perhaps what is needed is the exact opposite – sociocultural diversity and guaranteeing the rights of the peoples are, by far, the best and most sustainable way of slowing down and confronting not only climate change, but also the entire crisis of civilization that is threatening the human life on the planet.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

A woman dries blankets after her home went underwater for five days in one of the villages of India's Morigaon district. The woven bamboo sheet beyond the clothesline used to be the walls of her family’s toilet. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

By Susan McDade
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 12 2014 (IPS)

Among all the impacts of climate change, from rising sea levels to landslides and flooding, there is one that does not get the attention it deserves: an exacerbation of inequalities, particularly for women.

Especially in poor countries, women’s lives are often directly dependent on the natural environment.The success of climate change actions depend on elevating women’s voices, making sure their experiences and views are heard at decision-making tables and supporting them to become leaders in climate adaptation.

Women bear the main responsibility for supplying water and firewood for cooking and heating, as well as growing food. Drought, uncertain rainfall and deforestation make these tasks more time-consuming and arduous, threaten women’s livelihoods and deprive them of time to learn skills, earn money and participate in community life.

But the same societal roles that make women more vulnerable to environmental challenges also make them key actors for driving sustainable development. Their knowledge and experience can make natural resource management and climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies at all levels more successful.

To see this in action, just look to the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the Waorani women association (Asociación de Mujeres Waorani de la Amazonia Ecuatoriana) is promoting organic cocoa cultivation as a wildlife protection measure and a pathway to local sustainable development.

With support from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), the women’s association is managing its land collectively and working toward zero deforestation, the protection of vulnerable wildlife species and the production of certified organic chocolate.

In the process, the women are building the resilience of their community by investing revenues from the cocoa business into local education, health and infrastructure projects and successfully steering the local economy away from clear-cutting and unregulated bushmeat markets.

Indigenous women are also driving sustainable development in Mexico. There, UNDP supports Koolel-Kab/Muuchkambal, an organic farming and agroforestry initiative founded by Mayan women that works on forest conservation, the promotion of indigenous land rights and community-level disaster risk reduction strategies.

The association, which established a 5,000-hectare community forest, advocates for public policies that stop deforestation and offer alternatives to input-intensive commercial agriculture. It has also shared an organic beekeeping model across more than 20 communities, providing an economic alternative to illegal logging.

Empowered women are one of the most effective responses to climate change. The success of climate change actions depend on elevating women’s voices, making sure their experiences and views are heard at decision-making tables and supporting them to become leaders in climate adaptation.

By ensuring that gender concerns and women’s empowerment issues are systematically taken into account within environment and climate change responses, the world leaders who wrapped up the U.N. Climate Change Conference 2014 in Lima, Peru, can reduce, rather than exacerbate, both new and existing inequalities and make sustainable development possible.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Davi Kopenawa at an assembly of the the Hutukara Associação Yanomami . Credit: Courtesy Luciano Padrã/Cafod

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 14 2014 (IPS)

Davi Kopenawa, the leader of the Yanomami people in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, who is internationally renowned for his struggle against encroachment on indigenous land by landowners and illegal miners, is now fighting a new battle – this time against death threats received by him and his family.

“In May, they [miners] told me that he wouldn’t make it to the end of the year alive,” Armindo Góes, 39, one of Kopenawa’s fellow indigenous activists in the fight for the rights of the Yanomami people, told IPS.

Kopenawa, 60, is Brazil’s most highly respected indigenous leader. The Yanomami shaman and spokesman is known around the world as the “Dalai Lama of the Rainforest” and has frequently participated in United Nations meetings and other international events.“The landowners and the garimpeiros have plenty of money to kill an Indian. The Amazon jungle belongs to us. She protects us from the heat; the rainforest is essential to all of us and for our children to live in peace.” -- Davi Kopenawa

He has won awards like the Global 500 Prize from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). His voice has drawn global figures like King Harald of Norway – who visited him in 2013 – or former British footballer David Beckham – who did so in March – to the 96,000-sq-km territory which is home to some 20,000 Yanomami.

Kopenawa is president of the Hutukara Yanomami Association (HAY), which he founded in 2004 in Boa Vista, the capital of the northern state of Roraima. Before that he fought for the creation of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory (TI), which is larger than Portugal, in the states of Amazonas and Roraima, on the border with Venezuela.

On Jul. 28, HAY issued a statement reporting that its leader had received death threats in June, when Góes, one of the organisation’s directors, was accosted on a street in the Amazonas town of São Gabriel da Cachoeira by “garimpeiros” or illegal gold miners, who gave him a clear death message for Kopenawa.

Since then “the climate of insecurity has dominated everything,” Góes told IPS.

Garimpeiros are penetrating deeper and deeper into Yanomami territory in their search for gold, in Brazil as well as Venezuela, encroaching on one of the world’s oldest surviving cultures.

Illegal gold miners damage the territory and attack the families of the Yanomami. Credit: Courtesy Colin Jones/Survival International

The Yanomami TI was demarcated just before the 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro. And it was the Rio+20 Summit, held in this city in 2012, that made Kopenawa more prominent at home, where he was less well-known than abroad.

“Davi is someone very precious to Brazil, but some people see him as an enemy. He is a thinker and a warrior who forms part of Brazil’s identity and has fought for the rights of the Yanomami and other indigenous people for over 40 years,” activist Marcos Wesley, assistant coordinator of the Rio Negro sustainable development programme of the Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA), told IPS.

The Rio Negro, the biggest tributary of the Amazon River, runs across Yanomami territory.

In the 1990s, Kopenawa managed to get 45,000 garimpeiros evicted from the Yanomami TI, Wesley noted. “He and Hutukara are the spokespersons for the Yanomami, for their demands. I can imagine there are people who have suffered economic losses and are upset over the advances made by the Yanomami,” he added.

“There are threatening signs that put us on the alert,” Góes said. “We are working behind locked doors. Two armed men were already searching for Davi in Boa Vista. They even offered money if someone would identify him. We are getting more and more concerned.”

The director of HAY explained that “our lives are at risk, and our elders advised Davi to take shelter in his community.”

Shaman Davi Kopenawa with former British football star David Beckham, who visited Yanomami territory in March. Credit: Courtesy Nenzinho Soares/Survival International

Although the Yanomami TI was fully demarcated, illegal activities have not ceased there.

“There are many people invading indigenous land for mining,” Góes said.

Kopenawa comes from the remote community of Demini, one of the 240 villages in the Yanomami TI. The only way to reach the village is by small plane or a 10-day boat ride upriver.

On Aug. 8, IPS managed to contact the Yanomami leader, just a few minutes before he set out for his community. But he preferred not to provide details about his situation, because of the threats.

“At this moment I prefer not to say anything more. I can only say that I am very worried, together with my Yanomami people; the rest I have already said,” he commented.

Five days earlier, Kopenawa had been one of the guests of honour at the 12th International Literature Festival in Paraty in the southern state of Rio de Janeiro. He talked about the violence facing his people, when he presented his book “The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman”.

“The landowners and garimpeiros have plenty of money to kill an Indian. The Amazon jungle belongs to us. She protects us from the heat; the rainforest is essential to all of us and for our children to live in peace,” he said.

He had previously denounced that “They want to kill me. I don’t do what white people do – track someone down to kill him. I don’t interfere with their work. But they are interfering in our work and in our struggle. I will continue fighting and working for my people. Because defending the Yanomami people and their land is my work.”

In its communiqué, HAY demanded that the police investigate the threats and provide Kopenawa with official protection.

“The suspicion is that the threats are in reprisal for the work carried out by the Yanomami, together with government agencies, to investigate and break up the networks of miners in the Yanomami TI in the last few years,” HAY stated.

Kopenawa and HAY provide the federal police with maps of mining sites, geographic locations, and information on planes and people circulating in the Yanomami TI. Their reports have made it possible to carry out operations against garimpeiros and encroaching landowners; the last large-scale one was conducted in February.

According to the federal police, in Roraima alone, illegal mining generates profits of 13 million dollars a month, and many of the earnings come from Yanomami territory.

Góes stressed to IPS that mining has more than just an economic impact on indigenous people.

“It causes an imbalance in the culture and lives of the Yanomami, and generates dependence on manufactured, artificial objects and food. It changes the entire Yanomami world vision. Mining also generates a lot of pollution in the rivers,” he complained.

“We know that in Brazil we unfortunately have a high rate of violence against indigenous leaders and social movements,” Wesley said. “Impunity reigns. Davi is a fighter, and will surely not be intimidated by these threats. He believes in his struggle, in the defence of his people and of the planet.”

In Brazil there is no specific programme to protect indigenous people facing threats.

Representatives of Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, told IPS that a request from protection was received from Kopanawa and other HAY leaders, and that it was referred to the programme of human rights defenders in the Brazilian presidency’s special secretariat on human rights.

But they said that in order to receive protection, the Yanomami leader had to confirm that he wanted it, and the government is waiting for his response to that end.

In this country of 200 million people, indigenous people number 896,917, according to the 2010 census.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A Jepelacio resident carries a blue jerrycan with 20 litres of “Jepe water” along one of the dusty but clean streets of this town in the Peruvian Amazon, a healthful routine many families carry out daily. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
JEPELACIO, Peru, Jul 2 2014 (IPS)

He may look like a rapper, but 33-year-old José Antonio Bardález is the mayor of Jepelacio, in the Peruvian Amazon. His ingenious innovations in the municipality include transforming waste management into a source of income and making spring water a source of drinking water.

“I’m a civil engineer, but people think I’m an environmental engineer,” the mayor told IPS, driving his pickup truck and stopping frequently to greet and joke with local people in the district, located in the department of San Martín, in the country’s northern Amazon region.The eye-catching blue jerrycans of “Jepe water” are delivered free to schools and to 100 “healthy families” who have kept their houses and surroundings clean and have processed their waste appropriately.

Bardález wears torn denim jeans and dark glasses, and styles his hair with gel. His black pickup, with polarised windows, is part of his image, and he has changed the letters of its brand name around to “Jepe”, the brand of the town’s sustainable products.

Jepelacio, one of the principal districts in Mayobomba province, has over 20,000 people distributed in 70 villages. Most local people make their living from agriculture, mainly coffee growing. The district has lush biodiversity, but also suffers from serious deforestation.

Between 2006 and 2011, deforested areas in San Martín fell to an average of 36 percent, but the level of deforestation in the Gera valley, one of the main basins in Jepelacio, is still 65 percent, according to the Asociación Amazónicos por la Amazonia (AMPA – Amazonians for the Amazon), an NGO.

Half the population lives in poverty, and 26 percent of children under five were chronically malnourished in 2009, according to official figures.

When Bardález became mayor in late 2010, he decided to turn the disadvantages into an opportunity for change. His monthly budget was 93,000 dollars, or about four dollars a head.

He began to mobilise local people to collect garbage to be turned into cheap agricultural fertiliser. Local families keep the streets clean and separate organic from inorganic materials, putting them in plastic buckets, sacks, bags or any other suitable containers.

Small containers of classified rubbish can be seen outside the houses that line the dusty unpaved streets of Jepelacio. These are emptied by municipal personnel and the garbage is processed with the aid of efficient microorganisms, found in yeast mixture, molasses, milk whey or cow rumen.

One litre of this fermentation culture can decompose 100 tonnes of organic material, said the mayor. In five days, the waste material can reach a temperature of 70 degrees Celsius, and the residue is passed through a sieve until the final product is “Jepe fertiliser.” The process lasts a little over two weeks.

Every month the municipal district decomposes 30 tonnes of organic waste, at a cost of 3,500 dollars, which is covered by sales of the fertiliser at 143 dollars a tonne.

In Bardález’s view it is a win-win formula, because building a sanitary infill to dump rubbish would cost nearly one million dollars, equivalent to the municipality’s budget for a whole year and preventing it from undertaking any other works.

“The best thing of all is that the microorganisms do not generate bad odours, there is zero pollution, and people are learning to process waste in order to make an income from fertiliser sales,” he said.

Mayor José Antonio Bardález at the treatment plant producing “Jepe fertiliser”, an initiative that is generating sustainable changes in his district in the Peruvian Amazon. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

To replicate the project, the municipality is organising a fertiliser mini-plant contest among 10 of its outlying villages. “This means I have gained 10 clean townships,” the mayor said.

In the upper years of the district’s secondary schools, students are being taught how to make the fertiliser as well as the basics of how to run a family business, in order to help improve the management of their family farms.

“This fertiliser has a value. It’s no good giving it away for free, if it costs people nothing they don’t value it,” Bardález said, explaining that some government programmes give sacks of fertiliser to farmers, and instead of using them they sell them on at half price in order to get cash in hand.

“It’s good that they’re making that fertiliser to sell to people more cheaply,” said Martina Díaz Vásquez, a 39-year-old mother of seven. She told IPS that she had come to Jepelacio from Cajamarca at the age of 11.

More than 80 percent of the district’s residents come from other departments, mainly in the Andean region, like Cajamarca and Piura. The challenge is to involve them in a project in an area other than their birthplace, AMPA director Karina Pinasco told IPS.

“It is highly innovative for an authority to transform a problem (like waste) into an opportunity. I have not seen anything like it elsewhere in San Martín,” Pinasco said.

Bardález’s ingenuity has been applied to other municipal projects related to the district’s natural resources.

The mayor saw the potential for making the clear water of a natural spring fit for human consumption, and so solve the problem of diarrhoeal diseases in the district. Now the water is filtered and processed with fine silver rods, which have a powerful bactericidal effect.

For the past two years, residents have been able to buy 20-litre containers of drinking water for less than 50 cents. “It’s good to drink, we don’t have to boil our water any more. We save time and money,” Margarita Delbado, who has three children, told IPS.

At present the eye-catching blue jerrycans of “Jepe water” are delivered free to schools and to 100 “healthy families” who have kept their houses and surroundings clean and have processed their waste appropriately.

In April 2013 the municipality of Jepelacio was recognised by the San Martín departmental government as a key ally in the implementation of a special programme for improving child nutrition.

In December, the Health ministry recognised it as one of the municipalities that has contributed to overcoming social problems that affect people’s health.

In addition to waste management and water treatment, a natural swimming pool has been created under a waterfall on the Rumi Yacu stream. A pool of water was simply dammed up and surrounded with rocks, creating a recreational space for children and their families.

“Innovation can happen in small stages. The next step is to provide more ‘Jepe water’ for the whole district, to improve waste treatment and to keep making progress,” said Bardález, who went into politics because in his technical job he was unable to realise the changes he wanted.

Early in his term of office he asked for a loan to buy heavy machinery. Criticism rained down on him: Why purchase an excavator, a tractor, a bulldozer or a dumpster? people asked.

But these voices faded away when people saw roads being built and stones being moved. Bardález is convinced that it is well worth taking risks. As indeed he has.

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

View of the port of Ponta da Madeira, in northeast Brazil, where vessels - including Valemax megaships - dock to load iron ore mined in Carajás. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
SÃO LUIS, Brazil, Mar 21 2014 (IPS)

“We are victims of progress,”complained Osmar Santos Coelho, known as Santico. His fishing community has disappeared, displaced to make way for a port complex on São Marcos bay, to the west of São Luis, the capital of the state of Maranhão in Brazil’s northeast.

The Ponta da Madeira maritime terminal, which has been in operation since 1986, has strengthened the influence of its owner, the giant mining company Vale, in São Luis. The terminal currently exports 110 million tonnes a year of iron ore, consolidating a logistical corridor of decisive importance for local economic development.

Company trains arrive at the port, transporting minerals from Carajás, a huge mining province in the eastern Amazon region that has made Vale the world leader in iron ore production. The port also exports a large proportion of the soya grown in the centre-north of Brazil.

Beside it, a Vale plant converts iron ore to spherical pellets.

These activities create thousands of jobs, especially in Vale’s area of direct influence, Itaqui-Bacanga, an area of 58 poor districts in the southwest of São Luis.

Young people aspire to work there because the pay is good, and Vale’s human resources policies, inherited from its long life as a state company (1942-1997), guarantee job stability. An employee “is only fired if he or she really messes around a lot,” an executive told IPS.

Vale also offers a lot of temporary work for the expansion of the port, and its railroad track, so far one-way, is in the process of being made two-way, with the aim of doubling mining exports from 2018.

Because of these and other local projects, the economy of the surrounding neighbourhoods is booming, said George Pereira, the secretary of the Itaqui-Bacanga Community Association (ACIB). Three plants are planned, for pulp and paper, cement and fertilisers, as well as a coal-fired thermoelectric station, among others.

Some 55 kilometres further south, in the municipality of Bacabeira, the state oil company Petrobras will build the Premium I refinery, which will be the largest in Brazil when it opens in 2018. The project will be put out to tender in April, and at its peak will employ 25,000 workers, the company says.

The employment boom boosts consumption, trade and services, “but this is not the development we want. We have more money in our pockets but no water to drink, because the rivers are polluted,” Pereira said.

Sanitation, drinking water, transport, teachers and doctors are scarce, while there is an excess of violence, drugs and prostitution in the poor districts, where the population is soaring, he said. Close to 200,000 people already live there, and two more housing estates are under construction, he said.

In this context, Vale “does good works, but in isolation, without transformative programmes to develop the entire area,” Pereira criticised. The priorities are education and sanitation, he said.

Ironically, the association that criticises and puts pressure on Vale is its own creature. It arose from the company’s social investment, required by the state National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES) as a condition for financing the iron ore pellet plant.

ACIB is governed by representatives of the five divisions that make up Itaqui-Bacanga and was created 10 years ago to mobilise the local population for an urban clean-up project. Its overheads and its headquarters, a two-story building, are funded by Vale, Pereira said.

Among the company’s numerous social action projects, some are outstanding for their effectiveness, such as extensions to the Itaqui-Bacanga Centre for Professional Education, an educational centre belonging to the National Industrial Apprenticeship Service (SENAI).

This year the centre is providing technical education for 10,000 students, twice the enrolment it had in 2013 and five times that of 2010, thanks to 14 new classrooms and five new laboratories.

Three other centres along the corridor between Carajás and São Luis are supported by similar partnerships between Vale and SENAI, Janaina Pinheiro, Vale’s human resources manager, told IPS.

In 2013, SENAI trained 65,000 students in Maranhão, compared to 10,000 a decade ago, state director Marco Moura told IPS.

Industrialisation in São Luis is concentrated around the ports on São Marcos bay. Near Ponta da Madeira is the state port of Itaqui, which has handled cargo of all kinds since the 1970s, and this year will see the addition of a grain terminal to export soya and maize from the new agricultural frontiers in the centre and north of the country.

Some of Brazil’s new ports were created with the goal of becoming industrial hubs, including Suape and Pecém, in the northeastern states of Pernambuco and Ceará. They were planned as industrial-port complexes and have been boosting the local economies for the past decade.

Both these ports have Petrobras refineries, and Suape has a petrochemical plant and eight shipyards, while Pecém has a steelworks and electricity generating plants. Many companies are locating in the enormous industrial zones on the landward side of the two ports.

The São Luis ports were unconnected to that wave of industrialisation because they belong to the poorest Brazilian region, which is backward and neglected compared to other hubs in the northeast.

The bay’s deep water, suitable for large-draught vessels, its location facing the North Atlantic, and the Carajás railway link, were advantages for the Ponta da Madeira terminal.

Osmar Santos Coelho, Santico, outside the shed where he keeps his nets and fishing gear, on a narrow beach that escaped takeover by the port terminal built by the Vale mining company in São Luis, in Brazil’s Northeast. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

But there have been victims, the 73-year-old Santico reminded IPS, for instance “between 80 and 100” artisanal fisherfolk from Boqueirão, who were evicted from their fishing village on the beach and resettled in different districts.

A few years later, many of them have returned to fish in the São Marcos bay, in spite of this being banned, and they have settled on a small stretch of beach not occupied by the port, he said.

“We had no other trade, and we were hungry,” he said. They eventually built eight rough cabins from poles and palm leaves, some for living in and others just for fishing equipment.

Santico has a house in a nearby district and a cabin on the beach for the gear he uses for his sporadic night-time fishing expeditions. “There are hardly any fish left, and only a few prawns,” after new underwater concrete breakers were built to control tidal currents, he said.

As a result, fisherfolk negotiated with Vale and three years ago the company donated food baskets for 52 fisherfolk, worth between 308 and 725 dollars. “That’s how we survive,” Santico said.

Thousands of other families were evicted to make way for docks and port installations. Itaqui was, in fact, the name of a district that disappeared.

More city districts are now threatened by the industrial zone under construction next to the highway. Vila Maranhão fears extinction, squeezed between the railway and the new industrial hub, and only a few kilometres from a coal-fired thermoelectric plant, a large aluminium industry and stockpiled minerals.

“There is no official word yet, but it’s only a matter of time before we are evicted from here,” predicted Lamartine de Moura, a 71-year-old ACIB director who has lived in Vila Maranhão for 23 years. “If we’re not forced out by expropriation, we will be by the pollution,” she told IPS.

A university study found heavy metals in the local stream, and mineral dust in the air stains the houses and spreads respiratory diseases, she said.

U.S. Native American leader Tom Goldtooth. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Mar 20 2014 (IPS)

Civil society and advocacy groups are warning that a prominent carbon-reduction initiative, aimed at curbing global emissions, is undermining land tenure rights for indigenous communities, putting their livelihoods at risk.

On Wednesday, an international dialogue here focused on the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation Plus (REDD+) programme, overseen primarily by the United Nations and World Bank.“As the carbon in living trees becomes another marketable commodity, the deck is loaded against forest peoples." -- Arvind Khare

The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a coalition of organisations focused on land tenure and policy reforms, presented new research highlighting the lack of legal protection and safeguards for indigenous communities living in forests.

“As the carbon in living trees becomes another marketable commodity, the deck is loaded against forest peoples and presents an opening for an unprecedented carbon grab by governments and investors,” said Arvind Khare, RRI’s executive director.

“Every other natural-resource investment on the international stage has disenfranchised indigenous peoples and local communities, but we were hoping REDD would deliver a different outcome. Their rights to their forests may be few and far between, but their rights to the carbon in the forests are non-existent.”

REDD+ provides a series of financial incentives and rewards for developing countries to reduce their carbon emissions resulting from deforestation.

The World Bank plays an active role in REDD+ through its Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) and the Forest Investment Programme (FIP), both of which are designed to encourage better forest conservation and stewardship.

However, watchdog groups say Latin American, African and Asian indigenous communities living in forests have yet to receive any REDD+ revenue streams from their respective governments.

“There has been no transfer of funds to the [indigenous] communities through the governmental REDD processes,” Khare told IPS. “And therefore, in most of these countries … no money has been transferred to the communities through these two major bodies [REDD+ and FCPF], which are actually piloting REDD in the world.”

RRI’s new research, which examines 23 countries, finds that only Mexico and Guatemala have laws meant to clarify tenure rights over carbon. Meanwhile, none of the countries have a legal framework or institutions in place to determine who receives REDD+ benefits for carbon emission reductions.

One-eighth the deforestation

In order to ensure that indigenous communities receive an appropriate share of the financial benefits from REDD+, many of the participants at Wednesday’s dialogue called on the programme’s overseers to explicitly link carbon rights with land tenure rights.

“Tenure must be a centrepiece of REDD …That recognition of local rights is essential to the viability of carbon markets,” said Alexandre Corriveau-Bourque, a tenure analyst at RRI.

“These observations are based not only on moral or legal grounds but on a growing body of academic literature demonstrating that communities with secure tenure have proven that they promote the permanence of forest carbon” – essentially, preventing deforestation – “often achieving better outcomes than state-protected areas.”

For instance, in areas of the Amazon where the land ownership rights of indigenous communities are respected and legally protected, the rate of deforestation is only one-eighth of the level in areas not under indigenous control.

When land tenure rights are not clearly recognised or legally protected, however, the potential for violent conflict, state repression and heightened deforestation increases.

“It’s also clear that insecure, unclear and unrecognised community tenure rights can lead to conflict and deforesting activities,” Corriveau-Bourque continued. “If governments decide that carbon is a public good and claim exclusive state ownership, as many have with mineral resources … it will add another layer of contestation and conflict in an already crowded field.”

In 2002, New Zealand declared state ownership of its carbon supplies, which actually resulted in an increase in deforestation. As a result, the government has since reformed the law to adapt a policy that gives communities and individuals more freedom to engage in the carbon trade.

According to RRI, 15 of the 21 countries with national planning documents for REDD+ noted that a major cause of deforestation and forest degradation was the absence of clear tenure policies.

Misattributed blame

In addition to the lack of clear land tenure rights, some analysts believe that the implementation of REDD+ will be detrimental to indigenous people as governments seek to misattribute and direct blame for deforestation towards local communities, rather than on the corporate interests operating in fragile forest ecosystems.

“The message coming from forest peoples is that they are being pressed from both sides,” Tom Griffiths, a coordinator with the Forest Peoples Programme, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“On the one hand, their forests are being given out without their knowledge and agreement to foreign companies for agricultural development and oil extraction. And on the other, they’re being pressed by these same climate initiatives, which are actually limiting their access to the forest.”

Griffiths suggested that the industrial sector is largely responsible for driving deforestation in many countries, but that subsistence farmers and poor people often get the blame.

He also notes that some analysts have characterised traditional rotational farming as “slash and burn” agriculture.

“There’s a deep prejudice in forest policymaking, and indeed the forest profession, against so-called slash and burn agriculture,” said Griffiths. “In fact, there’s a large amount of science to show that, with the right conditions, it is a fully sustainable form of land use and in fact can even enrich forest ecosystems.

“We’re very concerned that some of these REDD policies, forest climate policies, are not paying adequate attention to these obligations to protect customary rights to land and crucial customary systems or ways of using the land.”

Earlier this month, indigenous groups from around the world held an international conference on deforestation and local rights in Palangka Raya, Indonesia.

In addition to singling out agribusiness, infrastructure as well as mineral and energy extraction, they called for a halt to “green economy” projects, which they argued prohibit forest peoples’ “fundamental rights”.

In a declaration, the conference organisers directly criticized REDD+ both for its lack of progress on emissions reduction and for the restrictions it imposes on the rights of indigenous forest peoples to use their land.

“Global efforts promoted by agencies like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), [REDD+] and the World Bank to address deforestation through market mechanisms are failing,” states the communiqué.

“Not just because viable markets have not emerged, but because these efforts fail to take account of the multiple values of forests and, despite standards to the contrary, in practice are failing to respect our internationally recognised human rights.”

Furthermore, the declaration indicated that organisations collaborating on initiatives like REDD+ have implemented development programmes that have themselves contributed to deforestation:

“Contradictorily, many of these same agencies are promoting the take-over of our peoples’ land and territories through their support for imposed development schemes, thereby further undermining national and global initiatives aimed at protecting forests.”

Outside the New York federal courthouse on Oct 15, 2013, Ecuadorians and their supporters gather to protest the Chevron lawsuit. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 5 2014 (IPS)

In the latest twist in a 21-year-old environmental pollution case, a U.S. federal judge Tuesday ruled that the victims of massive oil spillage and their U.S. attorney could not collect on a nine-billion-dollar judgement by Ecuador’s supreme court against the Chevron Corporation.

In a racketeering case brought by the U.S. oil giant, the judge found that the lawyer, Steven Donziger, and his associates had used bribery and falsified evidence to prevail against Chevron in Ecuador’s courts and thus should not be permitted to collect damages.“Misconduct on the part of a couple of lawyers... is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for a corporation that has committed massive toxic contamination.” -- Marco Simons

“It is distressing that the course of justice was perverted,” the District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in a nearly 500-page ruling.

“There is no ‘Robin Hood’ defense to illegal and wrongful conduct,” he went on. “And the defendants’ ‘this-is-the-way-it-is-done-in-Ecuador’ excuses – actually a remarkable insult to the people of Ecuador – do not help them.”

Chevron applauded the judgement “as a resounding victory,” while Donziger and his attorneys said they would take the ruling to the same appeals court that overturned a similar judgement in the case rendered by Kaplan in 2011. At that time, Chevron appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Kaplan’s original ruling, but the Court rejected the appeal without comment.

Donziger himself called Kaplan’s latest judgement, which followed a six-week trial conducted late last year, “an appalling decision resulting from a deeply flawed proceeding that overturns a unanimous ruling by Ecuador’s Supreme Court. …We are confident we will be fully vindicated in the U.S., as we have been in Ecuador.”

The case was first filed in the U.S. federal court in 1993 on behalf of 30,000 mostly indigenous residents of the Lago Agrio region of the Ecuadorean Amazon where Texaco, which was acquired by Chevron in 2001, had operated continuously from the 1960s until 1992. For much of that period, it worked in partnership with Petroecuador, which took over all of Texaco’s operations in the region when the U.S. oil giant left.

The plaintiffs claim that Texaco dumped more than 70 billion litres of toxic liquids, left some 910 waste pits filled with toxic sludge, and flared millions of cubic metres of toxic gases – poisoning the environment in one of the most biologically diverse areas in South America and creating serious health problems, including an unusually high incidence of cancer, for people living in the region.

Apparently concerned that U.S. courts would be more sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ case, Texaco persuaded Judge Jed Rakoff to have the case transferred to Ecuador in 2002 — when it was ruled by a conservative government eager for foreign investment — on condition that the company waive certain defences, such as the expiration of the statute of limitations, and ensure that any judgement would be enforceable in the U.S. The Ecuadorean case was filed the following year.

Chevron has long argued that the damages cited by the plaintiffs are exaggerated and that, in any case, Texaco extinguished its obligations when it carried out a 40-million- dollar environmental remediation project as part of a 1995 agreement with the Ecuadorean government that covered 37.5 percent of the well sites and waste pits in the concession area.

The remaining sites were to be cleaned up by Petroecuador, according to Chevron.

But the plaintiffs, who are backed by a number of local and international green groups, have argued that Chevron, having drilled all of the original sites, also remains responsible for Petroecuador’s portion, as well as for the continuing health and other impacts of its operations that are not covered by the 1995 agreement.

The trial court in Ecuador ruled against Chevron and granted the plaintiffs, who were represented by Donziger and his associates, an 18 billion dollar judgement. The country’s Supreme Court subsequent upheld the judgement but reduced the damages to 9.5 billion dollars.

Chevron, however, has sought to prevent the plaintiffs from collecting any of the money, by, among other steps, withdrawing all of its assets from Ecuador and initiating a racketeering suit against Donziger and his team based on its charges that they used bribery and other corrupt methods to win the case and extort billions of dollars from the company.

To sustain those charges, it subpoenaed tens of thousands of documents, emails, and other materials from Donziger and other lawyers, as well as activist groups that supported the case. It even subpoenaed out-takes from a 2009 documentary produced by film-maker Joe Berlinger, “Crude,” about the case.

In his testimony last November, Donziger himself admitted making mistakes, such as concealing his interactions with and payments to a court-appointed expert witness who produced a report on which the Ecuadorean courts relied for the assessment of damages.

One former Ecuadorean judge testified for Chevron that plaintiffs paid him to ghostwrite opinions for the presiding judge who had been promised half a million dollars by Donziger for a favourable ruling. Both Donziger and the presiding judge, Nicolas Zambrano, vehemently denied those charges.

Nonetheless, Kaplan, who has never questioned the extent of the environmental damage wrought by the oil companies’ operations in the region, ruled in favour of Chevron, noting that “an innocent defendant is no more entitled to submit false evidence, to co-opt and pay off a court-appointed expert or to coerce or bribe a judge or jury than a guilty one.” He also noted that Donziger himself stood to win more than 600 million dollars in contingency fees.

If upheld, Kaplan’s ruling would prevent Donziger and the plaintiffs from collecting any damages from Chevron in U.S. courts. It also requires them to turn over any damages against Chevron they might collect in foreign courts to the company.

The plaintiffs have brought cases in three countries where Chevron has major operations and assets — Canada, Brazil, and Argentina – to enforce the Ecuadorean judgment, and Chevron’s CEO Tuesday told reporters Tuesday that Kaplan’s ruling should bolster the case in those countries.

The judgement, according to Deepak Gupta, who represented Donziger, amounted to “what is in effect a global anti-collection injunction that would preclude enforcement of a judgement from one country in every jurisdiction.” He noted that was one of the main reasons why the appeals court overturned Kaplan’s 2011 decision.

Marco Simons, legal director of EarthRights International, told IPS Tuesday’s judgement was vulnerable on other grounds as well. He said the law over whether the kinds of injunctions issued by Kaplan could be employed under the federal racketeering law remains unsettled.

In addition, he noted, the fact that Kaplan had found that the Ecuadorean judicial system had not provided due process “offers a good basis for re-filing the substantive case against Chevron in U.S. courts.”

“And even if all of what Judge Kaplan said about the fraudulent conduct of the attorneys was true, the answer shouldn’t necessarily be that Chevron gets away with no liability for what it has done in the Ecuadorean Amazon,” he said. “Misconduct on the part of a couple of lawyers, which is what Judge Kaplan suggested, is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for a corporation that has committed massive toxic contamination.”

Informal vendors sell food and drinks to passengers on the Carajás Railroad at Alto Alegre do Pindaré, in the northwest of the Brazilian state of Maranhão. This source of income will disappear when the trains are modernised and their windows sealed shut. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ALTO ALEGRE DO PINDARÉ/SÃO LUIS, Brazil, Feb 28 2014 (IPS)

The Carajás railroad, regarded as the most efficient in Brazil, runs a loss-making passenger service for the benefit of the population. But this does little to make amends for its original sin: it was created to export minerals and crosses an area of chronic poverty.

Three decades after it was built, the Carajás corridor, or area of influence, of the railway that transports one-third of the iron ore exported by Brazil remains a supplier of cheap labour for more prosperous regions and large projects in the Amazon, IPS found in a visit to the region.“The Vale train has brought me only woe and loss." -- Evangelista da Silva

Auzilandia, a village of 12,000 people and humble dwellings either side of the tracks, “is empty” at the end of every year, according to Leide Diniz. Her husband has gone, “for the second time,” over 3,000 kilometres south to the state of Santa Catarina, a three-day bus journey.

He left their three children with her in November to work in a restaurant during the tourist season in the southern hemisphere summer. “He earns some money and comes back,” said his wife, who accepts the situation because “there are no jobs here.”

For the past few years most of the unemployed workers in Alto Alegre do Pindaré, a municipality of 31,000 people, have migrated to Santa Catarina for seasonal work. Auzilandia is part of this municipality in the heartland of Maranhão, a transition state between the semi-arid northeast of Brazil and the Amazon rainforest.

The main street of Auzilandia, a village of 12,000 people in the municipality of Alto Alegre do Pindaré. Many adults here migrate 3,000 kilometres to the south in the southern hemisphere summer for work, because of the lack of opportunities in this village bisected by the Carajás Railroad. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Two-thirds of the 892 kilometres of the Carajás Railroad go through Maranhão, but this state continues to send workers to many other regions of the country, in general for temporary or precarious work, like artisanal gold mining in Amazonia or harvesting sugarcane.

It is also the main source of the victims of modern slavery, especially in stock raising and charcoal making. Its Human Development Index is next to last among the 27 Brazilian states and its per capita income is the lowest.

The Carajás Railroad and the transnational Brazilian mining giant Vale, that has the concession, will have a new opportunity to aid local development. Its tracks, so far one-way,  are in the process of being made two-way, and mining extraction in the Serra dos Carajás (Carajás mountains) in the Amazonian state of Pará is about to be doubled up.

From 2018, some 230 million tonnes a year of the highest grade iron ore on the world market will be extracted.

The railway widening will extend to the deep water port of Ponta da Madeira in São Luis, the capital of Maranhão, which exports the production of  Carajás, including manganese, copper and other minerals that make Vale the second largest minerals exporter in the world.

An investment of 19.5 billion dollars is required, most of it in logistics.

At its peak, railroad construction will employ 8,645 workers, Vale said. There will be 1,438 permanent jobs when the dual-track railway comes into operation and the priority will be to hire local people, the company promised.

A drop in the bucket towards development in such a vast area of influence. The most significant aid will come from the social investments of this company, one of the most profitable in Brazil.

A new mining bill, to be approved this year, will compel a small proportion of Vale’s income to be spent for the benefit of municipalities that are indirectly impacted by its activities.

To ensure these and other resources and to make better use of them, the 23 municipalities on the path of the railroad in Maranhão have joined forces to coordinate their actions and their relations with Vale.

The company assessed local economic interests and designed “projects for each micro-region along the railroad,” according to Zenaldo Oliveira, Vale’s director of logistics operations. In one community it may fund a cassava flour mill, in another fruit growing and juice production, he said.

Vale, founded by the state in 1942 and privatised in 1997, only supports education, health and income generation initiatives, he said, because these have been identified as the major problems hindering local development.

At present, with a single track for both directions, there are 12 freight trains daily from Carajás to São Luis. The trains are said to be the longest in the world, with 330 railcars, four locomotives, and each carrying more than 30,000 tonnes of minerals, totalling over 100 million tonnes a year.

On the return journey they carry fuel, fertiliser and other products consumed in the interior.

Passenger trains operating at subsidised fares, because “the local population is unable to afford the real cost,” provide the “social benefit” of cheap, permanent transport in a region where the rains often make roads impassable, Oliveira said.

At 15 stops, especially at Alto Alegre do Pindaré, vendors of cold drinks and food, most of them women, swarm to the train offering their wares to the railroad’s 360,000 passengers a year through the open windows.

This precarious income may disappear with the new project, as the cars will be air conditioned and the windows will be closed. “We will seek solutions” before the changeover, perhaps organising vendor cooperatives, Vale’s Oliveira said.

A workers and vendors cooperative has existed in Alto Alegre for some time, founded with support from Vale. Ten years ago it used to sell food to the railroad’s canteen, but “only for a short time,” according to its 58-year-old coordinator, Alice Cunegundes, a mother of three.

Afterwards the cooperative, which had as many as 93 members, supplied up to 3,000 meals a day to the mayor’s office, until the present mayor, elected in 2012, cancelled the arrangement, knocking the stuffing out of the initiative, she complained.

Supporting enterprise, improving schools and training thousands of workers are some of the social and environmental actions of Vale and its Foundation.

But “they are one-off projects that do not promote effective development in the territory,” said George Pereira, the executive secretary of the Itaquí-Bacanga Community Association, another “product of Vale’s social investments,” which serves 58 neighbourhoods around Ponta da Madeira.

Moreover, they are inadequate compensation for the damages suffered by the population of the Carajás corridor, according to Justiça Nos Trilhos (Justice on the Tracks), a campaign made up of social and religious movements to defend the rights of the people affected by the railroad.

In 2012, its denunciations and those of Articulaçao Internacional dos Atingidos pela Vale (International Network of People Affected by Vale) led to the company being selected for The Public Eye award, created by international organisations like Greenpeace to single out the worst corporate offenders against human rights and the environment.

Fatal accidents, pollution with mineral dust and cracks in houses close to the railway line are some of the impacts on local people.

The railroad must answer for its own sins as well as those of its twin partner, iron mining. It is also part of the Programa Grande Carajás (Grand Carajás Programme), a group of mining, steel, aluminium, pulp and paper, ranching and hydropower companies with which the government intended to develop the eastern Amazon region in the 1980s.

The programme created accelerated deforestation, lethal pollution around iron industry centres, slave labour and other forms of violence, while there was little progress in human development, acording to the statistics.

Florencio de Souza Bezerra points with his foot to a mound of dangerously inflammable charcoal dust on a roadside in Piquiá de Baixo. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
PIQUIÁ DE BAIXO, Brazil, Feb 10 2014 (IPS)

“My nephew was eight years old when he stepped in the ‘munha’ [charcoal dust] and burned his legs up to the knees,” said Angelita Alves de Oliveira from a corner of Brazil’s Amazonia that has become a deadly hazard for local people.

Treatment in faraway hospitals did not save the boy’s life, because “his blood had become toxic, the doctor said,” said Oliveira, 61, who has been working as a teacher for the last 30 years. “My sister was never the same after she lost her youngest child.”

Oliveira’s own husband suffered from similar burns, as the scars on his legs show."An examination a year ago showed shadows on my lungs, and the doctor accused me of being a long-time smoker, but I have never touched a cigarette.” -- Angelita Alves de Oliveira

“Munha” is pulverised charcoal waste left over from the production of pig-iron, an intermediate in steel production. It has made the village of Piquiá de Baixo, in the Brazil’s eastern Amazon region, a tragic case study in industrial pollution.

Piquiá is a rural village in Açailandia municipality in the state of Maranhão, which grew out of workers’ camps set up in 1958 to build the Belém-Brasilia highway, a major axis of development and integration in the centre-north of Brazil, which was responsible for several environmental and social disasters.

The railway that opened in 1985 to transport iron ore from the huge mining province of Carajás sealed the fate of Açailandia as a logistics crossroads and steel industry hub. Piquiá de Baizo was hemmed in by five pig-iron plants, the railway and large mining storehouses.

Making charcoal to feed the steel furnaces was added to traditional cattle ranching, and transformed Açailandia into a focal point for deforestation and slave labour.

These blights have receded in the face of state persecution and various pressures. But pollution in Piquiá has worsened, according to the testimonies of people interviewed by IPS.

Pulverised charcoal waste is still a menace. Dryness makes it inflammable at the lightest touch. This is what cost Oliveira’s nephew his life in 1993, when few people knew how lethal the black dust was.

A family smiles for the camera from the shade of a tree. The highway separates them from the pig-iron plants that are making like impossible in their neighbourhood. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

People took heed and accidents have become less frequent, but they have not been eradicated. A child of seven was burned to the waist in 1999 and died three weeks later.

“I have seen cows incinerated,” said Florencio de Souza Bezerra, who used to be a small-scale farmer and is now an active member of the Piquiá Residents Community Association. He has lived in Piquiá for 10 years with his nine children and two grandchildren, in a big wooden house with a large yard.

Mounds of munha can be seen in the streets where the steel plant trucks pass, and in at least one unroofed materials storehouse that IPS was able to enter unrestricted.

But the most frequent complaint of local people is the air pollution. “Just over a year ago a girl died from iron dust in her lungs and cancer, after 15 days in intensive care,” said Bezerra.

In the village square, he points out the houses where residents have died of respiratory illnesses.

Oliveira said “an examination a year ago showed shadows on my lungs, and the doctor accused me of being a long-time smoker, but I have never touched a cigarette.” She wants to “give life and hope” to her grandchildren, who live here “exposed to pollution 24 hours a day.”

“I have lived a long time, but my grandchildren haven’t,” said Oliveira. Her house is next to the Gusa Nordeste plant, one of the five industrial units that produce pig-iron.

The situation worsened “two years ago,” she said, when the company started producing cement. Now it spreads clouds of black dust that cover everything in seconds and, some mornings, make her house invisible from the main road, only 30 metres away.

For the company this has spelled progress, as they can use blast furnace slag as an input for cement production, avoiding bulky waste and providing the local construction market with a product that formerly had to be hauled in from a long way away.

Gusa Nordeste proclaims that it is being responsible for the environment because it uses munha as a fuel, saving granulated charcoal, and utilises gas derived from pig-iron production to generate all its electrical energy needs.

But the truth, recognised by the justice system, several authorities and the industry itself, is that air, water and soil pollution have made it impossible for the people of Piquiá de Baixo to continue to live where they have been for over four decades.

A proposal to resettle the 312 families living in Piquiá de Baixo on 38 hectares of land six kilometres from its present location has been approved by the justice system and the municipal council.

In December, justice authorities ordered the expropriation of the land and valued it at the equivalent of 450,000 dollars, but the owner is demanding four times that sum, so the residents of Piquiá are still waiting.

The community has come up with its own urban project, including the designs for the houses, the school, the square, shops and churches, said Antonio Soffientini, a member of Justice on the Rails, a network of dozens of organisations supporting those affected by the Carajás mining region.

Eroded street and dilapidated houses in Piquiá de Baixo. Residents have long waited for relocation on land expropriated by the justice system. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

In the mountain range of Serra dos Carajás, the giant mining company Vale extracts close to 110 million tonnes of iron ore a year. The ore is transported by rail 892 kilometres to the port of Ponta da Madeira in São Luis, the capital of Maranhão, to be exported.

A small proportion of the iron ore remains in Açailandia. As the supplier to the local pig-iron industry, Vale has direct responsibility for the pollution, according to Justice on the Rails.

“Vale could stop supplying ore until the industry instals filters and puts an end to the dreadful situation in Piquiá,” said Soffientini, an Italian member of the Catholic order of Comboni missionaries.

That would create an unemployment crisis in Açailandia, said Zenaldo Oliveira, Vale’s global director of logistics operations.

This steelmaking hub has already experienced a decline in activity since 2008. The 6,000 jobs it provided then have fallen to 3,500 today, according to Jarles Adelino, the president of the Açailandia metalworkers union.

The union leader complained of the high price charged by Vale for its iron ore, which amounts to half the cost of pig-iron production.

However, the declining activity is not apparent in the city of Açailandia, with its hotels filled to capacity and other signs of prosperity. Several plants in the surrounding area offer temporary work, said Adelino, and each position at a pig-iron plant generates 10 indirect jobs.

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

Xokó chief Lucimario Lima searches for new livelihoods for his people, after the Itaparica dam on the São Francisco river cut them off from traditional agriculture and fishing. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
FOZ DO IGUAÇU/PAULO AFONSO, Brazil, Jan 22 2014 (IPS)

The Itaparica hydroelectric power plant occupied land belonging to the Pankararu indigenous people, but while others were compensated, they were not. They have lost land and access to the São Francisco river, charge native leaders in Paulo Afonso, a city in northeastern Brazil.

“We can no longer eat fish, but the worst loss was that of the sacred waterfall where we celebrated religious rites,” chief José Auto dos Santos told IPS.

Nearly 200 kilometres downriver, the Xokó indigenous community suffers from low water flow, the result of the large dams that have eliminated the regular seasonal rises in river level of the São Francisco, making it impossible to cultívate rice in the floodplains as before and drastically reducing the fish catch.

Similar effects are feared on the Xingú river in the Amazon, where the Belo Monte hydropower plant will divert some of the water in the stretch known as Volta Grande (Big Bend), affecting the native Juruna and Arara peoples.

Some 2,500 km further south, Ava Guaraní people living on the banks of the Itaipu reservoir, on the border with Paraguay, have become fish farmers to maintain their traditionally high fish consumption, given their growing population and the shortage of arable land.

In Brazil a generation of indigenous people grew up on still rather than running waters in the 1970s and 1980s, when the country built a large number of hydroelectric plants, some of them huge, like Itaipu which is shared with Paraguay, and Tucuruí in the eastern Amazon region, both of which opened in 1984.

In that period, five hydroelectric plants were built on the São Francisco river, which mainly crosses semi-arid territory, altering the flow of the river.

One of these facilities, Sobradinho, has a reservoir with an area of 4,214 square km, one of the largest artificial lakes in the world, according to its state operator, Companhia Hidro Elétrica do São Francisco (São Francisco Hydroelectric Company) which has another 13 hydropower plants in Brazil’s northeast región.

When Sobradinho opened in 1982 it ended rice cultivation in the floodplains 630 km downstream in Xokó territory, local people told IPS.

The annual cycle of river level rises practically disappeared in the lower São Francisco after 1986, when the Itaparica dam and its 828 sq km reservoir, which regulates the flow below the Sobradinho dam, were created in the state of Pernambuco.

Deposition of the alluvial soil that fertilised ricefields and regularly renewed fish stocks in lagoons connected to the river by channels also came to an end.

“Without a flowing current, the river has lost force; it’s a shallow pond that can be crossed on foot,” said Lucimario Apolonio Lima, the 30-year-old Xokó chief who is unusually young to be the leader of an indigenous people. He told IPS that he is seeking a sustainable future for his people, who number just over 400.

He is encouraging bee-keeping and other alternative modes of production, fighting to revitalise the São Francisco and actively opposing Brasilia’s megaproject to divert water from this river to combat drought in the north.

“Before doing this, the river must be given life; sick people do not give blood for transfusions,” he said.

Raimundo Xokó, a 78-year-old shaman, told IPS, “My grandparents predicted that the banks alongside the São Francisco would die. I won’t see it, but my grandchildren will.”

The river banks are a thing of the past for the Pankararu who live five km from the huge Itaparica dam, in the state of Pernambuco. Their leaders feel they have been robbed.

“We have nowhere to fish. The company has taken our land and fails to recognise our legal rights to waterside land,”  shaman José João dos Santos, better known as Zé Branco, told IPS.

Former chief Jurandir Freire, known as Zé Indio, is fighting for indemnities totalling millions of dollars, because the native people were not paid reparations for the flooding of their lands, while municipal governments are receiving compensation and non-indigenous farmers have been resettled in newly built villages with irrigated land.

Zé Indio was imprisoned and lost his chief’s post for leading a 2001 protest that tore down electrical transmission lines from the hydroelectric plant that go through mountains in Pankararu territory without any payment being made.

The fertile land in a valley and on mountain slopes that retain humidity, in contrast to the surrounding semi-aridity, is another source of conflict. Since the Pankararu Reserve was demarcated in 1987, the native people have been pressuring the government to remove the non-indigenous farmers who have settled on the best land.

Isabel da Silva, who belongs to a non-indigenous farming family, pointed out that her family and others have lived in Pankararu territory for over a century. “My grandmother was born (in the reserve), and she died aged 91, five years ago,” she said.

“According to the law, we should leave, but that would be unjust,” said da Silva, who works for the Polo Sindical dos Trabalhadores/as Rurais do Submédio São Francisco, a family farmers’ union that achieved resettlement for nearly 6,000 rural families affected by the Itaparica dam.

There are 435 families who have been under threat of eviction for the past two decades. The measure has not yet been carried out for lack of land to resettle them on, according to the authorities.

The Pankararu Reserve covers an area of 8,376 hectares. In 2003 there were 5,584 members of this ethnic group there, according to the state Fundaçao Nacional do Indio (FUNAI – National Indigenous Foundation), responsible for protecting native peoples.

But thousands more have migrated to the cities, especially São Paulo, where they maintain their identity and meet up for indigenous religious rites and celebrations. If land were less scarce, many would return, said Zé Indio.

Land scarcity is also a threat to the Ocoy people, who live on the banks of the Itaipu reservoir. Here 160 families, totalling some 700 people, survive on barely 250 hectares, most of which are protected forests where agriculture is prohibited.

Fish farming, promoted by the Itaipu Binacional company, has emerged as a food-producing alternative in the light of dwindling traditional fishing reserves and the limitations to agriculture.

Indigenous people have excelled among the 850 fisherfolk who participate in the initiative, “perhaps because of their cultural relationship to water,” the company’s head of coordination and the environment, Nelton Friedrich, told IPS.

The Ocoy community harvests nearly six tonnes of fish a year from its 40 net cages, according to deputy chief Silvino Vass.

However, fish farming is not its major source of food and few individuals participate directly in this activity, according to a 2011 academic study by Magali Stempniak Orsi.

Besides, the indigenous people are overly dependent on the company, which supplies them with the fry and fish food, said Orsi, in whose view the project should promote greater community participation.

The Ocoy need assistance to meet their food needs, in contrast to two nearby Ava Guarani communities, who have more land donated by Itaipu Binacional, and grow more crops.

The support given by the Itaipu company to local indigenous people is an exception among hydroelectric plants. In addition to seeking development alternatives, it promotes sustainability in the river basins it manages with its “Cultivating Good Water” programme, which includes 65 environmental, social and productive actions.

Mundurukú chiefs and warriors protest in Brazil’s lower house of Congress Tuesday Dec. 10, 2013. Credit: Luis Macedo/Acervo/Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 12 2013 (IPS)

It took them three days to make the 2,000-km journey by bus from their Amazon jungle villages.

The 10 Mundurukú chiefs and 30 warriors made the trek to the capital of Brazil to demand the demarcation of their territory and the right to prior consultation in order to block the Tapajós hydroelectric dam, which could flood several of their villages.

“No one from the government has come to talk to us,” Juarez Saw, the 45-year-old chief of Sawre Muybu, one of the affected Mundurukú villages, told IPS by phone from Brasilia. “For us, the land is our mother. It is where we live and raise our kids and grandkids. We have nowhere to go if the government forces us off.”

The Brazilian government, which is already building the Belo Monte mega-dam on the Xingú river in the northeastern Amazon state of Pará, also wants to construct another huge hydropower complex on the Tapajós river, in the same state.

The complex, in the heart of Amazonia and in an area of significant gold deposits, is to involve the construction of five dams in the Tapajós basin, with an estimated power potential of 10,700 MW.

Seven conservation units are green areas on the map, scattered between the three largest cities along the Tapajós river: Santarém (population 300,000); Itaituba (population 130,000); and Jacareacanga (population 40,000).

The 6,133 MW São Luiz do Tapajós hydropower dam will be the largest. The other dams planned in the complex are Jatobá, on the same river, and Jamanxin, Cachoeira do Caí and Cachoeira dos Patos, on the Jamanxin river.

The complex is to begin to operate between 2017 and 2020, according to the state-run company Empresa de Pesquisa Energética.

Some 13,000 Mundurukú Indians will be affected along the Tapajós river, and the project will also impact the Kayabi and Apiaká communities – bringing the number of indigenous people impacted by the dams to 20,000.

The Mundurukú chiefs and warriors came to Brasilia on Tuesday Dec. 10 and Wednesday Dec. 11 to demand that the government make faster progress demarcating their lands along the middle stretch of the Tapajós river.

Until the demarcation process has been completed, people from the villages along the middle stretch of the river run the risk of being displaced, with their land flooded.

On Tuesday, the indigenous demonstrators protested against the dams on the Tapajós and the nearby Teles Pires river, in the lower house of Congress and outside the attorney general’s office, where they called for the repeal of decree 303.

The decree, which the attorney general’s office issued in July 2012, created the regulations to be followed by public defenders and prosecutors in legal proceedings on the demarcation of indigenous land throughout the country, with the stated aim of ensuring legal stability.

But the decree also laid out the foundations for the state to install in the reserves equipment, communication networks, streets and the constructions necessary to provide public services like healthcare and education.

This aspect of the decree limits indigenous people’s control over who has access to and uses their territory, while infringing on their right to prior consultation about activities and economic projects carried out in their territories, according to the Catholic Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI).

“We are once again shouting out against hydroelectric complexes in the region,” CIMI executive secretary Cleber César Buzatto told IPS from Brasilia. “It is a difficult situation – we perceive that the government has made a political decision not to demarcate any indigenous land.”

In his view, the conflict-ridden situation has been aggravated by “the inertia of the executive branch, which is not moving forward with the administrative procedures” set out by the constitution, such as demarcation of indigenous land and indigenous people’s right to prior consultation.

“We are confident in the native people’s power of resistance to defend and secure their rights. The central question is that the government must recognise these rights and demarcate the land of the Mundurukú along the middle stretch of the Tapajós river – the area that will be affected by the São Luiz hydropower plant,” Buzatto said.

The delegates came from different villages on the upper Tapajós river, where there is already one demarcated reserve, and on the middle stretch of the river, where the villagers do not yet hold legal title to their land.

“Our main struggle is for demarcation,” Saw told IPS. “We haven’t come to make threats. They don’t pay any attention to us – only when we come to Brasilia. It’s very tiresome to come here and return without any answers.”

His village, Sawre Muybu, was founded in 2008 and is home to 20 families – 150 people. It is located 50 km from Itaituba along the BR-230 trans-Amazonian highway – or over one hour away by river.

According to the chief, before the villages were founded along the middle stretch of the Tapajós, the Mundurukú lived in riverbank communities where they were losing their traditions and customs.

“We are in Brasilia to find out why the president of the National Indian Foundation [the government agency FUNAI] doesn’t want to sign the anthropological report,” he said.

Saw said the first anthropological report documenting the Mundurukú people’s roots on the land along the middle stretch of the Tapajós river was carried out in 2007, but was never delivered.

A new study had to be conducted, which has been ready since the middle of the year, waiting to be signed by FUNAI president Maria Augusta Assirati, in order for the demarcation to go ahead.

Saw said the people of Sawre Muybu found out in 2010 from Movimento Tapajós Vivo activists that the village could be flooded.

During their visit to the capital, the indigenous protesters stayed at a CIMI rural property 40 km outside of the city.

CIMI head Buzatto said “they came to us seeking support to demand these things from the government which, unfortunately, does not recognise that it is failing to respect the rights of the people in that region.”

In response to questions from IPS, FUNAI said the agency’s president had not planned on meeting with the Mundurukú chiefs and warriors but decided to meet with them on Wednesday as a result of their protests.

In May, the Mundurukú invaded and occupied for two weeks a plant of the company building the Belo Monte dam located 830 km by road from their territories, in solidarity with the people affected by that project, and to call for the suspension of the construction of hydropower dams on their rivers as well.

In June, they came to Brasilia to negotiate with the government. But because they did not agree to send only a limited group of delegates, the authorities sent two airplanes to transport 144 representatives.

Shortly afterwards, that same month, they took hostages – three biologists who were studying the local flora and fauna for the environmental impact studies for the dams. With that protest measure, they managed to delay the process until August. And before the study could get underway again, the government and FUNAI had to give prior notice to the indigenous community.

The Autana tepuy or mesa – a national park and the “tree of life” for the Uwottyja Indians, seen from the river. Credit: Humberto Márquez/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
PUERTO AYACUCHO, Venezuela , Nov 26 2013 (IPS)

The presence of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is evident in Venezuela’s Amazon region, where the guerrillas can be seen on speed boats, in camps, or interacting with local indigenous communities.

“We see them once in a while passing by in a boat in the evening, dressed in green, armed, carrying supplies,” a veteran boatman, Antonio, told IPS standing next to the dark waters of the Cuao river, which runs into the Orinoco river in the southern Venezuelan state of Amazonas on the Colombian border.

Some 100 km to the south, in Maroa, a town of 2,000 people on the banks of the
Guainía river, which forms part of the border, “when the food for the Mercal [the government chain of stores selling food at heavily subsidised prices] arrives, part of it goes to the guys in the FARC,” a local told Catholic Bishop José Ángel Divassón, vicar apostolic in Amazonas.

And in Atabapo, another border town, “the FARC keep order and prevent theft,” while in indigenous communities “they try to set up camps and recruit young guys, who they offer work for three years,” he added.

Amazonas is a mineral-rich rainforest state with abundant rivers in southernmost Venezuela. Its huge 184,000-sq-km territory is home to just 180,000 people, 54 percent of whom belong to 20 different indigenous groups according to the 2011 census.

The presence of armed groups from Colombia is the latest affliction for this region which already suffers from isolation, a dearth of basic public services, and a lack of interest in its voters at election time, due to the sparse population and high poverty level.

The local environment and traditional indigenous ways of life have long been vulnerable to the impacts of activities such as illegal gold mining, which is only the most visible.

Amazonas governor Liborio Guarulla, an indigenous man who is a veteran left-wing leader opposed to the country’s leftist central government, estimates that there may be up to 4,000 Colombian guerrillas in this vast state.

In Puerto Ayacucho, the state capital, Guarulla told reporters that “five kilometres from here, they have held meetings with local shopkeepers to demand payment of a ‘vacuna’ [‘vaccine’ or war tax].”

The governor, who belongs to the Progressive Movement of Venezuela, believes the arrival of the FARC to Amazonas “is a result of the offensive unleashed by the army in their country in the last seven years, against the columns that they had as a rearguard in eastern Colombia, which have now spilt across the border.”

The FARC, which took up arms in 1964, is the oldest left-wing insurgent group in Latin America. Since November 2012 it has been involved in peace talks with the Colombian government in Cuba.

In May, FARC rebels under the command of Antonio Medina made contact with leaders of the Uwottyja or Piaroa indigenous community, who live along the middle stretch of the Orinoco – Venezuela’s biggest river – and its tributaries, to establish a cooperative relationship, José Carmona, the shaman of the Caño de Uña community, told IPS.

“We told them no, that both their presence and that of the miners offend our traditions because we are peoples who want to live without weapons – we only have machetes for our crops and shotguns for hunting,” Carmona said.

After the meetings, Uwottyja organisations issued a public letter addressed to the FARC in which they expressed “our total disagreement with your presence and movements in our territory.”

The Uwottyja also said they rejected trading with the FARC “or the hiring of indigenous persons” by the guerrillas, and urged the insurgents “to find a way to return to your country”.

César Sanguinetti, a lawmaker with the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela and a member of the Curripaco indigenous community, who live in the south of Amazonas and the southeast of Colombia, told IPS that “we are a sovereign country that should not permit incursions by any kind of armed force, and as a nation and a government, we demand respect.”

Other local indigenous people such as Uwottyja schooteacher Juan Pablo Arana and Yanomami health worker Luis Shatiwe say the guerrillas are aggravating the problems faced by native communities in obtaining supplies, because in order to acquire food, fuel and other goods indigenous people have to compete with those who smuggle contraband across the border.

“We travel hours to get flour, sugar, oil, rice or coffee, sometimes going all the way to Puerto Ayacucho,” Arana told IPS in the Raudal de Seguera community at the foot of the Autana tepuy – a mountain with vertical sides and a flat top – which is sacred to his people.

“And it’s expensive because of the cost of gasoline and oil [for the boat or canoe engines], and sometimes we get there and the products have run out in the Mercal shops.”

Venezuela’s gasoline is the cheapest in the world at 1.5 cents of a dollar per litre. But prices here suffer from other kinds of distortions.

A 200-litre barrel, which costs 20 bolivars in Puerto Ayacucho – as much as a can of soda – “costs thousands of bolivars on the upper stretch of the Orinoco, up to 8,000 or 10,000. Indigenous people’s canoes are closely inspected by the military, but apparently they let the boats of the miners or smugglers go by,” Shatiwe said.

Hundreds of small-scale miners pan for gold in Amazonas, even though mining is banned in this state.

And Guarulla remarked that “A shipment of 100,000 litres of gasoline that reaches the town of Maroa, which has only one power plant, runs out in just three days. Who is it being sold to?”

Divassón said “The big problems that we have identified are illegal mining, which destroys the habitat of the communities, the presence of irregular armed forces from Colombia, and sensitive issues like the lack of electricity, problems with other services, and scarcity of goods, and insecurity.”

What does reach Amazonas is the sharp political polarisation seen in the rest of the country. The sheet metal roofing for homes in indigenous communities is red if it was donated by the government of President Nicolás Maduro, or blue if it came from Governor Guarulla.

Uwottyja children in the Amazon community of Samaria in Venezuela. Credit: Humberto Márquez/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CAÑO DE UÑA, Amazonas, Venezuela , Nov 19 2013 (IPS)

“All of the countries of the Amazon basin say they want to protect the environment, but they all have agreements with transnational corporations for the construction of roads or for mining and exploitation of forests,” Curripaco indigenous leader Gregorio Díaz Mirabal, from the south of Venezuela, told Tierramérica.*

“In Venezuela there are more than 50 laws and provisions that favour the rights of indigenous people, but it is hard to enforce them, and decisions about our affairs are principally consulted with indigenous leaders who hold positions in the government,” added Díaz Mirabal, coordinator of the Regional Organisation of Indigenous Peoples from Amazonas (ORPIA), which groups 17 of the 20 native groups from this southern state.

“That is the case of the concession granted to the Chinese company Citic to carry out a mining survey of Venezuela,” he added. “We don’t want mines, and we don’t want to be treated as criminals, as destabilisers or agents of the CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency), or as if we were defending other foreign interests.”

Since June, 11 native organisations from Amazonas have been asking for a meeting with President Nicolás Maduro to call for a moratorium on Citic’s mining exploration activity, and for an acceleration of the demarcation of indigenous land.

“The only way for us to survive is to defend the environment, our habitat; as guardians of the Amazon we are helping to save the planet,” Guillermo Arana, a leader of the Uwottyja or Piaroa people, told Tierramérica.

He lives in the community of Caño de Uña, which is set against the backdrop of the Autana tepuy – a mountain with vertical sides and a flat top.

After a several-hour journey by boat from Puerto Ayacucho – the regional capital located 400 km south of Caracas – heading upstream on the Orinoco, Cuao and Autana rivers, the tepuy that is also known as Wahari-Kuawai or “tree of life” in the language of the Uwottyja Indians comes into view.

The communities live in clearings in the jungle, near the rivers, which are raging during the current rainy season. On the granite bedrock, the layer of soil and vegetation in this area is thin and fragile.“We have found indigenous people with numbers branded on their arms by miners who use them as property." --Yanomami activist Luis Shatiwe

In Amazonas, a state of 184,000 sq km, 54 percent of the 180,000 inhabitants are indigenous people. Mining has been banned by law here since 1989 and most of the territory enjoys some form of environmental protection.

The demarcation of indigenous territories was established in the 1999 constitution, to be carried out by a national commission under the Environment Ministry.

According to the commission’s last report, from 2009, 40 collective property titles were granted to 73 communities of 10 different native ethnic groups, making up a total of 15,000 people.

No property title has been issued to an entire ethnic group, of the 40 indigenous peoples in Venezuela. Instead they have been granted to certain communities, none of which are in Amazonas.

“It is a complex process due to the multi-ethnicity – several native groups coexisting in the same territory – and because there are specific legal statutes in force in indigenous areas with respect to the environment, security, development and the borders,” said César Sanguinetti, a member of the Curripaco ethnic group and a national legislator representing Amazonas state for the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Sanguinetti told Tierramérica that “the state intends to make progress soon towards the demarcation of the territories, hopefully by the end of the year.”

Another indigenous lawmaker from the ruling party, José Luis González, said “we could serve as a liaison for a meeting with President Maduro if necessary.

“Now, the title that comes out of the demarcation process will enable the communities to strengthen their collective property ownership and step up their demands for their rights, but that won’t put an end to illegal mining,” said González, chairman of the parliamentary Indigenous Peoples Commission and a member of the Pemón community, in the southeast of the country.

Uwottyja children in the Amazon community of Samaria in Venezuela. Credit: Humberto Márquez/IPS

While Citic staff are studying Venezuela’s mining resources in different regions of the country, small-scale gold-panning operations are mushrooming across the intricate topography of Amazonas, almost always run by gold panners from Brazil, Colombia or other countries in the region.

Anecdotal evidence gathered by Tierramérica indicates that there are dozens of artisanal gold mines and hundreds of migrant gold panners deforesting entire sections of rain forest, polluting rivers with the mercury used to separate the gold, and exploiting the local population.

“We have found indigenous people with numbers branded on their arms by miners who use them as property, making them work in exchange for almost nothing: a bit of food, rum, a machete. They use them as beasts of burden, and they use the women to service them,” Yanomami activist Luis Shatiwe told Tierramérica at a spot along the upper stretch of the Orinoco river which borders Brazil.

And José Ángel Divassón, apostolic vicar of Amazonas, said “These people have not been consulted, as the constitution requires, about the agreement with Citic, which aggravates the existing situation: for more than 30 years there has been illegal mining here, especially on the upper stretch of the Orinoco.”

For 690 km a river separates the western flank of Amazonas state from Colombia. In this border region, essential goods are scarce – food, gasoline for the boats used for transportation, basic utensils and materials – and they are smuggled across the border, due to the differences in prices between the two countries.

In Venezuela gasoline costs 1.5 cents of a dollar per litre – compared to 100 times that across the border in Colombia.

The local indigenous people also complain that members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) make incursions across the border, set up camp, stock up on supplies, and even impose their own laws in their territories.

“The gold and the guerrillas are wreaking havoc,” the governor of Amazonas, Liborio Guarulla, a left-wing indigenous leader who is opposed to the Maduro administration, told foreign correspondents. “The guerrillas behave as the vanguard that protects the business of illegal mining, violating indigenous areas and damaging the environment.”

The Uwottyja communities met in May with representatives of the FARC and asked them to withdraw from their territory.

“The guerrillas have come here to tell us they are revolutionaries fighting against the empire,” shaman José Carmona, the leader of the Caño de Uña Council of Elders, told Tierramérica. “But we are peaceful people, we don’t want weapons – we want to live peacefully in the territories that belong to us.”

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

Excerpt:

Guyana has 12.2 million hectares of state forest. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
GEORGETOWN, Nov 11 2013 (IPS)

Guyana is engaged in a balancing act to save its rainforest, regarded as a living treasure, from the destructive activities of miners digging their way to another kind of treasure buried beneath this fragile ecosystem.

Natural Resources Minister Robert Persaud warns that the country stands to lose about 20 million dollars from the forest conservation fund because it has lost more of the Amazon, mainly to gold and diamond mining."We are fighting for our land rights, we are fighting for our indigenous rights, we are fighting for respect." -- Amerindian leader John Alfred

In November 2010, Guyana and Norway established a partnership that is the second biggest Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus (REDD+) interim agreement in the world. Norway committed to giving Guyana up to 250 million dollars by 2015 for avoided deforestation and degradation.

Guyana met the performance requirements for two consecutive years, earning approximately 70 million dollars which has been transferred by Norway into the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund (GRIF).

But the preliminary third national report on deforestation did not contain good news.

“We’ve had a change in terms of deforestation rate, the level of 0.079 [percent], and this rate of change is higher than the previous year which was 0.054 percent,” Persaud told IPS.

“But if we look at the total area, it is just a mere 3,600 hectares in a 12.2 million hectares of state forest estate,” he added.

In percentage terms, Guyana has breached the agreement with Norway because it has increased from 0.054 percent in the Year Two assessment to 0.079 in Year Three, which is above the agreed threshold of 0.070.

The report will be finalised by independent auditors for Durham University and Norway by Nov. 30.

The funds earned by Guyana under the agreement with Norway are directed towards low carbon development strategy (LCDS) projects that have a transformational effect on the national and local economy, as well as supporting Guyana’s efforts to adapt to climate change and to increase resilience to future climate change.

However, some native Guyanese feel marginalised by the deal.

“The land, our resources, and keeping the environment healthy for our people and our children are key issues for us,” Laura George, a representative the Amerindian People’s Association, told IPS.

“One of the things we told them is that you need to consult with communities. Government should not pressure our Toshaos [Amerindian village leaders] into endorsing projects that we do not understand, that we have not fully understood,” she said of the agreement with Norway.

John Alfred, a former Toshaos from Region 9, told IPS that for many years their rights have been infringed with the destruction of the forest.

“There are many issues in our villages, in the regions. We are fighting for our land rights, we are fighting for our indigenous rights, we are fighting for respect,” he said.

Despite the latest report, Persaud told IPS Guyana “continues to be the country with one of the lowest rates of deforestation within South America.”

He conceded that 94 percent of the changes stem from mining activity, but said it was conducted “with the knowledge of the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC), working with legitimate miners, fulfilling their own economic activity while following the national guidelines or laws as well as our regulations in this regard.”

Patrick Harding, the president of the Guyana Gold and Diamond Mining Association (GGDMA), argues that it’s a numbers game.

“We stand maybe to lose about 40 percent of the Norway funds or about 25 million dollars,” he told IPS. “The mining industry, including bauxite, will give the government foreign exchange of about one billion dollars. We have an industry that is providing jobs for tens of thousands of Guyanese.”

He insisted that the GGDMA is also concerned about deforestation. “Our motto is mining with the environment in mind and we are very careful about the environment. We encourage our members to follow the guidelines of the Environmental Act and the Mining Regulations.”

In 2012 the mining industry declared 413,600 ounces of gold and this year its commitment is over 461,000 ounces.

“Of course we are concerned about the environment but you cannot have development without some additional disturbance,” Harding said.

Former Guyanese president Bharrat Jagdeo has been championing the cause of developing countries in the fight against climate change, highlighting the role that the country’s forests play in absorbing carbon emissions.

In 2009, under Jagdeo’s leadership, Guyana’s Low-Carbon Development Strategy, commonly known as the LCDS, was developed.

Under the programme, the country receives payment for forest ecosystem services. These funds are used to direct economic activities onto an environmentally-friendly, low-carbon trajectory for its growth and development.

Guyana’s LCDS has received widespread national support and international acclaim.

Belém do Pará, seen here from the Guamá river, is the epicentre of several Amazon rainforest megaprojects. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BELÉM, Brazil , Nov 5 2013 (IPS)

South America has gone from the world’s granary to the site of innumerable international infrastructure, energy and mining megaprojects. It is now facing a new dilemma: bolstering the economy with the promise of reducing inequality, in exchange for social and environmental costs that are taking their toll.

The old developmentalist model is back. South America has grown, and with that growth has come rising demand for energy, bridges, roads and minerals – just as demand has grown in other emerging economies that today see this region as the new frontier in terms of supplies of strategic raw materials.

Latin America “has difficulties in digesting its own development…what are the traps, what are the alternatives?” Maria Amélia Enriquez, assistant secretary of industry, trade and mining in the Brazilian state of Pará, told IPS.The region that will supply electricity to half of Brazil suffers frequent blackouts. -- Fabiano de Oliveira, an activist with the Movement of People Affected by the Altamira Dams

Pará, in the extreme north of Brazil, forms part of the Amazon rainforest, which is shared by Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Guyana, Venezuela and Surinam, where 320 major infrastructure works are planned for the next 20 years, according to João Meirelles, director of the Peabiru Institute, a nonprofit that seeks to generate value for the conservation of the biological and cultural diversity of the Amazon jungle.

Hydroelectric dams comprise more than one-third of all the megaprojects in Brazil. In the basin of the Tapajós river, a major tributary of the Amazon river that runs through the states of Pará, Amazonas and Mato Grosso, 42 dams are planned, including five large ones.

“We’re talking about an annual investment of at least 50 billion reals [some 23 billion dollars], dominated by at least 10 companies, including the Brazilian firms Camargo Corrêa and Odebrecht,” said Meirelles.

The mushrooming of megaprojects can be seen throughout the region – ports, roads, freeways, waterways, mining projects, agribusiness and steelworks.

“The old hasn’t died and the new hasn’t been born yet,” said Alfredo Wagner, coordinator of the New Social Mapping of the Amazon Project, referring to the economic model inspired “in the 1930s” and oriented today towards “the international commodities market.”

These issues were discussed at an Oct. 26-28 workshop on megaprojects for journalists organised by the IPS news agency and the U.S.-based Mott Foundation in Belém, the capital of Pará.

Men peeling cassava at the Ver-o-Peso market in Belém, Brazil. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

The region’s new transnational corporations, such as Brazil’s Odebrecht, are key players in the boom in megaprojects in the region, which receive financing from both private and public sources, in particular Brazil’s National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES).

In Venezuela, the company is involved in three major infrastructure projects.

The Tocoma dam is the last of the four hydropower plants to be built to harness the waters of the Caroní river, the second-biggest river in Venezuela, in the south of the country.

The Nigale suspension bridge over Lake Maracaibo in northwest Venezuela, to be completed in 2018, will be the third-longest in Latin America, and the project includes the construction of 11 kilometres of roads and railways and three artificial islands.

The Mercosur bridge, which will be the third bridge over the Orinoco river, is planned for 2015, to link southern and central Venezuela. It will be the second-largest bridge in Latin America.

According to the Venezuelan government, 30 major infrastructure works are in progress, as part of the 2013-2019 “Fatherland Plan”, with a total investment of 80 billion dollars.

“Are we looking at the evolution of late capitalism?” Wagner wondered.

In Brazil’s Amazon region, the highest-profile and most controversial megaproject is also in Pará: the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, which will flood more than 500 square km of jungle and displace over 16,000 people.

The dam, on the Xingú river, will have an installed capacity of 11,233 MW and is considered essential by the government to supply Brazil’s energy needs.

A large part of the energy generated by the dams in the Amazon rainforest will be used by industry. Several industrial corporations are interested in investing in the construction of more dams, according to Meirelles, like the U.S.-based aluminium giant Alcoa and Brazil’s Votorantim Group, which has operations in the cement and concrete, mining, metallurgy and pulp and paper industries.

“The question is who ends up with the natural wealth extracted from the Amazon, and who benefits from these projects,” said Gilberto Souza, professor of economy at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA).

The expansion of the Vila do Conde port in the Pará city of Barcarena will improve the transport of aluminium and its raw materials, as well as the export of grains from central Brazil. But it will also displace several riverbank neighbourhoods.

With the new hydroelectric dams, Pará will produce half of the energy consumed in this country of 200 million people. A large proportion of the minerals produced in the state, which is rich in minerals but has the worst development indices in the country, goes to China, the world’s biggest consumer of iron ore, Souza noted.

The population of Altamira, the closest city to the Belo Monte dam, grew 50 percent in two years. As a result, the deficit in healthcare, education and housing grew, and violent crime and prostitution soared.

The area is facing problems like increased deforestation, the deterioration of water quality, and a reduction in the river populations of fish, a staple of the diet of local communities.

Ironically, the region that will supply electricity to half of Brazil suffers frequent blackouts, Fabiano de Oliveira, an activist with the Movement of People Affected by the Altamira Dams, told IPS.

Oliveira and other people living in communities affected by megaprojects complain that they have not been duly consulted.

Resistance movements are growing, but they are facing “one of their biggest contradictions: many of the people who are being relocated are at the same time employed” on the Belo Monte construction site, he explained.

Similar resistance has emerged against two major works in Chile.

The HidroAysén project in the Patagonia wilderness in southern Chile involves the construction of five large hydropower dams in the most biodiverse area in the country.

The 2,000-km transmission line required to carry electricity to the mining industry in the north will cross eight of the country’s 15 regions. But it will not supply any of them with energy.

Work on the project has been suspended by court rulings.

Further north, the Pascua Lama gold and silver mine, owned by Canada’s Barrick Gold corporation, straddles the border between Chile and Argentina in the Andes. Numerous lawsuits over water pollution and the destruction of two glaciers led to a legal decision in April to temporarily halt construction.

The company announced on Oct. 31 that it would indefinitely suspend development of the Pascua Lama mine, due to cost-overruns and a sharp drop in the price of gold.

In the Amazon region of Beni in Bolivia, indigenous communities are waiting for information on the impacts of the construction of the Cachuela Esperanza hydroelectric plant, with an installed capacity of 990 MW and a cost of two billion dollars, which will export electricity to Brazil.

Environmentalists warn that the flooding of some 1,000 square km of land will cause environmental imbalances, besides displacing local communities.

In Pará, José Etrusco, the manager of environment, safety and health in the Albras aluminium corporation, said big hydropower dams like Belo Monte represent the best cost-benefit ratio, even if they entail the relocation of native communities.

“We have to do it, or we’ll be left in the dark,” he argued.

In Colombia, the construction of a set of tunnels at the Alto de La Línea Andes mountain pass is generating another kind of controversy.

The tunnels are essential to creating an east-west road connection, from Venezuela through Bogotá and on to Buenaventura, Colombia’s only Pacific ocean port.

The route is the backbone of Colombia’s international trade, and provides a key outlet for Venezuela to the Pacific.

But while the first tunnel is being completed, environmentalists have pointed out that since 1999, the National Geological Service has been warning about the danger of eruption of the nearby Machín volcano – something that wasn’t even taken into account in the environmental impact assessment.

Forest engineer Paulo Barreto of Brazil’s Imazon institute said the question is “what is the real cost of these works?”: the environmental costs, such as the aggravation of climate change; socioeconomic costs, like the concentration of rural land ownership; and social problems in newly urbanised areas.

“Who is going to pay the bill?” asked Barreto.

UFPA professor of agrarian law José Benatti raised another question: who will employ the workers who have been drawn from other regions by the megaprojects, once the work is done?

Pedro Bara, with WWF Brazil, proposed a methodology for analysing the long-term impacts of major infrastructure works as a whole, rather than on a project by project basis.

As a foundation for that analysis, the WWF Living Amazon Initiative’s Infrastructure Strategy, which Bara heads, carried out an exhaustive study of the different Amazon ecosystems that must be conserved in order to prevent the biome from disappearing.

That big-picture view, said Bara, should include regional planning, especially in sensitive shared areas like the Amazon rainforest.

With reporting by Estrella Gutiérrez (Caracas), Constanza Vieira (Bogotá), Marianela Jarroud (Santiago) and Franz Chávez (La Paz).

Outside the New York federal courthouse, Ecuadorians and their supporters gather to protest the Chevron lawsuit. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

Two years after they were awarded 18 billion dollars by an Ecuadorian court for environmental damage caused by Chevron in the Amazonian rainforest, a group of indigenous villagers and their U.S. lawyer went on trial Tuesday in New York, accused by the oil company of bribery and racketeering.

Chevron was found liable in 2011 for an ecological catastrophe caused by pollution released in the 1970s and 1980s by Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001 and for which they agreed to assume legal obligations.“Every day, family members and loved ones are sickened because of the contamination." -- Javier Piaguaje, a Secoya Indian from Ecuador

Chevron has refused to pay the penalty.

Because Chevron has no assets in Ecuador, the plaintiffs have attempted to collect the fine abroad.

The New York suit, filed under the RICO statute, a strategy made famous during Mafia prosecutions in the 1970s, seeks to block enforcement of the 2011 decision in U.S. courts, where Chevron maintains ample reserves to foot the bill.

The complaint claims the lawyer, Steven Donziger, and a group of Ecuadorians representing the 30,000 original Amazonian plaintiffs attempted to persuade and corrupt a series of Ecuadorian judges who heard the case in an attempt to extort Chevron.

Donziger and the Ecuadorian defendants deny any wrongdoing and assert the lawsuit is another expensive legal distraction that the 230-billion-dollar corporation can afford to tack onto what has become a 20-year saga of litigation.

Outside the courthouse, Ecuadorians and their supporters gathered to protest the case.

Demonstrators chanted and held photographs depicting shiny, blackened earth, open runoff pits and frail jungle residents who they said were dying from cancers that resulted from the estimated 18 million gallons of crude oil and 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater that was leaked or illegally pumped into pristine jungle ecosystems around the Lago Agrio field the northwest of the country.

“We’re here in front of the courts against this large corporation,” said one of the defendants, Javier Piaguaje, a Secoya Indian who lives along the heavily polluted and now-ironically named “Aguarico” River.

Dressed in traditional Secoya garb, Piaguaje told the crowd the lasting effects of the spill were ravaging his community.

“Every day, family members and loved ones are sickened because of the contamination,” said Piaguaje.

“We’re here to show what’s really going on in the Amazon,” he added, before turning to enter the courthouse and mount his defence.

The judge in the case, Lewis Kaplan, has long been a thorn in the side of indigenous plaintiffs.

Earlier this month, Kaplan decided Donziger and his co-defendents were not entitled to a trial by jury.

“This trial is a travesty of justice,” said Paul Paz y Miño of Amazon Watch, an environmental justice group that assists the Ecuadorian claim.

“Chevron has spent years to have a trial where the original plaintiffs are not allowed to discuss the evidence,” Paz y Miño told IPS.

“There is absolutely no evidence of fraud on behalf of the plaintiff,” he added.

A spokesperson for the defendants in the New York case, Han Shan, told IPS the lawsuit took a lot of chutzpah on the part of Chevron.

“They’ve done a great job of media and political jujitsu in taking things that we were alleging, Chevron being totally corrupt, putting pressure on judges, bribery, trying to entrap people, using dirty contracters and said that we did it,” said Shan.

In 2009, Diego Borja, a Chevron contractor in Ecuador, was caught trying to entrap the presiding judge, Juan Nunez, by videotaping himself offering Nunez a bribe. Chevron has since paid for Borja to move to the United States and supplies him with a monthly stipend.

The Chevron media relations website was down for maintenance at the time of this article and IPS was unable to reach the company for comment.

However, on the company’s website devoted to the lawsuit, Morgan Crinklaw, a spokesman for Chevron, says, “We believe that any jurisdiction that observes the rule of law will find that the judgment is illegal and unenforceable because it’s a product of fraud.”

The trial taking place in Manhattan hinges in large part on Donziger’s personal diary and hours of outtakes from Joe Berlinger’s 2009 film, “Crude,” which Chevron claims show Donziger considered some of the environment evidence in the lawsuit to be “all smoke and mirrors.”

Donziger has said his quotes were taken out of context.

Judge Kaplan has already decided in favour of Chevron once.

In March 2011, Kaplan issued a global injunction that blocked enforcement of the Ecuadorian judgment, effectively kneecapping indigenous claims.

In January 2012, however, the 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York overturned the injunction, which opened the door once more for the original plaintiffs to enforce the 18-billion-dollar decision in U.S. courts.

That decision led Chevron team of over 100 lawyers to cobble together a last ditch defence strategy in form of the RICO suit, which they worked hard to have heard in Kaplan’s courtroom.

Shan isn’t optimistic about Kaplan presiding over the case.

“I don’t feel Kaplan will give us a fair hearing,” said Shan. “I think he’s already made up his mind.”

But should Kaplan rule against the indigenous community and issue a global injunction once more, Shan is confident the 2^nd Circuit will strike it down.

“The 2nd Circuit has been clear that the U.S. District Court is not an appellate court for the Ecuadorian judiciary and there’s absolutely no jurisdiction for that kind of injunction,” said Shan.

The circles show possible hydropower dams in the Tapajós river watershed. The colour indicates the level of impact of each dam, from very high (dark red) to low (yellow). Credit: Courtesy WWF-Brazil

By Mario Osava
SÃO PAULO , Sep 5 2013 (IPS)

Everything indicates that the decisive battle between harnessing hydropower and preserving the Amazon will play out in the Tapajós river basin in Brazil. At stake there are a potential of nearly 30,000 MW and a vital part of the Amazon rainforest.

Eight of the 42 possible dams included in the government’s energy expansion plan up to 2021 are in that area.

The Tapajós river is one of the biggest tributaries of the Amazon river, in northern Brazil. Its watershed is more sparsely populated – just one million people in an area of 50 million hectares – than other areas where hydroelectric dams are being built, such as Belo Monte on the Xingú river.

Pedro Bara talking to activists and indigenous representatives. Credit: Denise Oliveira/WWF Living Amazon Initiative

For that reason the Brazilian government has promised to build them there without land access, transporting staff, equipment and material by air, and to reforest depleted quarries after construction is completed.

But the promises have not dissuaded the Mundurukú indigenous people from fighting against dams in the Amazon jungle.

There is also gold in that area, which means garimpeiros – illegal gold miners – are active along the Tapajós river, which is set to become the best route for transporting agribusiness products from the western state of Mato Grosso, Brazil’s biggest soy producer, if plans for an industrial waterway go ahead.

According to the World Wildlife Fund-Brazil (WWF-Brazil), the only way to protect essential ecosystems and species is by preserving a large central bloc of jungle and other smaller areas in the Tapajós watershed, while leaving open the Jamanxim river, one of its main tributaries.

WWF developed a methodology for defining priority environmental areas which, if used in the Tapajós watershed, could serve as a basis for negotiations to help work out the conflicts and come up with better decisions concerning hydropower dams.

This was explained by Pedro Bara, head of the WWF Living Amazon Initiative’s Infrastructure Strategy, in the second part of this interview with IPS. Read the first part here.

Q: You are calling for the preservation of 30 percent of each one of 423 land and 299 aquatic ecosystems identified in the Amazon rainforest, as a basis for negotiating the expansion of hydroelectric dams without irrecoverable environmental losses. How would that be applied in the Tapajós river basin?

A: In Amazonia, given the scant knowledge about the broad range of biodiversity, we make an approximation. In the case of Tapajós we were able to define a “Noah’s ark”, with 93 land and 28 aquatic ecosystems, 46 species of birds, 17 mammals and 37 fish, as well as 20 aquatic habitats, defined by world-renowned experts.

Soil use and the expansion of agriculture and garimpeiro mining were also analysed and it was concluded that 22 percent of the territory is degraded. But 22 percent is covered by protected areas and 20 percent by indigenous reserves.

The evaluation takes into account the size of the dam, forest conservation and sustainable use units, and indigenous lands.

Q: And what conclusions were reached through the use of the tool you developed and the data collected?

A: What we want to conserve as a minimum is this large central bloc [Bara points on a map to an area around the spot where the Juruena and Teles Pires rivers converge, where the Tapajós river is born, and where at least four dams are planned].

The central bloc of the Tapajós river basin, whose preservation is essential. The black triangles indicate planned hydroelectric dams. The areas marked in light and dark blue show the size of the reservoirs. Credit: Courtesy WWF-Brazil

The other areas selected are marked with these green spots. Some dams are unacceptable, like the Chacorão, because it is in the Mundurukú indigenous territory.

Q: But the government says it won’t flood any indigenous territory.

A: That’s because it hasn’t put that on the table or included it in the 10-year plan for energy expansion, because it is worried about a backlash. But the Mundurukú are aware of it, which is why they are reacting.

Q: What other hydropower plants are rejected under the criteria outlined by the WWF model?

A: The Escondido dam, also because it will flood around 1,000 square kilometres, to generate 1,248 MW. That is twice the area to be flooded by the Belo Monte dam, which will generate nearly 10 times more energy.

Between these two are the Salto Augusto and São Simão dams, which are also problematic because they are in the Juruena National Park.

All four of them are in the big central bloc that must be preserved.

Q: But would the government agree to negotiate about the [6,133 MW] São Luiz do Tapajós dam, which is strategic?

A: No, the [Brazilian government’s] Empresa de Pesquisa Energética (EPE) [Energy Research Company] has made it clear that, although it considers our tool to be excellent, it is not open to negotiations on the São Luiz or the Jatobá dams.

With these dams, and others that will have a smaller impact, half of the basin’s potential could be achieved without compromising the biological and cultural diversity of the big central bloc. There is room for negotiating.

Q: The president of EPE, Mauricio Tolmasquim, said he supported the use of the tool in order to “preserve as much as possible” in the hydroelectric programme. Are there signs that the government is willing to negotiate?

A: Looking at the Tapajós watershed as a whole, important elements are missing for EPE to preserve as much as possible. Mainly because not all of the environmental permits are in federal jurisdiction, and without clear coordination between the states and the central government, contradictory decisions are produced.

I’m less optimistic with respect to the possibility of the government negotiating a hydroelectric programme in Tapajós. I think it still prefers one battle at a time, even if that is gradually hurting its image.

But one battle at a time, without knowing where you are heading, does not help the lives of those who depend on free-flowing rivers and the conservation of critical areas like the central bloc of the Tapajós basin.

On the other hand, we have seen that a broad, strategic debate is awakening more and more interest on the part of companies and financiers.

Q: But indigenous people, especially the Mundurukú, want to veto the dams. Do you think it is possible to convince them to negotiate?

A: We are in the process of approaching the indigenous leaders. There are many villages, some of which are very far apart, and the Mundurukú are facing the huge challenge of how to organise themselves in the face of a major works project that affects their territory and involves powerful interests.

They have to inform themselves, communicate, create participative spaces, deliberate.

But the negotiation will depend, obviously, on the government’s willingness to agree to a dialogue, which must start with discussing the application of International Labour Organisation Convention 169, on prior, informed consent for local communities, but would have to go far beyond that.

Q: Wouldn’t it help to have consistent development plans for the affected territory?

A: But they have to be drawn up long before the works begin, not like what happened in the case of Belo Monte, which is already 30 percent built, while the development plan just began to be drafted.

Excerpt:

Pedro Bara explains to indigenous people and activists the tool developed by the WWF to guide negotiations over hydropower projects in the Amazon. Credit: Courtesy of Denise Oliveira/WWF Living Amazon Initiative

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

In the war over major hydropower dams in the Amazon jungle, everyone loses – even the winners who manage to overcome the opposition and build them, but who suffer delays, costs that are difficult to recoup, and damage to their image.

“The polarisation impoverishes the debate on the use and preservation of natural resources,” Pedro Bara, head of the WWF Living Amazon Initiative’s Infrastructure Strategy, said in this interview with IPS.

WWF stands out for seeking negotiated solutions to the dispute between economic questions and the preservation of nature. In the case of hydroelectric dams, it is calling for dialogue to resolve the confrontations between the business and government interests involved and a diverse array of opponents, including affected communities, and social, indigenous and environmental movements.

The aim is to outline a broad strategy for the Amazon rainforest, overcoming the project-by-project focus that is not based on any proven parameters.

To that end, the Brazilian chapter of WWF developed a tool based on scientific studies, which makes it possible to have an idea of what is needed to preserve water and biodiversity and keep the Amazon alive.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: How can nature be protected in the Amazon jungle in the face of encroachment by hydropower dams, cattle, soybeans, logging and mining companies, and roads?

A: Six years ago, we decided to ask ourselves what we would need to preserve of the Amazon rainforest from here on out. It’s not 100 percent of what’s left, but it can’t all be used for development either.

If we were completely familiar with the area’s biodiversity, it would be easy to define priority areas. But we don’t have enough information on biodiversity in the Amazon. I think we know about only 40 percent of the total, at the most.

We were forced to draw broad conclusions about biodiversity based on the variety of environments. Different environments will have different species. You make approximations. We have conducted several tests in Madre de Dios [a region in southeastern Peru] on how to plan the conservation of water in data-poor areas.

We concluded that by cross-referencing slope with surface run-off, water flows, vegetation and sources of water, you can get a good explanation of the variety of aquatic species and classify rivers by segments. We expanded that model to the entire Amazon basin.

Q: Did you choose Madre de Dios because the ecology there is representative of Amazonia?

A: No, it was because it contained different characteristics. If it was homogeneous it wouldn’t be useful. We had to work with a broad diversity of environments in order to test several models and select the best to apply in the entire Amazon region, where we identified 299 kinds of aquatic ecosystems.

At the same time, the [U.S.-based environmental conservation group] Nature Conservancy and NatureServe [an international network of biological inventories] developed a terrestrial ecological classification based on landforms, soil type, vegetation and climate.

They identified 423 terrestrial ecosystems in Amazonia. Conclusion: this biome is more diverse from a terrestrial than an aquatic point of view.

This is also an approximation, because there are many animal species that move around a lot.

But with the two models I can decide what to preserve. If I can preserve a representative, functional and resistant sample of the 299 aquatic and 423 terrestrial classifications, theoretically I’m preserving the heterogeneity and biodiversity of the Amazon.

Q: But how are the priority areas chosen?

A: By the best cost-benefit ratio, keeping the area to a minimum size based on a purely economic decision.

Q: How are cost and benefit measured?

A: Benefit is opportunity: for example, protected reserves and indigenous lands, where the cost of preserving is lower. Cost is threat: deforestation and the advance of the agricultural and livestock frontier are the terrestrial costs.

Within an ecosystem classification, the model chooses the area most distant from those threats, which drive up conservation costs.

It’s a software that assembles puzzles of thousands of micro-basins, each of which has its attributes, such as belonging to this or that aquatic or terrestrial classification, the proximity of roads, or the current level of degradation.

It avoids red zones, where costs are high, and selects the sample of ecosystem in a protected area. It makes thousands of cross-references to find the best solution.

We didn’t invent anything; we use methodologies from scientific research. The national water agency [ANA] carried out a similar project, the “strategic map of the rivers on the right side of the Amazon river”, which gave us a sense of certainty.

But there are cases where I don’t have options. Aquatic ecosystem 214, for example, only occurs in one spot. If it is affected, it would definitely be lost. It is irreplaceable. And there are many irreplaceable areas.

Q: So what can you preserve?

A: We set a target: preserving 30 percent of each kind of ecosystem. But it’s only an exercise; the actual decision depends on who is at the table discussing the parameters.

Thirty percent of the aquatic ecosystems, plus 30 percent of the terrestrial ecosystems, theoretically adds up to 60 percent. But because there is some overlap, it’s actually 55 percent. That’s reasonable, because today 40 percent is covered by nature reserves and indigenous territories. It’s an arbitrary number, but it has some technical value.

Q: An index to mark the negotiation?

A: That’s where we started: we reached a definition of what we want, in response to the challenge of the hydropower plants.

If we agree that an area must be preserved for the future, it has to have a free connection with the main channel – the Amazon river – since the watershed is unified. Conservation depends on the connectivity of waterways. If the power industry wants to dam all of the rivers [in a watershed], the future of a living Amazon would be compromised.

But everything is negotiable. Our tool offers the possibility of dialogue, not a pat solution. It’s a platform of strategic evaluation to look at the big picture, contextualise projects and reach decisions based on better information. Tomorrow someone could introduce the question of archaeological sites, of quilombos [communities of descendants of escaped African slaves], etc.

Q: How did the government react to this proposal?

A: The reception is always good, until a specific interest is touched. For us, the ideal was to discuss the entire Amazon basin, but we didn’t manage to organise a forum.

The path to that opened up thanks to a December 2010 inter-ministerial decree, which created a working group to analyse environmental and socioeconomic aspects, seeking to subsidise the selection of areas to exploit for hydropower. That was what we had wanted.

The Energy Research Company [EPE] of the Ministry of Mines and Energy wanted to learn about our tool. We trained people in the ministries. They carried out their analysis.

But two years have already gone by. That’s why we decided to go public with our proposals, before the [hydroelectric] projects on the Tapajós river progressed any further.

Q: And have there been any interesting reactions in the private sector?

A: The directors of an international bank praised our ideas, telling us that they’re scared to death of getting involved in a project and later having to face protests outside the doors of the bank. The BNDES [Brazil’s National Bank for Economic and Social Development] won’t be able to finance everything on its own.

Q: Can you cite a case where this tool pointed to better alternatives?

A: On the Teles Pires river [a tributary of the Tapajós], I found out that they were thinking of building a single dam, bigger than the current one, the Teles Pires dam, without the other two that had been planned, the São Manoel and Foz do Apiacás. It might have been a better alternative, with greater potential and a smaller cumulative impact.

The river has a natural barrier and the problem of connectivity is not such a major issue. There is a myth that small hydroelectric dams have a smaller impact, but if there is a string of them, the aquatic ecosystem is broken up more.

Excerpt:

The ecosystem and indigenous people of Yasuní Park are in danger, environmentalists warn. Credit: Iniciativa Yasuní-ITT

By Ángela Meléndez
QUITO, Aug 24 2013 (IPS)

The Ecuadorean government’s decision to allow oil drilling in the Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse areas of the planet, has caused alarm among environmentalists and indigenous people, who are calling for a referendum on the issue.

President Rafael Correa ordered the shelving of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, a plan to leave oil reserves underground in the Amazon rainforest park in return for international compensation.

He complained that only 13.3 million dollars were contributed by companies, individuals and countries to a trust fund administered by the United Nations since 2007, towards a final goal of 3.6 billion dollars.

The decision announced Aug. 15 gives the state-run oil company Petroamazonas the green light to commence exploration in up to one percent of the area of the park, according to the decree that ended the Yasuní-ITT Initiative.

Opponents warn of the effects on the fauna, flora, and native peoples in voluntary isolation – the Tagaeri and the Taromenane – if drilling goes ahead in Ecuador’s largest protected area, covering 982,000 hectares.

On Thursday Aug. 22, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE), the Confederation of Peoples of Kichwa Nationality (ECUARUNARI), the Confederation of University Students, and environmental organisations like Acción Ecológica presented a proposal for a referendum to the Constitutional Court.

They will need to collect 584,000 signatures – five percent of all registered voters in this country of 15 million people – in support of the petition.

In the proposed referendum, voters would be asked: “Do you agree that the Ecuadorean government should keep the crude in the ITT, known as block 43, underground indefinitely?”

President Correa urged people to collect signatures, and said he was sure that his own proposal to extract crude from Yasuní, for the purpose of boosting public expenditure, would win in a referendum.

The government says an area of less than one-thousandth of Yasuní park, situated in the north of the country, will be affected.

It also claims the isolated native communities will not be impacted, since the fields to be exploited (Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini – the ITT) are far from the area declared the “untouchable zone”, where they live.

José Lema, the president of the association of geological engineers of Ecuador, told IPS that it is possible that oil could be extracted as the government proposes.

He cited the work Petroamazonas is doing in the Pañacocha field, located in another nature reserve in the north of the country, which has received international recognition for environmental best practices.

“Petroamazonas is carrying out similar work there, and it has had only temporary impacts while building the oil pipeline,” he said.

The expert believes the first thing to be done is to carry out a new assessment of the area in order to redesign the drilling plan.

“There may be changes, because the methodology that was first used (in 1993) was a two-dimensional seismic survey…that determined reserves of 920 million barrels of crude,” he said.

“But once more detailed information is available, there will be a more precise volume assessment, which will no doubt be greater than the original estimate,” he said.

In Lema´s view, the main task will be to adapt the oil rigs that are already in the park, and to bring in equipment for the installation. Then the wells will have to be drilled and the oil pipeline built.

“Every project creates disturbances; the aim is to reduce them as much as possible by using the best technology,” he said.

Wilson Pástor, a former minister of non-renewable resources in the left-leaning administration of Correa, who took office in 2007, says the concerns are unfounded because oil is already being extracted in the park.

“Block 31, which was explored by (Brazilian oil company) Petrobras and now belongs to Petroamazonas, is located within the park,” he said.

He also noted that the Pañacocha field produces 18,000 barrels per day, but the crude is not processed in any way within the protected area.

“The same approach will be used with ITT, since there are already seven oil rigs in the area,” and cluster wells will be drilled. “Previously, one well per platform would be drilled, but now 25 wells are drilled from each rig, occupying less space,” he said.

In Pástor’s view, the most polluting activity is the treatment and separation of water, gas and oil, which mean “in practice setting up a refinery, and the refinery will not be built in the ITT…so the entire intervention will only affect 190 hectares.”

He added that electricity will not be generated in the field and the oil pipeline will not affect the park, as it will be buried in a trench three metres wide filled with biodegradable material.

Evidently, the drilling plans already existed

The former minister also said that oil exploitation would have an additional benefit for the park. “Today, the Yasuní lacks strong institutions to control access to the park, but if Petroamazonas begins work here there will be resources to protect it,” he said.

According to government forecasts, the Tiputini field will produce its first barrels of crude in two years’ time, Tambococha 12 months later, and Ishpingo a year after that.

But civil society organisations are not convinced by the arguments put forward by Correa and his government.

María Paula Romo, of the left-wing party Ruptura 25, who is a former member of the constituent assembly that rewrote the constitution, argues that the government is violating article 57 of the constitution, which bans extraction activities in the territories of isolated peoples.

The article says: “The territories of the peoples living in voluntary isolation are an irreducible and untouchable ancestral possession and all forms of extractive activities shall be forbidden there. The state shall adopt measures to guarantee their lives, enforce respect for self-determination and their intention to remain in isolation, and ensure observance of their rights.”

It adds that “the violation of these rights shall constitute a crime of ethnocide, which shall be classified as such by law.”

Romo told IPS, “Before talking about specifications for wells, the first step is to ask how entry into forbidden territory can be justified in the light of the constitution.”

The justice minister, Lenín Lara, said there are no isolated communities in the oilfields where drilling is planned.

But environmental experts and academics refute this claim.

“The Taromenane are hemmed in on every side. And even if the work is done with the best technology, pressure is going to be put on these peoples,” said journalist and filmmaker Carlos Andrés Vera.

With reporting by Carey L. Biron in Washington, D.C.

A demonstration against the reopening of the highway in Iguaçu National Park. Credit: Courtesy of SOS Mata Atlântica

By Alice Marcondes
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 13 2013 (IPS)

Environmental groups have appealed to UNESCO to help stop the reopening of Caminho do Colono, a stretch of highway in southern Brazil that crosses through Iguaçu National Park, declared a World Heritage site by the UN agency in 1986.

Hydroelectric dams in the Amazon, amendments to the Forest Code, agrarian reform conflicts: over recent years, the Brazilian public has witnessed a succession of controversies pitting environmental organisations against the country’s authorities.

The most recent conflict involves the Caminho do Colono or “Settler’s Road”, a stretch of highway in the southern state of Paraná that has been closed for over a decade, but could be reopened if a bill currently under study in the Senate is passed. The bill was fast-tracked straight to the Senate following approval by a commission in the Chamber of Deputies, without full discussion in the lower house as a whole.

The origins of the 18-kilometre stretch of highway date back to 1925, when local communities used it as an informal road and for the transport of the “yerba mate” harvested in the region. (Yerba mate is a plant used to prepare a tea-like infusion popular in a number of South American countries.)

Years later the road was integrated into the Brazilian highway network, forming part of Route PR-495, which connects the city of Serranópolis do Iguaçu, on the northern edge of the park, and the town of Iguiporã, in the municipality of Marechal Cândido Rondon.

In 1986 the road was closed for the first time under a management plan drawn up for Iguaçu National Park, which was created as a nature conservation area in 1939 and is home to the largest area of the Mata Atlântica or Atlantic Forest biome in southern Brazil. The closed section of highway falls entirely within the borders of the park.

It was also in 1986 that the park was designated a World Natural Heritage site by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). The road was later reopened illegally, but in 2001 the government declared its permanent closure.

The park is located in the westernmost part of Paraná, 17 kilometres from the centre of the city of Foz do Iguaçu and near the triple border with Argentina and Paraguay. It borders on Iguazu National Park in Argentina, with which it shares the breathtaking Iguazu Falls, a popular tourist destination that earned a spot on the list of Seven Natural Wonders compiled by the Swiss-based New7Wonders Foundation.

Lawmakers from the region have presented numerous bills to get Caminho do Colono reopened. One of them, PL 7.123/2010, drafted by federal deputy Assis do Couto of the ruling Workers’ Party, could be passed by the Senate this month.

The goal is to stimulate tourism and environmental education, and to allow tourists to get to the falls without having to go through Argentina, Couto told Tierramérica*.

The imminent Senate vote on the bill to reopen the road prompted some 1,000 Brazilian organisations to write to UNESCO and request its intervention.

“The author of the bill and its supporters claim that the highway will promote preservation, environmental education and sustainable regional development, although the impacts of highways on protected areas are widely documented and understood. Historical records do not demonstrate any positive effect of the Caminho do Colono on the local, regional, state or national economy,” the letter stresses.

Deputy Couto says that his bill provides for the control of traffic through the park and prohibits the use of the road by trucks.

“The road will not be paved, in order to maintain the permeability of the soil. Cars will not be allowed on it at night. In addition, the opening of the highway will mean a greater state presence, which will curb the current illegal harvesting of palm hearts. The police have even found camps of palm heart harvesters in the area,” he added.

According to Couto, the road will benefit local communities, but this argument does not convince the park’s director of conservation and management, biologist Apolonio Rodrigues.

“The highway is of no importance to the flow of production and the road network of the region. It is simply viewed as a shortcut for people travelling south to north, who would like to shorten the distance they need to drive by going through the park,” Rodrigues told Tierramérica.

“If we consider the importance of the park for humanity, there is no justification for opening the highway to benefit a small group of people,” he said.

Reopening the highway would lead to the fragmentation of the ecosystem, he maintained. “In addition, it could serve as an entryway for exotic species, and its use could lead to the sedimentation and degradation of the waterways,” he warned.

Another problem highlighted by the road’s opponents is the danger it could pose for the local population of jaguars (Panthera onca), which has already shrunk by 90 percent.

It is estimated that there are barely 18 living specimens in an area where up to 180 jaguars once roamed. In fact, the species could be completely wiped out in the region in the next 80 years, according to the coordinator of the National Centre for Carnivorous Mammal Research and Conservation, Ronaldo Morato.

The Centre is a division of the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, which is responsible for the management of Iguaçu National Park.

The area “is already suffering from hunting. Urgent action is needed, and reopening the highway will not contribute to preservation,” Morato told Tierramérica.

Critics of the bill maintain that the efforts to open the road serve the interests of local soy producers, who would be provided with a shortcut for transporting their merchandise.

But Couto refutes this argument by emphasising that trucks would be prohibited. Soy producers, he says, “already have established transportation routes.”

Reopening the highway would require amending the Brazilian legislation on conservation areas in order to include the category of “parkway”. This would set a precedent for the indiscriminate opening of roads in other protected areas, warned the signatories of the letter to UNESCO, which has yet to issue a pronouncement on the matter.

Couto, for his part, believes it would remedy a void in environmental legislation, since there are already highways within the borders of other conservation areas. “One example is the Paraty-Cunha highway inside Serra da Bocaina National Park,” he said.

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

Excerpt:

By Walter García and Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

The bold strategy implemented by the Brazilian government has achieved an 84 percent reduction in deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in the last eight years. But when the natural resources and pesticides used in agricultural production are taken into account, the environmental progress made is not so impressive.

The achievement was announced this month by leftwing Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and her environment minister, Izabella Teixeira, in the tone of “mission almost accomplished,” Francisco Oliveira, the director of policies against deforestation in the environment ministry, told IPS.

Between August 2011 and July 2012, 4,571 square kilometres in the Amazon were deforested – the lowest annual rate since the Institute of Space Research (INPE) began satellite monitoring in 1988, and 27 percent lower than in the previous 12-month period.

In 2004, when an inter-ministerial plan for prevention and control of deforestation, burning and illegal logging was established in the Amazon rainforest, the annual loss was 27,772 square kilometres. Deforestation in 2012 represented an 84 percent drop since the plan’s inception, Teixeira said.

Brazil’s Amazon region covers 5,033,072 square kilometres or 60 percent of the national territory, and the decline in deforestation is an essential contribution to progress towards the country’s target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for global warming.

Brazil made a voluntary commitment to reduce deforestation by 80 percent, from 1990 levels, by 2020. “We have already achieved 76 percent of this goal,” minister Teixeira said on Jun. 5.

“Several sectors contributed to this result,” said Carlos Painel, of Alternativa Terrazul, an environmental NGO. “The federal government improved oversight and control, which reduced illegal logging in the Amazon and limited the expansion of slash-and-burn of the rainforest for agricultural and livestock raising activities.”

The plan was launched early in the administration of leftwing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), based on three inter-related core concepts: tighter control and higher penalties for illegal logging, stimulation of sustainable activities and regulation of land use.

Land-use planning policies created forest conservation units totalling 250,000 square kilometres, equivalent to 75 percent of the environmentally protected areas in the world, according to official figures.

Environmentalists welcomed these results, but they warned about collateral effects and future threats.

“There have been setbacks in the past year, particularly after the approval of the new forest code,” Painel told IPS.

The controversial code, promoted by the powerful landowning lobby, halted the decline in deforestation, “putting the Amazon region in danger again,” the activist said.

The law provided an amnesty for illegal logging carried out before July 2008. This gave large agricultural and livestock producers and illegal loggers a sense of impunity, Fernando Gabeira, a former congressman for the Green Party, told IPS.

“In the Amazon, they got the idea that they should carry on deforesting as fast as possible,” he said.

The government and environmentalists consider that “accounts” for the Amazon should include an additional factor: the economic expansion of the country which is growing as an emerging power based on two pillars, agricultural production and mining.

Brazil is one of the top exporters of soy, beef and sugar, and its goal is to become the world’s biggest food producer. China is at present the main importer of Brazilian agricultural and livestock commodities.

“Deforestation is closely correlated with economic growth, and it now depends a great deal on China, which buys soy, beef and minerals. Our relationship with the Asian giant will determine much of what happens in future,” Gabeira said.

Painel said that as well as illegal logging, the expansion in the Amazon of crops like soy and of cattle ranching has a strong effect on deforestation.

He added that “it is important for all the costs of agricultural production to be taken into account. The natural resources used are not counted, and more organic, sustainable production does not exist,” he complained.

He also pointed out that Brazil is currently the top global consumer of pesticides, and that the country does not include costs like the water consumed by agribusiness in the accounts it keeps of its economic growth or exports.

“Every kilo of exported beef requires thousands of litres of water for its production, a precious resource in today’s world,” Painel said.

He also mentioned other natural resources that are not subtracted from the bottom line, such as land, “a resource that few countries have as much of as Brazil.”

The “over-use” of fuels for production and overland transport to the country’s ports is not taken into account either, he said.

“The accounting has to include other factors such as sustainability, social issues, benefits to the country and particularly investment in new technology to increase production with fewer natural resources and without pollutants,” he said.

“We don’t have to take on the role of feeding the world. We can contribute. But it is not Brazil’s role to feed billions of Chinese hogs with soybeans,” said Painel.

According to the environment ministry, areas of pasture and secondary vegetation (re-growth after land clearance) expanded by 22 percent between 2008 and 2010. Pastureland is increasingly occupying recently deforested areas.

“This shows that it is possible to produce in a sustainable manner while preserving the environment, by means of sustainable agricultural practices,” Minister Teixeira said.

But the government admits that in order to maintain the positive results in the Amazon, it is necessary to step up efforts to promote sustainable economic activities, which it says will now be the focus of its plan.

Oliveira mentioned, for example, that vast tracts of land in the Amazon that have not been allocated could become areas for sustainable forest management, settlement of landless farmers, or production.

“We have to separate the wheat from the chaff, because there are people of good faith who are working properly in the Amazon, respecting environmental laws and building a future in the right way,” he said.

But unfortunately, the majority persist in illegal behaviours, he added.

One positive step, the official said, is a moratorium by companies on buying soy grown on newly deforested land in the Amazon rainforest, in force since 2006 and respected by 90 percent of traders.

An agreement is also in effect for meat packing plants not to buy beef from illegally deforested areas.

Brazil cannot lower its guard in demonstrating that it can grow and maintain its forests, said Oliveira.

In Painel’s view, to do this requires “changing the vision of agribusiness in Brazil. It has an important role in the national economy, but the direction it is taking is utterly behind the times,” he said.

“The big producers want as much land as possible, so they encroach on protected conservation areas, indigenous territories, land close to river banks… they have no shame in accelerating the deforestation process as much as possible, to maximise production,” he maintained.

Juan Chávez of Peru and Koku Agbee Koto of Togo discuss their communities’ efforts to preserve forests, at the WIN conference in Darwin. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
DARWIN, Australia, May 29 2013 (IPS)

This city in northern Australia brought them together to share their experiences this week. They are indigenous Shipiba people fighting indiscriminate logging in Peru’s Amazon jungle region and delegates from the Ando-Kpomey community in Togo, which created and protects a 100-hectare forest.

“Without the forest we are nothing – it’s like losing life itself,” said Juan Chávez, a Shipibo Indian from the eastern Peruvian region of Ucayali, in a conversation with IPS during a break in his participation in the World Indigenous Network (WIN) conference that ended Wednesday in Darwin, Australia.

Chávez and others have been working for 15 years to keep six Shipibo communities from being seduced by illegal logging for a quick profit, and to help restore the indigenous group’s tradition of forest preservation.

To that end, they designed communal development plans, based on reviving traditional knowledge on management of land, water and forest resources, with the support of the Association for Integral Research and Development (AIDER), a Peruvian NGO.

The 1,200 indigenous representatives from some 50 countries focused their attention Tuesday, the third day of the four-day WIN conference, on successful cases of reviving ancestral and traditional cultures and knowledge, under the premise that “sustainable development not only depends on modernity; it’s also important to look to our roots,” as Chávez put it.

Some of the cases, like the Shipibo experience presented by Chávez, have won prizes from the Equator Initiative, which brings together the United Nations, governments, civil society, businesses and grassroots organisations to acknowledge and foment local sustainable development solutions.

“We are not poor devils; we also come up with solutions,” Ecuadorean indigenous leader Manuel Tacuis said in his presentation at one of the WIN sessions. The delegation from Ecuador was the largest from Latin America, along with Brazil’s.

As the representatives of indigenous and local communities from around the world exchanged experiences, it became more and more clear that the everyday lives and the challenges faced by people in rural Africa were not so different from those of native people in the Amazon rainforest.

The community of Ando-Kpomey in the West African nation of Togo began over a decade ago to restore the forest on their land, which had been destroyed by the seasonal burning of grasslands by hunters.

Koku Agbee Koto, an avid 35-year-old representative of the community, told IPS that the destructive practice had finally been significantly reduced.

So far, more than 100 hectares have been reforested, benefiting around 2,500 villagers, he said.

But the Togolese and Peruvian representatives concurred that traditional knowledge was no longer sufficient to sustainably mange land and adapt to climate change.

“We have to appreciate both cultures: indigenous and scientific,” said Chávez, after admitting that there was still resistance among his people to recognising what science could contribute.

The indigenous and community delegates taking part in the WIN conference demonstrated their openness.

Koto, from Togo, constantly took notes on the different experiences shared by indigenous and local people from around the world, used his limited English to ask for more information, telephone numbers and email addresses, spoke “un poquito de español” with Chávez, while chatting easily in French when meeting with delegates from other French-speaking countries in Africa.

Koto was taken by the success of an ecotourism project in the Anja Miray community in
Madagascar, which he felt could be replicated in his village.

The Anja Reserve community-managed forest and ecotourism site, another Equator Prize-winner, generates income for the elderly, children and vulnerable segments of the community, who are assisted with basic services and scholarships, while restoring the forest and curbing desertification.

Víctor Samuel Rahaovalahy, one of the leaders of the reserve run by the Anja Miray association, told IPS that they were still looking for ways to generate more income and more effective methods to adapt to climate change.

“We need more capacity-building, not only for my community, but for surrounding ones as well,” Rahaovalahy said. “We all have to come together to fight desertification in a coordinated manner,” he added, saying the local communities and governments must work together more closely in order to get results.

Not all of the participants were clear on how to tackle negative developments in their territories or how to confront big challenges like the effects of climate change.

For over a decade, the Sami people in northern Sweden have faced unusually severe winters due to climate change. But they have not yet come together to confront the sudden changes in the climate in an organised way, despite their traditional knowledge, biologist Berit Inga, a Sami descendant, told IPS.

Inga said the Sami were more concerned about dealing with more immediate challenges, such as the activities of the mining industry.

But everyone at the conference agreed that it was not possible to come up with solutions in an isolated fashion.

The manager of the Equator Initiative, Eileen de Ravin, told IPS that successful local experiences should be taken up by governments in the design of public policies that recognise and value indigenous and community knowledge.

In the last decade, 152 of the roughly 2,500 nominated indigenous and local community projects won the Equator Initiative prize. The representatives of the winning organisations met at the conference Wednesday to discuss WIN’s future plans.

Indigenous activists Ángel Durán from Bolivia and Bernardette Angus from Australia share their experiences in conservation at the WIN conference in Darwin. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
DARWIN, Australia , May 28 2013 (IPS)

“Are you a park ranger?” IPS asked. “No, I am one of the owners of the territory,” Ángel Durán responded in a firm voice. The Bolivian indigenous leader is in this northern Australian city along with 1,200 other native delegates from over 50 countries for the World Indigenous Network (WIN) conference.

Durán, who was born in and lives on a collectively-owned native territory, is attending the conference in representation of eight native groups from Bolivia’s Amazon region that total more than 20,000 people.

Although he is not on the programme as an official speaker and can only communicate in Spanish, this is not stopping him from sharing his knowledge and experiences with other indigenous leaders walking from one auditorium to another at WIN headquarters in Darwin, the capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory.

The meeting, supported by the Australian government, runs May 26-29, with presentations of successful projects for the preservation of ecosystems and biodiversity, the sustainable use of protected natural areas, and the development and food security of indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America and other countries like Canada or Australia itself.

On Monday, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples James Anaya stressed the importance of governments recognising international instruments that protect the basic rights of native people.

Melissa George from Australia told IPS that the conference was a major contribution by the Australian government and a form of recognition that indigenous people were the first to use their knowledge to protect the territory.

George, who belongs to the Wulgurukaba aboriginal tribe, added however that there was still much to be done.

The activist has dedicated 20 years – nearly half her life – to developing projects for administering natural resources in aboriginal territories. She is now co-chair of the WIN National Advisory Group.

The international network of indigenous and local community land and sea managers recently became an official part of the United Nations after the government of Australia handed over its management to the Equator Initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The initiative brings together the United Nations, governments, civil society, businesses and grassroots organisations to advance local sustainable development solutions and support the work of indigenous people around the world by means of capacity-building.

Eileen de Ravin, manager of the Equator Initiative, told IPS that this concerted effort opens up enormous possibilities for people from a South American country like Bolivia to learn directly what is happening in Canada or Australia.

“Our goal is to influence the governments to get them to respect and listen to these valuable experiences and solutions,” de Ravin said.

The Equator Initiative awards a prize every two years, recognising 25 outstanding local sustainable development projects. In the past decade, 152 indigenous community organisations, of 2,500 that have been nominated, have won the prize.

One of the presentations at the WIN conference was on the conservation of protected areas by indigenous and local communities in Canada, Australia, Sweden and Brazil by means of indigenous forest rangers, park rangers or environmental agents.

“The name doesn’t matter, the objective is the same: to make use of traditional knowledge to protect nature and culture from the different threats,” Brazilian activist Osvaldo Barassi with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) told IPS.

ACT’s annual indigenous park ranger training programme provides conservation and land monitoring capacity-building to native communities, including the use of tools like GPS tracking technology.

Since 2005, the Brazilian organisation has trained 190 people from 30 native ethnic groups in forest management and conservation, which has enabled the communities to develop projects to monitor illegal logging in order to protect the local flora and fauna.

But in spite of the contribution made by the indigenous forest rangers trained by ACT, they receive no payment from the government for their work.

That is in contrast to Australia’s indigenous land stewardship programme, which has created Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) in more than 50 locales on traditional aboriginal lands over the last 15 years, covering a total of 43 million hectares.

Bernardette Angus, a park ranger from Western Australia, told IPS that it is indigenous people who have been caring for the plants and animals and protecting the land and the sea since a long time ago, and who are teaching young people to continue doing so when the current generation is gone.

In Bolivia, the federation of indigenous peoples from north of La Paz, led by Durán, are seeking to go one step further in their conservation efforts, and have asked the government of Evo Morales – the country’s first-ever native president – to legally recognise the “guardians” of community-owned indigenous land to enable them to levy penalties on those who invade their land and make illegal use of their natural resources.

Durán, who belongs to the Leko de Apolo indigenous community, said no government plan aimed at protecting biodiversity could leave out the communities. “Not even scientific knowledge can compare to the ancestral know-how of the local people. We take care (of nature) because it is our way of life,” he told IPS.

But while Barassi recognised the importance of indigenous knowledge, he warned that it was not always a guarantee in and of itself of the successful management of natural resources. For that, capacity-building is key, the ACT activist stated.

Participants at the conference agreed on the need to join forces to maximise results in the face of threats from illegal activities, large-scale private investment projects, or the effects of climate change.

“I never imagined that the forests could disappear, but it is happening,” said Joao Evangelista, a Brazilian park ranger who was unable to travel to Darwin, but sent a videotaped message presented by Barassi to an audience keen on cutting the distances between them.

“That’s why capacity-building is important; it’s a form of liberation for us, and of preparing ourselves to confront outside threats,” he said.

Indigenous students learning to operate equipment at a communications workshop. Credit: Courtesy of PCSAN/Daniela Silva

By Clarinha Glock
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, May 21 2013 (IPS)

Indigenous communities in remote areas of Brazil have begun to recognise that they have the right to not be hungry, and are learning that food security means much more than simply having food on the table.

Rosiléia Cruz, 19, dreams of studying journalism. She chooses her words carefully during her interview with Tierramérica* by mobile phone from Tabatinga, in northwest Brazil, which can only be reached by plane or river travel.

Cruz is a member of the Ticuna indigenous ethnic group, one of the most numerous in the country. The Ticuna live in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, in the Alto Solimões region around the river of the same name, near the borders of Peru and Colombia.

The lands of their ancestors were invaded for decades by “seringueiros” (rubber tappers), fishermen and loggers, who left poverty and destruction in their wake.

Up until three years ago, young people like Cruz had few prospects, and many sought relief in alcohol and even suicide.

But in January 2010, the Joint Programme on Food and Nutrition Security for Indigenous Women and Children opened a window of hope, with activities aimed at creating agricultural and other nutritional solutions, but with particular emphasis on training and awareness raising.

Cruz forms part of a group of 50 young people from Ticuna and Kokama indigenous communities participating in communications workshops held in local schools. At the Umariaçu II community school in Tabatinga, she learned how to conduct interviews, take photographs, and produce daily news billboards and radio programmes.

She was thrilled by the opportunity to handle a microphone or camera in order to question the village chief about community problems, explain the importance of breastfeeding to mothers-to-be, or inform children about healthy habits, soft drinks, processed foods and the fruits of the region.

“There are a lot of young people that we can rescue from alcoholism,” she said. “We just prepared a news report on ‘Indian Day’ (a Brazilian holiday celebrated every Apr. 19) and I’m going to participate in Indigenous Babies Week.”

The aim of the workshops is to motivate young people to promote and defend their rights. An agreement with a local television station made it possible for the youngsters to be trained in the use of the equipment donated by the joint programme. The radio station in Tabatinga provided them with space in its Saturday programming schedule so that they could broadcast their own radio show.

The group also uses loudspeakers mounted on posts in their villages to get their message across. The daily news billboards are displayed on the walls of medical clinics and schools, and internet workshops have provided them with the skills to run their own website, which will be launched on May 21.

Once all the workshops are completed, the participants will share what they have learned with other students. Partnerships with local governments, universities and indigenous organisations will ensure continuity, and the internet will serve as a platform to disseminate the results, expand communication and inspire other young people.

These experiences form part of a wider project to help Ticuna and Kokama communities to organise in order to demand health care, education and economic and political participation.

The joint programme is an initiative of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Achievement Fund, set up with a financial contribution from the government of Spain and administered by various United Nations agencies, including the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in partnership with the Brazilian government.

Now in the stage of collecting data and evaluating results, since it will conclude in June, the programme focused on the municipalities of Tabatinga, Benjamin Constant and São Paulo de Olivença in the northwestern state of Amazonas, and the municipality of Dourados in the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, which are home to a combined total of 53,000 indigenous people.

These areas were chosen because of their high rates of malnutrition, substance abuse and violence, as well as their remote and difficult-to-reach locations. It is hoped that the positive results expected can be extended to other regions of the country, Fernando Moretti, the national coordinator of the joint programme, told Tierramérica.

In the three and half years since the programme was launched, International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples has been translated into the Guaraní, Terena and Ticuna languages. Brazil ratified the convention in 2002, but its implementation remains a challenge.

Another concrete outcome was the publication of a book that shares the perceptions of 25 children and adolescents in villages in Mato Grosso do Sol and neighbouring Paraguay on food and nutrition security. The book, which includes photographs, letters and artworks, will be distributed in a Portuguese-Guaraní bilingual edition to schools, libraries and cultural centres.

“When we talk about food security, it is not simply a matter of food production, but also of training in health and self-esteem,” said Moretti.

The activities are aimed at motivating people to use the region’s biological and agricultural diversity sustainably.

Communities were provided with rural technical assistance and guidance for the establishment of agro-forestry systems, which combine farming with sustainable use and recovery of local forests, and of school gardens. In Dourados, indigenous farmers reintroduced yerba mate – used to prepare a hot beverage widely consumed in southern Brazil and neighbouring countries – and other native plant species with significant commercial potential.

In the village of Panambizinho, two plant nurseries were constructed, and the local residents learned how to make eco-friendly stoves that use less firewood, thus preserving the forest, and reduce harmful smoke emissions.

There were also discussions of concepts and practices related to healthy eating and disease prevention. Awareness raising and the creation of opportunities allowed the project to grow naturally, said Moretti.

Some families created gardens in their homes. Indigenous community members were trained to measure and weigh babies and children in order to provide data on these populations to the Food and Nutrition Security System.

In Alto Solimões, the ILO is supporting an association of craftspeople with a market study to help their products reach buyers.

For Moretti, what was most important was strengthening institutions and expanding interaction with the indigenous population. From now on, there will be two indigenous representatives on the National Council for Food and Nutrition Security, the agency responsible for implementation of the Zero Hunger policy launched by the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration (2003-2011). Indigenous community members are also organising to participate in municipal councils.

In Dourados, the National Indigenous Fund and UNICEF organised a colloquium in order to create a network for the protection of indigenous children and adolescents and to define the measures to be adopted in cases of abuse, abandonment and alcoholism. A similar event will be held with communities in Alto Solimões on Jun. 17-19.

An ethnic mapping exercise was also conducted, which included the identification of what is produced in each region. “These are tools that the indigenous people themselves will be able to use,” stressed Moretti.

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

Excerpt:

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.

Dead trees mark the site of the 1996 massacre in Eldorado dos Carajás. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
ELDORADO DOS CARAJÁS, Brazil , Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

The order came from the office of the governor of the northern Brazilian state of Pará, Almir Gabriel, at 5:00 PM on Apr. 17, 1996: clear route PA-150, the epicentre of social protests for land reform, at any cost.

Route PA-150 joined the city of Marabá and the town of Parauapebas, in the southeast of the Amazonian state of Pará, the location of some of the country’s largest mining and ranching projects.

On that day in 1996, at a spot known as the “S” curve on route PA-150 in Eldorado dos Carajás municipality, 800 kilometres from the state capital Belém, 150 police officers opened fire on some 1,000 demonstrators belonging to the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) who were blocking the road.

Nineteen people were killed and 70 were wounded. The demonstrators were on their way to Belém to demand the expropriation of the Macaxeira estate in Curionópolis, close to Eldorado, already under occupation by 1,500 families, and the distribution of its land under the land reform laws.

The tragedy placed land reform on the political agenda of this South American country, and Apr. 17 was named International Day of Peasant Struggle.

This year is the 17th anniversary of the massacre, and the 15th anniversary of the creation of Assentamento 17 de Abril, the peasant settlement founded in response to the demonstrators’ demands.

The settlement was created nearly two years after the massacre, when the National Institute for Colonisation and Land Reform (INCRA) declared the Macaxeira estate unproductive, a necessary condition for expropriation according to the land reform laws.

Some 700 previously landless families are now settled on 37,000 hectares of the estate which the MST activists occupied in 1996. Today they are struggling to survive, without sources of employment or support to make their plots of land productive.

Ivagno Brito, the son of peasants, was 13 years old when he witnessed the massacre. Today he is 30, and dedicated to the MST cause.

“People were desperate, it was sheer madness. Imagine the scene, a whole bunch of people in the crossfire. What affected me most was seeing women and children taking cover in a small chapel that no longer exists,” said Brito, pointing out the exact spot of the massacre on the “S” curve.

“I can’t forget it. I lost my head. I couldn’t find my father and I began to run…Later on I found myself in the bushes,” he told IPS.

Maria Zelzuita, 48, was also there. “They wanted us to clear the road but we were on foot. So the police decided to open fire to clear it. What I can’t forget was the people screaming and the children crying for their mothers,” she said.

“There were already people dead on the asphalt. I took four little children by the hand to rescue them. I ran off the road towards the bushes, and we also carried a boy who had been shot.”

Zelzuita has a plot of 25 hectares of land where she grows rice, cassava, maize and pumpkins.

But experience has shown that it is not enough to distribute land without providing the instruments and knowledge to develop sustainable agriculture.

Zelzuita works in partnership with the people in the settlement. She earns a living as an assistant cook at the local school, and she is also a student and a single mother of three. At home she has piped water and electricity.

“I am happy to be a settler; I have somewhere to live and raise my children. Before I did not have this, and I can’t imagine myself in a city. But there is no employment here, and many people have to go to the cities to find work,” she told IPS.

In the face of these difficulties, many INCRA settlers have sold their lots and left. The sale of plots in the land reform settlements is a frequent occurrence in Pará.

Forty-nine-year-old “Dona” Rosa Costa Miranda has no plans to leave the rural area, but she was overwhelmed by the effort it took to cultivate a vegetable garden in such poor soil, so she decided to rent her land for grazing cattle.

“Today I have a plot of land and a house. I produce hardly anything because I am on my own, but I rent it out. Life in the settlement is hard because there is no work. Some people owe money to the bank and have no way of making payments,” she told IPS.

Dona Rosa was born in Maranhão, in the arid Northeast, the poorest part of Brazil. At the age of 16 she came to Pará with her husband, a farmer. She took part in the occupation of the Macaxeira estate, and on the day of the massacre she was one of the women who hid in the small chapel.

Recently, Dona Rosa got funds to plant “cupuaçu”, an Amazonian fruit. But a slash-and-burn fire lit by her neighbours – a common practice to clean and prepare the land for cultivation – spread out of control and burned her fruit trees.

In spite of the difficulties, “this is better than living on the outskirts of cities or in the favelas (shanty towns). Having a plot of land nowadays means security. I don’t plan to move. City streets are very dangerous,” she said.

Expropriating unproductive portions of estates and redistributing the land is a slow process that can take up to a decade.

The creation of the 17 de Abril settlement was achieved “two years after the massacre because of the blood that was spilt. People in some encampments have been waiting for 12 years and land reform has still not arrived for them,” Dona Rosa said.

The Amazon region is no longer what it was when she first arrived from the Northeast. To reach Assentamento 17 de Abril, you drive through small villages and urban areas that have sprung up along the side of the road, like Sororó, Eldorado dos Carajás and Curionópolis, places where there is heavy traffic of trucks loaded with minerals.

The former route PA-150, now paved federal highway BR-155, passes close by the industrial district of Marabá which has 12 steelmaking plants and large ranching properties, all of them in the middle of Amazonia.

The view from Marabá is a landscape of pasture, without a single tree. “It’s changing a lot, that’s why we’re dying of drought. In a few years’ time there won’t be any rain, because there aren’t any trees,” Dona Rosa complained.

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.

Excerpt:

A sign put up by activists in Marabá, Brazil demands justice for the murders of Amazon activists José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espírito Santo. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
MARABÁ, Brazil , Apr 5 2013 (IPS)

Peasants and human rights defenders in Brazil are indignant over the acquittal of the man accused of ordering the May 2011 murders of two prominent Amazon activists, José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife Maria do Espírito Santo.

The trial ended Thursday Apr. 4 with the sentencing of two men paid to kill the couple in the Amazon jungle state of Pará. But the third man held for the crime, the landowner accused by the prosecutors of hiring the other two, was absolved on the grounds of insufficient evidence.

The trial was one of the six slated to take place this year in Brazil involving land conflicts, one of the main causes of violence in South America’s giant.

In the trial, which lasted 48 hours with only a few breaks, a seven-person jury found Alberto Lopes do Nascimento and Lindonjonson Silva Rocha guilty. They were given sentences of 45 years and 42 years and eight months, respectively, on two counts of aggravated murder and cruelty.

Da Silva, 54, and his wife Maria do Espírito Santo, 53, were riding a motorcycle when they were ambushed and gunned down in the rainforest in the northern state of Pará on May 24, 2011. The killers cut off a dying da Silva’s ear.

The murders “used methods that made it impossible for José Cláudio and Maria, killed in a cruel ambush…to defend themselves,” reads the sentence handed down by Judge Murilo Lemos Simão, which goes on to state that the motive was a dispute over land, described as an aggravating element.

But José Rodrigues Moreira, who was accused of masterminding the murders, was acquitted because there were “no concrete elements” proving his guilt, according to the judge. Prosecutors were seeking a 70-year sentence for the landowner.

The trial, attended by the delegates of dozens of national and international social movements and human rights groups, took place in the city of Marabá, in the southeast of Pará, the state that has the largest number of land disputes in Brazil.

Nearly 200 people held a vigil outside the courthouse, next to the Trans-Amazonian highway. When the sentences were read out, activists and rural workers burned crosses and threw stones at the courthouse windows.

“The verdict is more of the same, from Brazil’s justice system: it condemns those who are at one tip of the murder and acquits those who had the motives to commit it,” the head of the Brazilian NGO Terra de Direitos, Antônio Escrivão Filho, told IPS.

Da Silva, known as “Zé Castanha”, and his wife were community leaders and environmentalists involved in a project for sustainable agriculture and the gathering of rainforest fruits in the remote settlement of Praia Alta Piranheira, 500 km from Belém, the state capital.

Since 2005, the couple had been battling the illegal occupation of land on the 22,000-hectare settlement by loggers and charcoal producers. In Praia Alta Piranheira, the trees have been cut on 75 percent of the land.

The catalyst for the murders was the illegal purchase by Rodrigues of a 150-hectare plot in the area where the Praia Alta Piranheira project was being carried out.

Three families lived on half of the lot. Rodrigues tried to evict them, but failed, thanks to the support they received from Zé Castanha and his wife.

In reprisal, Rodrigues decided to hire gunmen to murder them, according to the prosecution. After the two community leaders were killed, the intimidation against the three families continued, and given the lack of police protection, they finally abandoned the land.

The prosecutor, Danyllo Pompeu Collares, announced that he would appeal the verdict.

“Society is not yet prepared to put the blame on the person responsible (for the killings) for fear of his economic power and political influence,” said the prosecutor. “The rest of the family (of the two victims) will continue to be under threat as long as (Rodrigues) is free.”

The south and southeast of Pará is one of the most violent parts of Brazil, in terms of deadly land conflicts. According to the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), of 1,645 murders related to land disputes committed since 1985, just 100 went to trial, and in only 22 of those cases was the person accused of masterminding the killings found guilty.

“The justice system in Pará is very conservative,” Marabá Mayor João Salame, who took office this year, told IPS. “I wanted a guilty verdict; any light sentence would be an incentive for hired killings. The punishment has to be stiff.”

Atila Roque, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil, told IPS that “the couple had a history of defending the law and working to pacify the conflict. The state played a role of complete omission…it is shocking and shameful.”

The 200 activists who came to Marabá to stand vigil outside the courthouse starting at 5:00 AM the first day included representatives of Amnesty, Brazil’s National Human Rights Movement, and the foundation that grants the Right Livelihood Award, better known as the Alternative Nobel Prize.

During the trial, activists and local small farmers set up an altar outside the building, with a photo of the victims and offerings of cashews.

“They defended the jungle,” said Maria do Espírito Santo’s brother-in-law, José Sampaio, who was the first to testify at the trial. “In this region there are many ranchers, loggers, charcoal producers and farmers who have settled on land. The couple were ‘agro-extractivists’ and lived off the rainforest.”

According to Laísa Sampaio, his wife and Maria’s sister, the couple had received death threats since 2001.

“They denounced crimes, the charcoal makers and loggers, and illegal occupation of land, and were carrying out an educational process to show people that it was possible to make a living from the jungle,” said Laísa, who also received threats and was forced off the land where she was living.

According to José Batista of the CPT, who assisted the prosecution, abundant physical evidence was gathered by the police, such as strands of hair found in a diving mask that was used in the murder and which, by means of DNA testing, made it possible to determine that it belonged to one of the two murderers.

“The conviction was a sure thing based on the existing evidence, which was compelling and gave us the certainty that the jurors would hand back a guilty sentence,” Batista told IPS.

Despite his health problems, 82-year-old French Dominican friar Henri des Roziers, a CPT lawyer in Pará who is known locally as Frei Henri, made it a point to attend the trial.

He said the case was similar to that of the assassination of legendary environmental activist Chico Mendes, a leader of the seringueiros or rubber tappers who was killed in 1988 in the northwest state of Acre.

“The impunity remains in place; I am leaving with a heavy heart,” Henri said.

“Extractivism and the preservation of nature are still a cause of death,” he said. “These murders were like that of Chico Mendes – the reasons were the same. These people were an irritant for the current model of agribusiness, agrotoxics and scorn for nature.”

Women and children from a Nanti community in initial contact with Western culture in the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios. Credit: INDEPA

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Mar 26 2013 (IPS)

In the dense Amazon rainforest of Peru, there are five reserves inhabited by indigenous groups who have chosen to remain totally or partially isolated from the rest of society. But these areas are not officially demarcated as indigenous lands, and only one is protected with a control post.

The authorities responsible for them are now attempting to reinforce protection of these vulnerable populations, ignored for years by the state.

“A reserve is an instrument to protect the rights of these communities, who have found themselves obliged to live in isolation due to a series of violations they have suffered, particularly during the rubber boom. We owe them a historical debt,” Paulo Vilca, the general director of intercultural affairs and peoples’ rights at the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs, told Tierramérica*.

Throughout the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the expansion of rubber tapping in the Amazon brought disease, death and virtual extermination to the rainforest’s indigenous peoples, who were forced into slave labour.

Groups living in “voluntary isolation” have chosen to avoid all contact with the rest of society in the countries where they live, for historical reasons such as the extermination described above. Other groups are categorised as living in “initial contact”: while they remain largely isolated, they engage in contact with the outside world for certain concrete reasons, such as health care.

After many years of waiting, a multi-sectoral commission in Peru recognised five reserves in August 2012. Three of them – Isconahua, Murunahua and Mashco-Piro – are in the eastern region of Ucayali. The Madre de Dios reserve is in the southeastern region of the same name, while the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is in the southern region of Cusco.

The latter is additionally home to the Matsiguenga and Yora peoples, but it also overlaps with the natural gas fields in Lot 88, an area under lease to the Camisea gas consortium.

All five are currently classified as “territorial reserves” but are slated to be designated as “indigenous reserves”, a category created in 2007 by Law 28.736 to provide greater protection for people living in isolation or initial contact.

In order for this reclassification to be official, the executive branch must issue a supreme decree. The Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs submitted the proposal in the first week of March, and it is now under study by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

The categorisation of these lands as indigenous reserves would mean the official demarcation of the territory needed to provide greater guarantees for these populations who face permanent ongoing threats, said Vilca.

Julio Ibáñez, an attorney with the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), stressed the need for indigenous organisations to form part of the commission responsible for evaluating these requests, in order for the native peoples themselves to have a say in the decision.

“This would guarantee that the rights of indigenous peoples in isolation or initial contact are represented and protected by genuinely representative organisations,” Ibáñez told Tierramérica.

This commission is currently made up by representatives of the national government, regional governments and universities, but includes no indigenous delegates.

Vilca reported that his department is drafting a proposal for the inclusion of indigenous organisations in the commission.

Since becoming active again in mid-2012, the commission has had to deal with a number of pending issues, such as the evaluation of requests for the recognition of another five reserves, which date back 10 to 14 years.

Vilca is preparing a report on this matter, after receiving the files for these requests in December from the National Institute for the Development of Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples (INDEPA).

He acknowledged that the state has not paid sufficient attention to these populations, but is now trying to rectify that situation.

Of the five territorial reserves that have been recognised, only the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is protected with a control post.

The vice ministry has announced the signing of agreements with local governments and the National Natural Protected Areas Service to guarantee the protection of the other reserves.

In the meantime, a whole range of threats loom over them, from illegal logging to oil and gas operations.

Argentine-based Pluspetrol, which heads up the Camisea gas consortium, is seeking to expand its activities in Lot 88 into a section of the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve – which encompasses three communities in initial contact: Santa Rosa de Serjali, Montetoni and Marankeato – and the buffer zone around Manu National Park.

In 2010, the government agency that promotes oil and gas industry investment accepted the request from Pluspetrol, which presented the terms of reference and a citizen participation plan to modify its environmental impact assessment in order to include the new activities.

In May 2012, technicians from INDEPA and Vilca’s department stated that gas exploration activities would pose a risk to the populations living in isolation.

As a result, the public participation mechanisms should only apply to the three communities in initial contact mentioned above.

Pluspetrol then asked Vilca’s agency if it should present a citizen participation plan to inform these three settlements of its activities.

The response, which came in late August, was that this would not be necessary unless the communities themselves demanded it, and that it should be carried out in coordination with the Vice Ministry, since it would be an ad hoc procedure.

The non-profit organisation Law, Environment and Natural Resources (DAR) questioned this response, since it opens up the possibility of information-sharing workshops in territories that are supposed to be protected.

Vilca replied that the mission of the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs is not to promote investment, but rather “to enforce respect for the rights of the peoples.”

In addition, his team must still evaluate the modification of the environmental impact assessment for the expansion of activities in Lot 88, and in this case, its evaluation will be binding.

After Pluspetrol activities were reported in the Manu National Park buffer zone, the company stated that it would not continue with its plans in the area. But DAR and indigenous organisations believe that the matter is far from settled.

Tierramérica contacted Pluspetrol and the Department of Energy-Related Environmental Affairs for their input on the subject, but neither had responded by press time.

In the meantime, a million dollars in funding from the Inter-American Development Bank will be used this year to step up protection of indigenous reserves, reported Vilca.

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

Pukobjê-Gavião community members in the Governador indigenous territory. Credit: Gilderlan Rodrigues – Courtesy of CIMI

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 5 2013 (IPS)

An indigenous community in Brazil has decided to single-handedly take action against illegal loggers who are moving into their territory in search of highly valued timber.

Indigenous lands in the Amazon rainforest, rich in precious hardwood species, have become a new target for illegal loggers, who use bribery and threats to ply their illicit trade.

The most recent episode occurred in late January in the Governador indigenous territory, located in the southwest of the state of Maranhão, near the city of Amarante and 900 km from the state capital, São Luís.

In this eastern corner of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, members of a Pukobjê-Gavião indigenous community seized four trucks and a tractor loaded with almost 20 cubic metres of ipê (Tabebuia chrysotricha) and sapucaia (genus Lecythis) logs.

“We got tired of denouncing what was going on and decided to matters into our own hands. We saw the trucks inside the reserve. What was going to happen if we didn’t do anything?” said chief Evandro Gavião from the village of Governador, one of the six Pukobjê-Gavião communities located within the indigenous territory of the same name.

The young community leader, only 24, spoke with IPS by telephone during a meeting with the chiefs of the other villages, where they discussing a plan for the monitoring and protection of the reserve.

Gavião stressed that the community first denounced illegal logging on its lands back in 2009. Located in the transitional area between the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado tropical savannah biome, these lands are rich in coveted tropical timber species like ipê and sapucaia, aroeira (Schinus terebinthifolius), copaíba (Copaifera sp.) and cerejeira (género Amburana).

“But the trees are running out,” warned Gavião.

According to the Brazilian chapter of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), illegal logging is closely tied to highway construction and migration flows. Road access facilitates ever deeper entry into the rainforest.

Between September and November 2012, Interpol arrested 200 people in 12 Latin American countries in the first international operation against the illegal harvesting and sale of timber. The operation encompassed Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela, and resulted in the seizure of 50,000 cubic metres of wood, with a total value of some eight million dollars.

The inhabitants of the Governador indigenous territory are demanding the presence of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), the Brazilian government environmental agency IBAMA, and the Federal Police to guarantee the safety of the roughly 1,000 people living in the six villages.

“What we did was dangerous, but it was the only way to capture the attention of the responsible agencies,” said Gavião.

Since the seizure of the trucks, illegal logging has not stopped; the perpetrators have simply switched to a different route into the area.

“The feeling is that it could get worse, and that the threats we are suffering will continue. We already know that a price of 30,000 reais (over 15,000 dollars) has been put on the head of the chief of the village of Nova, to have him killed. But the Gavião people will not back down,” he declared.

The indigenous communities attribute the increase in threats and pressures to the redefinition of the borders of the reserve. A new demarcation of the Governador indigenous territory has been underway since 1999, in order to expand the original borders established in 1980.

The traditional land use by local indigenous communities was not respected when the limits of the reserve were first determined, which meant they were forced to leave their territory in order to access the natural resources they need to feed themselves and carry out their ritual practices, explained Rosimeire Diniz of the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), a Catholic church organisation.

Parts of the territory traditionally used by the Pukobjê-Gavião were left outside the original demarcation and were occupied by cattle ranchers. For many years, the indigenous people’s relations with the ranchers were “more or less friendly,” but when they requested a revision of the limits of their territory, it sparked an upsurge in conflicts and violence, Diniz told IPS.

The Governador indigenous territory currently encompasses 42,000 hectares, which could expand to 80,000 hectares as a result of the new demarcation. According to Gavião, the current land area is not large enough, because it was “hastily” determined by the military regime in power at the time.

“The places where our ancestors fished and hunted are outside the indigenous land. They did not consult with the indigenous people to find out where they fished, where they hunted, where they planted crops. That’s why we have asked for a revision. We realise it can take a long time, but we have a responsibility to our people. That’s why we are fighting,” he said.

Illegal logging has been happening on indigenous lands since at least the 1980s, but the inhabitants of these lands were formerly unaware of it.

“Now it is much more visible. Using bribery, the loggers transferred the responsibility for these environmental crimes onto the indigenous people. The situation became intolerable, and the natives decided to take action to protect themselves. The logging was so blatant that the trucks were passing right through the villages,” said Diniz.

Fábio Teixeira, a Federal Police agent in Imperatriz, the second largest city in the state of Maranhão and roughly 100 km from Governador, told IPS that, over the years, illegal loggers have been relocating towards this part of the reserve and that there are currently at least seven large sawmills in the area.

“There has always been deforestation, but it used to be an isolated occurrence. However, after a major operation to combat deforestation in other locations, a lot of loggers moved towards Governador,” he said.

He added that a “highly conflictive” situation has developed, pitting the indigenous people against ranchers and loggers, who are banding together.

Teixeira reported that after the incident with the logging trucks, the residents of the small municipality of Amarante, a 20-minute drive from Governador, set up a barricade with fire and stones across the highway to keep the indigenous people from entering town, and security had to be reinforced with 20 federal agents and 30 military police officers.

“I didn’t know that the town was so heavily invested in illegal logging,” Teixeira admitted. “Its economy is based on the timber and livestock industries. Even the municipal authorities are implicated. I can’t give any details about our operations, but we will be stepping up control of the area,” he said.

In Teixera’s view, the action taken by the indigenous people was “an act of desperation” that could have turned into a “bloodbath”. Since then, “we have advised them to record anything they see as illegal activity within the reserve with photographs, since this will serve as evidence for an investigation,” he said.

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

Representatives of native communities in the Amazon region of Peru, where the first ever “prior consultation” about a project affecting their territory will be held, have pressured the authorities into promising that their views will be taken into account every step of the way. But the government’s word is no longer enough to assuage their mistrust.

Native leaders from the Amazon at the meeting of the Congressional working group. Credit: Puinamudt

“If they want to be respected, they must also respect our decisions. It’s not just about direct respect for the son; respect is first due to the father,” said Andrés Sandi, an Achuar Indian and president of the Federation of Native Communities of the Corrientes River (FECONACO).

Sandi wore a headdress of red and yellow feathers, symbolising his status as an “apu” (leader), when he talked to IPS a few days after a series of meetings with authorities in Lima on Jan. 24-31, together with other leaders of indigenous organisations in the northern department (or province) of Loreto in Peru’s Amazon region.

The purpose of their journey from the depths of the Amazon jungle to the Peruvian capital was to drive home to the authorities that there can be no consultation unless there is prior respect for the representatives of native organisations.

The leaders complained that technical personnel from PeruPetro — the state company responsible for putting out to tender the Loreto oil lot 192, known as Lot 1AB – attempted to enter their territory in late January without consulting the leaders. “We will stop everything dead if our voices are not heard,” they warned.

This is the first time that the Law on the Right to Prior Consultation of Indigenous or Original Peoples on all actions within their ancestral lands will be implemented in Peru. Promulgated in August 2011, the law was provided with regulations to define its concrete policies in April 2012.

"Indigenous people have lost confidence in the state."
FECONACO is part of a coalition, the Amazonian Indigenous Peoples United in Defence of their Territories (PUINAMUDT), which includes three other organisations of members of the Achuar, Urarina, Kukama-Kukamira, Secoya, Matsés and Quechua ethnic groups.

“The PeruPetro authorities have had to alter their approach because they cannot get around the way these communities organise and take decisions,” Congresswoman Verónika Mendoza told IPS.

Mendoza belongs to the congressional working group that is developing the consultation process. On Feb. 4, the commission called in the PeruPetro authorities for talks on the issue. At the meeting, the lawmakers called the company to account for its actions, and its executives committed themselves to keep native people informed at every step.

The law’s regulations say that consultations must be held directly with members of the indigenous peoples affected by economic activities being developed in their territory.

This new process marks the long-awaited fulfillment of Peru’s ratification in 1994 of the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries.

The ILO convention establishes special protection mechanisms for native peoples, including consultation on laws, productive projects and policies affecting these peoples’ development and environment.

According to Mendoza, the law and its regulations are one thing, and what actually happens on the ground is quite another. Carrying out consultations without involving the apus is not viable, she argues.

“However, some positive steps have been taken,” said Mendoza, highlighting a point in PeruPetro’s presentation to Congress: if there are found to be impacts on the collective rights of the native peoples, “adjustments in the texts of the basis and model of the contract” could be incorporated for the new company operating the lot.

In 2015 the concession on Lot 1AB expires, and the tendering process for the new concession, as well as the contract with the winning company, must include proposals arising from prior consultation with the native peoples.

On Jan. 30, representatives of the four indigenous organisations put forward their observations and recommendations about the present and future situation to the current operator, Pluspetrol Norte, at a meeting at PeruPetro’s headquarters.

“We refuse to be taken by surprise by the authorities,” said Sandi, of FECONACO. He used an analogy to sum up native people’s fears: “Indigenous people have lost confidence in the state; it is as though you hit a child, and then say ‘It’s OK, I’m not going to hit you any more’; (the child) is not sure if it is true, or not,” he said.

The leaders want greater openness from the authorities responsible for consultation. Their criticism is directed partly at the Vice Ministry for Intercultural Affairs, the government body in charge of the process, which has created a database of the native peoples to be consulted, but has not yet published it.

IPS requested an interview with Intercultural Affairs Vice Minister Iván Lanegra, but he declined to comment at this time.

However, reports have emerged that his office has identified 52 native cultures, 48 of which are in the Amazon region and four in the Andean region of the country. It has also been said that this year, the vice ministry intends to carry out five consultations on the same number of projects.

In October 2012, the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs said the first consultation would be carried out in February or March of 2013, but the lack of trust on the side of indigenous people and the vagaries of government policy make this goal an elusive one.

In spite of the difficulties, representatives of indigenous peoples and of PeruPetro agreed to meet in the second half of February in the city of Iquitos, the capital of Loreto, to coordinate a timetable and a mechanism for the first consultation. A date for the actual consultation could emerge from this meeting.

But reaching an agreement is not just a matter of fixing a timetable.

The native communities in Loreto showed the authorities scientific proof of the environmental impact of 40 years of oil exploitation in their waters and on their territory.

They communities have videos, photographs, and technical reports drawn up by their own environmental monitors. In their view, no consultation can negate these findings, related as they are to indigenous peoples’ basic rights.

In Lima they met with representatives of the multisectorial commission responsible for indigenous peoples’ environmental and social problems, which is headed by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

At the meeting they said that a new concession for Lot 1AB will not be possible without previously arriving at concrete solutions to remedy environmental damage.

Pressure from these organisations led environmental monitoring agencies to carry out an analysis of the degree of pollution in the area. The work began in the Pastaza river basin and the results were alarming.

In early February, PUINAMUDT received a preliminary report from the Environmental Assessment and Oversight Agency (OEFA), which indicates that in some cases the concentration of toxic chemicals in the waters of the Pastaza river were over 90 times the permitted limits.

Indigenous organisations have still not received the final report, but they are already examining the preliminary findings in order to communicate them to their communities and warn them of the risks.

“First of all, we are going to ask for this type of study to be carried out in the other river basins, to obtain the results. Then we will tell the state: now take responsibility and clean it up,” said Aurelio Chino, president of the Pastaza River Quechua Indigenous Federation (FEDIQUEP).

“We can’t accept consultations without such a commitment,” Chino told IPS, flanked by a delegation of apus, all wearing their red and yellow headdresses.

(END)

A view of the Peruvian Amazon. Credit: Jake G/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Jan 17 2013 (IPS)

Peru’s economic growth is largely dependent on its wealth of natural resources, which provide over 50 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and 80 percent of exports. In view of this fact, the government is developing a project for the valuation and protection of this natural bounty.

“There is a natural infrastructure tied to the physical infrastructure, which the state must protect,” Fernando León, an economic incentives advisor to the Initiative for Conservation in the Andean Amazon (ICAA), told IPS.

By way of example, he noted that “if you only worry about the pipes and other infrastructure for a drinking water treatment project, and not about the river basins that provide the water that will go through the pipes, then what will you treat for the population to drink in the future?”

Until late 2011, León headed up the Ministry of Environment’s Department for the Assessment, Valuation and Financing of Natural Resources, where he advocated the promotion of projects for the protection of these resources under the National System of Public Investments (SNIP).

His successor, Roger Loyola, who has continued with these efforts, announced that by the end of the year, a so-called “Green SNIP” will begin to operate.

Loyola and his team have been working in coordination with the Ministry of the Economy and Finance (MEF), which oversees SNIP, to draw up the guidelines, conceptual framework and terms and conditions for the environmental projects envisioned.

This process has posed a challenge for the financial specialists, because they have had to demonstrate that these initiatives will be economically profitable for the country, for example, by demonstrating the economic benefits of protecting an endangered species, explained Loyola.

During this stage, projects are being studied in the areas of biodiversity, climate change, land management and zoning, and protected natural areas, all of which fall under the remit of the Ministry of Environment (MINAM).

Sources at the MEF investment policy office told IPS that “the first step being undertaken is to assess which of all these projects qualify as public investments.”

Once a conceptual consensus has been reached within MINAM to serve as a reference for other sectors and the environmental and economic considerations have been reconciled, they will move on to developing the guidelines and methodology for the design and approval of individual projects.

Biologist Sandro Chávez, national coordinator of the environmental NGO Foro Ecológico and former head of the National Protected Natural Areas Service, believes the Green SNIP initiative to be a generally positive step.

However, speaking with IPS, Chávez warned of the danger that the government will make the mistake of taking environmental issues into account only with regard to investments in conservation projects, “when the environmental component should be mainstreamed in all of the projects presented by all sectors of the state to ensure that they are sustainable.”

León, for his part, stressed that the specific projects promoted by MINAM should be seen as a first stage, since he knows first-hand from his experience promoting the development of a Green SNIP as a public official that it will not be easy to convince the Ministry of the Economy to take this step.

But despite this resistance, he noted, a number of “green” projects are already being undertaken by the MEF.

Last September, at a regional workshop on financing for biodiversity public policies and conservation in the Andean Amazon, Mónica Muñoz Nájar from the MEF investment policy office announced that 15 environmental projects were being carried out under the SNIP.

These include a project undertaken by the government of the northern region of San Martín for the recovery of ecosystem services that provide water for the population.

Loyola reported that there are high expectations among regional governments planning to submit environmental projects for financing under the Green SNIP. León added that initiatives should be prioritised as soon as the new system is up and running, “because what we consume in the cities is connected to rural areas, to what is in the interior of the country.”

The experts believe that reports should be prepared on an ongoing basis to demonstrate the benefits provided by environmental resources and the losses incurred when the environment is mistreated, in order to dispel the myth that nature’s resources are freely available and infinite.

In an analysis of the environmental situation in Peru in 2007, the World Bank concluded that the environmental damages inflicted on this country have an economic cost of 3.9 percent of GDP and primarily affect the poorest sectors of the population.

The World Bank report estimated that “the impact of environmental degradation on the poor in comparison with the non-poor is 20 percent greater in terms of impact per 1,000 people and 4.5 times greater in terms of impact per unit of income.”

An inter-sectoral committee comprising 28 institutions and headed up by the Statistics and Information Institute (INEI) was launched in Peru last August to establish a system of “green accounting” that contemplates environmental degradation, water and forests, with technical assistance from MINAM.

The goal is to “incorporate environmental variables into national accounting practices,” said Araceli Urriola, an environmental accounting specialist at the Department for the Assessment, Valuation and Financing of Natural Resources. “In other words, the supply and demand (in environmental terms) of all economic activities,” she told IPS.

Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia have made significant progress in this area, noted Urriola. In Peru, however, this process of valuing environmental benefits and losses and establishing a green GDP is just beginning. The members of the inter-sectoral committee are expected to meet before the end of this month to agree on a work plan, the INEI told IPS.

“Environmental impacts are cumulative and are not always felt immediately. Because of this, some governments have not placed any importance on conservation and preservation. That is why, through the valuation of environmental damage, we hope to highlight the importance of conservation, because otherwise, we will pay for it tomorrow,” stressed Loyola.

(END)

Coffee growing in the forests of Puno, Peru illustrates the displacement of crops by climate change. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru, Dec 27 2012 (IPS)

“When someone in Peru sneezes, someone in Brazil catches a cold. When a barrel of oil is produced in Ecuador, a neighbouring country ends up buying it,” says prominent environmentalist Yolanda Kakabadse.

Everything that happens in Latin American countries is closely connected, as if they were vital organs shared by the same body, maintains Kakabadse, former environment minister of Ecuador and current regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN).

This is why the CDKN is promoting an initiative that will allow Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia to exchange and assess evidence-based information on the risks, impacts and threats of climate change shared by the countries of the Amazon region.

The aim is not only to measure impacts that are already evident, but also to foresee damages in the medium to long term. What will be the implications for the lives of the most vulnerable people if global temperatures increase two degrees by 2025? This is the kind of questions that need to be asked, explained Carolina Navarrete of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), which is also supporting the initiative.

For example, Navarrete told Tierramérica*, “a two-degree increase in temperature could make it necessary to move coffee crops up 300 meters higher, and the same thing would happen with other crops. How can we prepare for this situation without causing pressure on sensitive areas, such as protected natural areas, for example?”

The goal of the project is help the region’s authorities respond to these crucial questions for the population’s survival with concrete actions, Kakabadse and Navarrete told journalists from the five countries gathered in Puerto Maldonado, the capital of the Peruvian Amazonian region of Madre de Dios.

Kakabadse announced that Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar Vidal would be responsible for convening his counterparts, between the months of January and February, in order to jointly define measures to be adopted. It is hoped that a formal agreement will then be reached by April or May.

But the Ministry of Environment has yet to make an official statement in this regard, as it is still “working with other sectors and agencies involved in environmental affairs,” according to a communiqué received by Tierramérica at press time.

Nevertheless, as Kakabadse stressed to Tierramérica, the initiative must reach beyond the particular governments in power at a given moment, because “there is a great deal that needs to be done in the medium and long term.”

As a first step, a scientific working group has just completed a preliminary report that reveals the vulnerability of the Amazon region in a scenario of climate change.

For the report, coordinated by the Global Canopy Programme and CIAT and financed by the CDKN, the team of specialists reviewed more than 500 publications from the last 15 years and consulted websites and databases on deforestation and hydrologic modeling.

The report places emphasis on the threats to water, food and energy resources and how they are interrelated. Without water security in the region, there can be no food, energy and health security, it stresses.

The greatest impact will be on water quality, due to deforestation, energy extraction, mining and the use of fertilizers, among other activities that threaten the rainforest and its natural wealth, says the report.

In the last decade, the Amazon region suffered two unprecedented droughts in 2005 and 2010, while floods wiped out thousands of hectares of crops. According to the UK-based Met Office Hadley Centre for climate change research, extreme events like these will intensify and could occur every two years by 2025.

Under this scenario, competition for water will increase. The most powerful users will likely have greater control over this vital resource, while local populations, almost always the poorest, will have access to water of lesser quality and in smaller quantities, warns the report.

Energy generation also depends to a large extent on the Amazon. In Peru, the rainforest accounts for 73 percent of total oil and natural gas production. Hydroelectric plants in the Amazon provide over a third of electricity in Ecuador and Bolivia.

Meanwhile, the appetite for the large proven reserves of crude oil in the Amazon is exerting pressure on the protection of fragile ecosystems in a context where hydroelectricity generation could be compromised by changes in the flow of rivers.

In the Brazilian Amazon region, the total hydroelectricity potential is estimated at 116 gigawatts (GW), of which only 16 GW is currently exploited. Of the rest of this potential, 25 percent would affect indigenous territories, while 16 percent is located in protected natural areas, notes the report.

At the same time, there are growing exports of foods supplied by the Amazon rainforest – a region in which, paradoxically, one out of every three inhabitants suffers from hunger.

The appearance of vectors of diseases in areas where they were previously unimaginable – such as malaria, a hot-climate disease, in the cold environs of Lake Titicaca – also demands that the problem of climate change be confronted by the region’s countries as a bloc, say the experts.

All of these impacts and projections demonstrate that “long-term planning is as important as risk management in the present,” said Navarrete.

Kakabadse, for her part, stressed that no matter what, it is crucial not to lose sight of the enormous importance of the conservation of the Amazon and its protected natural areas. They are the “savings account” that must be preserved for the even more difficult times ahead, she said.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.