Three men who fished illegally in the Javari Valley, a part of the Brazilian Amazon near the Peruvian border, were charged with murdering Pereira and Phillips. Armed groups in lawless and remote areas of the Amazon are an understudied issue simply because they are so dangerous to research. But their activities are of global significance.

The Amazon’s rich biodiversity is fundamental to regulating the Earth’s water and oxygen levels and offsetting the man-made greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate crisis. But despite the importance of this region to the entire world, what goes on here remains out of sight and mind for most.

Those with the clearest view are Indigenous peoples in designated Indigenous territories, which comprise 22.1% of the Brazilian Amazon, and natural protected areas which make up a further 23.6% and are nominally excluded from development by businesses and other forms of private enterprise.

Indigenous communities in unprotected forest (covering 56.3% of the region) have seen the land and wildlife ravaged in recent decades by illegal fishing, deforestation and mineral extraction. Agribusinesses, mining companies, fishermen, land developers and loggers now advance on the remaining Indigenous territories and protected areas to exploit untapped gold, mineral ores, fish and fertile soil.

On the campaign trail in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro claimed: “Not one centimeter of land will be demarcated for Indigenous reserves”. Since entering office, his government has weakened Indigenous and environmental protections and scaled back enforcement.

It has also supported bill 490/2007 which, if passed, would prevent Indigenous communities from obtaining legal recognition of traditional lands if they were not present on them before October 6 1988.

The bill would prevent Indigenous peoples from claiming additional land to expand designated territories and endow the government with the power to remove reserves it decided were no longer required for the cultural survival of an Indigenous group, or for purposes it deemed in the national interest, such as building military bases or roads.

While many condemn Bolsonaro, pinning the fate of the Amazon on the actions of one government overlooks a longer history of land-grabbing and resource-related violence in Brazil. As early as the 17th century, bandeirantes (slave-hunting expeditions commanded by Portuguese business elites) drove westwards in search of Indigenous peoples to enslave. Afterwards, they used their labor to extract and transport gold, silver and diamonds.

Handmaidens of deforestation

With the help of militias and mafias, land-grabbing and resource exploitation continues today in less overt forms. According to studies and reports from across Brazil, including the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Manaus and Belém, loose networks of security agents or people skilled with weapons, sometimes linked to the Brazilian state, use violence to ensure illicit activities like illegal logging go ahead despite the laws prohibiting them.

Those carrying out the violence do not tend to be the main economic beneficiaries of their work, however. According to the characterization of Professor Vivieiros de Castro, a Brazilian anthropologist, they tend to be “miserable, violent and desperate men” with few other options.

Elected officials tend to shrug off responsibility for these groups. Responding to recent questions about Pereira and Phillips, President Bolsonaro compared the state’s inability to safeguard lives in the Amazon to entering a Rio de Janeiro favela, saying there was “no way to guarantee security to people going to the region”.

But studies have shown how lawmakers and decision makers in government can be complicit in militia and mafia violence. One paper documented how political rhetoric can undermine the legitimacy of Indigenous claims to land. It also showed how the replacement of specialized technical officials in state environmental agencies with non-expert military agents can lead to the delay or obstruction of formal conflict resolution processes over land disputes.

As a result, those with economic interests in the Amazon are more likely to feel emboldened to use violence. The informal status of armed groups and their ability to mete out violence in remote areas is particularly useful for businessmen and politicians keen to exploit the region’s material wealth.

Front Line Defenders, an Irish human rights organization, claimed that 27 people were killed defending Indigenous and protected territories in Brazil in 2021 alone. Many more deaths are likely to go unreported.

Threats against environmental defenders are seemingly insurmountable when understood within Brazil’s protracted violent history, but their plight is the world’s. Scientists recently warned that 75% of the tropical forest has become less resilient to stress, such as prolonged droughts, as the climate has warmed and dried since 2000.

Ushered in by violent men, this situation is exacerbated by illicit mining, logging and fishing, with those far from the frontline benefiting the most.

Nicholas Pope is a postdoctoral fellow at Brazil Institute and Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/armed-militias-in-brazil-hold-enormous-sway-over-fate-of-amazon-and-the-global-climate-185535

Once they were allowed to continue to their home, they were shocked at what they found. “It was horrible when we got home. All of us burst into tears. We didn’t know what to do,” says Elicarlos, who was born in the village and has lived there his whole life. “This wall [of the house] was broken, the roof was also broken in, the house was full of rocks and we didn’t know what to do.”

Worst of all, in the middle of their living room they found a boulder that had been blown clean through the wall of their house, leaving a window-size hole in the brickwork. The rock still sits in the living room today, a reminder that the family has still not been compensated by the FIOL project developer, Valec Engenharia, Construções e Ferrovias S.A., a state-run company. “I filed a lawsuit against them seven years ago and it’s never been resolved,” Elicarlos says.

That wasn’t the family’s first such experience. Ten months prior, their roof had been damaged by another detonation. Elicarlos says the subcontractor company hired by Valec to do the blasting was supposed to repair the damage. “On the day of the [second] blast, they told us the company would indemnify the house and give us a new one. Eight days later, they said they would just repair it, but I didn’t agree to it,” he says. “They had told us that the structure of the house had been too badly damaged.”

Elicarlos’s case isn’t the only one of its kind linked to the FIOL project. Throughout southwestern Bahia, between the municipalities of Bom Jesus da Lapa and Caetité, there have been constant complaints about FIOL’s construction activities among people living in small farming villages and quilombos, traditional Afro-Brazilian communities established by former slaves.

Construction of the railway line began in 2011 and has progressed slowly since then. The line will link the port of Ilhéus in Bahia to the BR-153 highway in the municipality of Figueirópolis, in neighboring Tocantins state, but along the way it has left a trail of grievances.

“FIOL has destroyed important areas of vegetation and water sources, destroying economically productive areas in the countryside,” says José Beniezio da Silva, a representative of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), an agency of the Catholic Church that helps farmers in the region.

“It causes trouble inside the communities because of blocked roads, displacement and other contradictions. There were no public consultations or debates to inform the population of the project’s many impacts and contradictions.”

He says that despite reports and proof of a number of violations, “the people continue to be unprotected by the state and have no perspective for being reimbursed for the innumerous crimes committed. Basically, the FIOL construction has created a path of injustice and inhumanity.”

Lucidalva Silveira Nascimento, who lives in the village of Fazenda Invernada, also in the Caetité region, sums up the complaints of many residents: “We aren’t against [the construction]. What we are against is what the company has done and continues to do: to neglect and disrespect the people who live here.”

She adds that when the company arrived in the area, “the people really suffered. There was a lot of noise, a lot of dust and a lot of ignorance on the part of the people who worked there.” In her case, the detonations hurled rocks that damaged the roof of her home; repairs were never made. “In the windy season, we’re afraid the house will fall in on us because the walls shake,” Silveira says. “When it rains, my whole house gets wet inside.”

60 Million Tons of Iron Ore and Grain

A sense of unease has returned among residents in recent months. In April, the multinational mining company BAMIN won a federal bid to build the 537-kilometer (334-mile) stretch of the FIOL line between Caetité and Ilhéus by 2025. In Ilhéus, it will be integrated with Porto Sul, a port project between BAMIN and the Bahia state government for which construction began at the end of 2020.

The cost of the railway and port projects is estimated at 7.3 billion reais (US$ 1.4 billion). According to BAMIN’s press office, the company is awaiting the signing of the railway concession contract before it announces how it will deal with the social and environmental liabilities left by Valec, which is responsible for the construction of the railway line. Valec did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The transformations that could occur in the southwest of Bahia due to increased mining activity in Caetité and faster-paced construction of the railroad are apparent from the numbers. According to BAMIN, the FIOL railway will facilitate the shipping of 60 million metric tons of cargo every year, of which 18 million metric tons will be iron ore from BAMIN’s Pedra de Ferro mine in Caetité. Operations at the mine began in January this year and exports began in July.

The rest of the railway’s freight capacity, 42 million tons, will likely be dedicated to transporting grains from the fast-growing agribusiness region known as Matopiba, on the border region between the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia. It could also be used to ship iron ore from other mines in the region.

The production that BAMIN envisions will transform the state of Bahia into a major source of Brazil’s iron ore exports. According to the state mineral research agency, known as CBPM, in the first half of 2021, Bahia had the third-biggest mining output, after Minas Gerais and Pará. Even though the FIOL has not yet been completed, the Caetité mine is on track to produce nearly 1 million metric tons annually, according to company data.

BAMIN is a subsidiary of the Eurasian Resources Group (ERG), headquartered in Luxembourg, and which has been developing the Pedra de Ferro mine in Caetité since 2007. That was the period when the Brazilian government under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva launched the PAC Growth Acceleration Program, which included projects like FIOL.

Located halfway between the deposits of the Chapada Diamantina landscape in Bahia and the mining heartland of Minas Gerais — both of which have been mined for centuries — the Caetité region was originally inhabited by diverse Indigenous groups and then by cattle-ranching colonialists.

The area has been renowned for its mineral riches since the 19th century, when the precious gems found in the district now known as the Swamp of Amethysts (Brejinho das Ametistas) were coveted by European royalty for their extreme beauty, according to historians.

In 1999, Brazil’s state-run nuclear company, INB, began mining uranium in Caetité, making Brazil one of only four nations at the time with uranium deposits and the technology to enrich it — alongside China, the U.S. and Russia. According to the INB, the Caetité uranium mine is the only one currently operating in all of Latin America.

Fears of a Sea of Mud

Residents’ concerns over the Pedra de Ferro mine stem not only from the impacts of the railway, but also from the tailings dam that will be built to hold back the slurry of mining waste.

BAMIN’s environmental impact report says the dam will hold 128 million cubic meters (33.8 billion gallons) of sludge. That’s more than double the capacity of the Fundão tailings dam in Mariana municipality, Minas Gerais, that collapsed in 2015; and 10 times that of the Córrego do Feijão dam, where a similar disaster played out in 2019. Nearly 300 people died in those accidents and hundreds of families were left homeless.

If the proposed dam at Pedra de Ferro were to collapse, it would especially affect the municipality of Guanambi, population 85,000. The city lies downstream from the site, which means a dam failure would flood it with mud within just a few hours. Because of the fear of accidents like those that happened in Minas Gerais, a local movement against construction of the Pedra de Ferro dam has emerged in recent years.

Evilásio Pereira Bonfim is a dentist in Guanambi and one of the people who rallied in protests behind the slogan “Life yes, dam no.” “This project is completely contrary to what is going on in the rest of the world in terms of protecting life and the environment in mining. What’s going on here is total disrespect for our community,” he says. “Tailings dams aren’t allowed to be built in the vicinity of any sort of residential areas in civilized nations the world over. If there are any people living below the dam, it has to be moved.”

BAMIN recently announced on its website that it will soon issue a new design for the dam using water filtration technology that transforms tailings sludge into a dry stack. It didn’t say whether the move was prompted by the protests. According to BAMIN, up to 90% of the water that would have accumulated behind the dam will be filtered and reused, preventing the accumulation of mud.

The dam’s planned location is also under question: since 2017 the Bahia State Prosecutor’s Office (MP-BA) has recommended that it be relocated to preserve protected environmental areas in the water supply system. Aside from environmental implications, the MP-BA also warned that the dam could damage traditional communal pastureland, common in Bahia.

Luciana Khoury, a prosecutor with the MP-BA, says there have been reports from local communities that tailings are already being deposited on the site from prospecting activity, and that the environment is already being damaged. “It needs to be understood that the dam cannot be built in this location,” she says. “No matter how many safeguards are taken, all the problems have shown that there is no such thing as zero risk.”

BAMIN’s press office said that “the finished basic engineering” of the new projects will be presented “in the coming months” to the appropriate agencies for technical analysis. These agencies are the Bahia state water and environmental board, known as INEMA, and the National Mining Agency (ANM).

Neglect and Disrespect for Communities

While BAMIN has not yet given details about its new dam project or its action plan for construction of the Caetité-Ilhéus railway, communities already affected by Valec’s construction of the FIOL railway line have gone to court demanding compliance with the commitments that were made as conditions for carrying out the work.

In the traditional village of Araçá Volta, in Bom Jesus da Lapa municipality, railway construction has come to a standstill following an injunction in 2019 from IBAMA, the federal environmental protection agency.

“This construction project is an example of governmental neglect and disrespect on the part of monitoring agencies,” says Lucas Marcolino, coordinator of the local community organization Associação Quilombola Agropastoril Cultural de Araçá Volta. The village sits on the very spot where the railway line crosses the São Francisco River.

Construction of the bridge is nearly finished. “They have finished the bridge but have never consulted with the people who live here. Unfortunately, what they did was judicialize the process, and now they prefer to go to court rather than talk with the communities. This railway has been pushed through for years, since 2009,” Marcolino says.

Pressure from community groups led to the developers having to carry out an additional assessment, known as the Complementary Studies on Quilombola Populations. During this process, the community had the opportunity to propose alternatives to address the impacts caused by the railway.

Their main request, which has received no effective response over the last 10 years, is that land titles be granted for the land inside the traditional communities in the region.

“Soon, as infrastructure is established in the region, the land here will be taken over by farms and agribusiness. So we need to have titles to our land in order to have any sort of security,” Marcolino says. “We’re not here to fight so-called development, but one thing is clear: the local communities must be treated with respect. They must be heard. Here, no one is heard, things are just pushed through any way possible. Things are done by force, ‘bellied through’ as we say around here. That’s how they run their construction. It’s even embarrassing to talk about.”

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office, which is responsible for defending the rights of traditional communities, has been following the dispute between Valec and the quilombo communities in the region. “My evaluation as to the result of [Valec’s] posture is that it has not been positive, resulting in distrust and a disagreeable posture on the part of the communities regarding construction of the railway,” says Robert Rigobert Lucht from the prosecutor’s office in Bom Jesus da Lapa. “There is a pressing need for the company to reestablish dialogue and enquiries with the communities it is affecting.”

“In terms of the environment, Valec is expected to meet all the environmental conditions listed by IBAMA so it can reconcile the necessary economic development with maintaining the required preservation and reduction of damage to the environment,” Lucht adds.

Over the years, the quilombos in Araçá Volta have also filed numerous complaints about environmental violations during construction, such as the filling in of two branches of the São Francisco River with dirt in 2016. Similar incidents have happened in other locations, like in Curral Velho, which lies in rural Caetité, but where the construction work has not been interrupted.

Adailson Meira dos Santos, a farmer in the region, sent a video he had taken next to a construction site on the banks of one of the creeks near his community. It shows the riparian forest along a creek that flows into the Ceraíma reservoir, the water source for the entire region, peppered with human feces and used toilet paper.

“They don’t bother to bring in a toilet for these poor men — fathers of families — for these workers,” Santos says in the video. “And it makes you ask yourself: who is monitoring this situation? Where is the Public Prosecutor’s Office? The environmental protection agency? Where?”

Santos’s attitude to the problems wrought by the projects here is common among many residents interviewed for this article: he doesn’t see himself as being against FIOL and BAMIN’s projects. “I want them to do the work, because I know the railroad is something that will benefit the world, but they also have to recognize the local communities which were once happy places. They’re taking away the happiness from our community,” he says.

He recalls how, before the FIOL construction started, he lived comfortably because his community and others in the region benefited from investments made to help family farming throughout the last 20 years. These included small dams and support for cooperatives.

Santos tells of the variety of crops that were grown in Curral Velho, including tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, beans, yucca, carrots and beets. He says the farms have now been damaged because of the intense amount of dust generated by the construction work.

The standard argument that progress will bring new jobs doesn’t make much sense to people like him, Santos says. “I’m not really interested,” he says. “Today I know, thanks be to God, how to produce more than one [minimum] salary wage for each of my four children. For me, earning just one minimum wage [paid by a company] isn’t worth it.”

Marcolino, from the Araçá Volta community, agrees: “Oftentimes, society only looks at development — but who is the development really for? That’s the truth. It’s society’s responsibility to take care of the environment so that future generations have at least that. But unfortunately, that’s not what’s been happening.”

Translated by Maya Johnson

This article appeared originally in Mongabay. Read the original article here: https://news.mongabay.com/2021/09/railroad-and-mine-projects-stir-up-anxiety-in-rural-brazil-communities/

Known as Tatinha, she lives in the Serra do Espinhaço, a mountain range more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) long in Minas Gerais state, that marks the eastern transition from the Cerrado savanna biome to Brazil’s semi-arid Northeast.

Tatinha is one of many inhabitants in hundreds of Serra communities who earn their living by gathering flowers, known as sempre-vivas (always-alive), that grow wild in the hills, and selling them.

The name, sempre-vivas, is apropos: the Serra’s beautiful flowering plants are hardy survivors: blooming again and again despite being rooted in shallow, nutrient-poor sandy soils, atop rocky outcrops. Unable to grow long roots to access water and minerals from subsoils, these flowering plants have evolved alternative strategies for surviving drought.

These include producing few leaves, so the plants don’t wilt in long hours of sun, and flowers that survive for weeks or even months without losing their color, allowing them to attract pollinators — and admirers.

The “sempre-vivas” are in big demand by Brazilian flower arrangers and artisanal craft producers. The rugged long-lasting blooms also provide Tatinha and others like her with sustainable livelihoods, along with a vibrant symbol of their own survival.

Staying Hidden, Blending In, Thriving

The Serra has a rich, though often tragic history. It was exploited intensively for gold and diamonds by elites during the Brazilian colonial period. Simultaneously, an unknown number of enslaved mine workers, mainly of African origin, escaped and took advantage of the rugged mosaic of Serra peaks and valleys to hide.

Invisibility and familial alliances became their survival strategies. Marcello Broggio, the representative of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Brazil, tells how the runaways met and intermingled with other groups, with other histories:

“The slaves, fleeing from deadly exploitation in farming or gold mining, merged with Indigenous peoples native to the region, and with the descendants of European settlers, carrying out itinerant cattle-rearing,” he explains.

For some, this brutal work under conditions analogous to slavery continued for generations. Fernanda Monteiro, who has studied the flower-gatherer way of life for more than a decade, says that her research revealed people still enslaved as late as the 1960s.

Flower-gatherer Andreia Ferreira dos Santos told something similar: “The oldest people in my community started work [on the big farms] as children and weren’t properly paid, often receiving food in return for their labor,” she recalled.

“My uncle Zé Carreiro told me something really powerful — that they worked in the fields and in the mine for a man who made them sleep in his paddock and, when he went out on his horse, they had to wait for him to arrive, as at night they used his saddle blanket to protect themselves from the freezing cold.”

“A Profound Struggle”

Together over time, the hundreds of communities, populated by these peoples of very different origins, constructed an alternative livelihood to slave labor — an independent way of life based on the common use of the highlands.

Monteiro says gathering flowers became much more than a way to earn money: “The struggle of the flower-gatherers is a profound struggle. It is a struggle for a way of life, a way of thinking the world, of relating with the Serra, and constructing a future they want for their children.”

Because the flower-gatherers are always working with future generations in mind, their vision is inherently sustainable. Broggio explains: “The ingenuity of these hybrid communities was to develop over a short timespan a lifestyle and a survival strategy fully integrated into the environment and sustainable enough to be efficient, long-lasting, and resilient.”

In 2020, this unique history was recognized by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which designated the Sempre-Vivas Flower-Gatherers’ Traditional Farming System (Sistema Agrícola Tradicional dos Apanhadores de Flores Sempre-Vivas) as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS).

According to FAO, this designation is only given to “outstanding landscapes of aesthetic beauty that combine agricultural biodiversity, resilient ecosystems and a valuable cultural heritage.” Out of the 62 GIAHS designations given out by FAO in 22 countries, the flower-gatherers are the first Brazilian community to win the prestigious title.

Living as One, Together with the Flowers

Tatinha tells how their synergistic relationship with nature works. Over many years, the communities have set up a meticulous nurturing procedure, handed down generation to generation, ensuring sempre-viva plants flourish. “You must pick the flowers when they are fully out, after the seeds have fallen, and you must always leave stubble in the ground, from which new flowers can sprout,” she says.

Flower collection isn’t their only activity. Tatinha says everyone clears small plots near their villages to grow food; they also sustainably manage Serra natural resources. “Along with medicinal plants, we collect over 200 species of flowers, fruit and dried leaves,” she says.

During the dry season, most families move upslope with their small herds of beef cattle (an ancient breed brought in by the first Portuguese settlers on the Atlantic coast). Once in the high country, they collect the flowers and, according to Tatinha, sleep in “lapas,” their name for caves in the rocky hillside turned temporary homes.

It’s a life lived in close cooperation: “Both the flower gathering and the cattle corralling take place in communal areas,” explains Tatinha.

A Blend of the Natural and Human

The Serra has a long history of human occupation. Prehistoric cave paintings show that people inhabited the region’s mountain ranges, outcrops, valleys and fields long before the arrival of European colonizers.

All across the centuries, the Serra’s heights have been well conserved and so have played a key role in maintaining Brazil’s downslope ecosystems. According to Monteiro, the headwaters of springs that feed into the basins of the Jequitinhonha and São Francisco rivers, responsible for supplying cities in Brazil’s southeast and northeast with water, are found in the Serra do Espinhaço.

Just as in other unique ecosystems — such as the fynbos in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa, or the high pastures of Sinjajevina in the European nation of Montenegro in the Balkans — the Serra families use fire to preserve the habitat, stewarding a beneficial relationship between natural and human communities.

At just the right time of year, after the first rains, they set fire to the pastures and slopes where the flowers grow. “The flowers cannot survive without fire,” Tatinha asserts knowingly.

The flower-gatherers say that their use of fire mimics the wildfires that occur naturally in the Serra, but systematizes and tames those blazes, making them more efficient and less destructive.

Broggio agrees: “No species [of sempre-vivas] has disappeared in the traditional gathering areas due to over-exploitation, whereas in some recently-established protected areas, where the use of fire is forbidden, some of these species have become rare.”

Fire is also used sparingly by the families to keep the land fertile for small-scale agriculture.

But, despite these proven, centuries-old sustainable results, some conservationists have remained critical of fire’s use, particularly on pastureland. Monteiro, however, argues that it is important to differentiate between small-scale Serra cattle rearing and large-scale cattle ranching as practiced in most of the rest of the Cerrado.

“The rearing of cattle in the natural pastureland of the Cerrado, on a small-scale and focused on the social reproduction of the group [carried out communally, with strict rules], is completely different from the rearing of cattle on an industrial scale and under capitalist social relations where large-scale deforestation occurs and native plants are replaced by species of grass brought in from outside,” she says.

Monteiro explains that cattle function in the communities as a kind of “piggy bank,” a savings account for a rainy day, while all the income from flower sales, almost the families’ only other cash source, is used to cover everyday expenses.

Finally, she notes, in the flower-gatherers’ integrated pastoral system, small-scale cattle-rearing and controlled burns help reduce the risk of big, out-of-control blazes: “Within their peasant logic, which is concerned with conserving native biodiversity, cattle rearing has the function of controlling the fires because it reduces the capacity of the Cerrado grasses to burn fiercely.”

Brazil Fences In the Flowers

In 2002, the Brazilian government created Sempre-Vivas National Park, which covers 124,000 hectares (30,6410 acres) in the south of the Serra do Espinhaço in Minas Gerais state. But officialdom did so without consulting the traditional communities.

Brazilian national parks represent a radical form of conservation, a model where human occupation or livelihoods are not permitted. However, the Serra do Espinhaço park was imposed on lands traditionally used and managed sustainably by the flower-gatherers for centuries. Upon the park’s establishment, attempts were made to criminalize the families for living as they always had, according to local people.

ICMBio (the federal Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation), which administers national parks, said its policies have changed since the park’s founding in 2002.

“ICMBio does not try to limit the traditional activities of the flower-gatherers in the National Sempre-Vivas Park. On the contrary, since 2012, the Institute has been developing a series of initiatives, in constant dialogue with the traditional communities, for the participatory construction of Terms of Commitment.

“These agreements are of fundamental importance for ensuring the dignified survival of the communities without harming the conservation of the natural resources protected in the conservation unit.”

But some tensions still exist. “Until last year, flower collectors were fined, if found working in the Park,” relates Tatinha, something she says was very unjust:

“If there are still flowers and water in the Park today, it is because we’ve been taking care of the land. The authorities found it preserved, yet they want to exclude collectors. This is a serious violation of our rights.”

Monteiro agrees. “I think it is completely incoherent to create a conservation unit that is preserved precisely because of the way traditional communities have managed [the land] over the last 300 years, and then to prevent these communities from entering it.” She adds, “I was shocked by the degree and type of violence, both physical and symbolic, that these communities suffered.”

Judging by current environmental policies in Brazil, prospects don’t look good for the communities. In October 2020, the Brazilian Minister of the Environment announced the privatization of public parks to promote ecotourism.

“We used to think that state agencies were responsible for the worst violations of our rights, but here comes [Environment] Minister Ricardo Salles with this idea of privatizing the parks. If I was tense before, I’m even worse now with this greater risk of expropriation,” says Tatinha.

Mining and Agriculture Encroach

There are also other, ongoing modern threats to the flower-gatherer communities, often presented as bringing economic progress to the region. To the north of the national park, extensive eucalyptus plantations used to produce charcoal cover 300,000 hectares (741,316 acres).

“Eucalyptus has a very negative impact,” explains Tatinha. “It destroys the Cerrado and it destroys water flows, because it dries out the groundwater. Wherever eucalyptus is planted, there is no water or flowers. In contrast, we are guardians of the water.”

Science backs Tatinha’s view, with strong evidence that invasive eucalyptus in Brazil is a water hog, and that it also significantly diminishes grassland biodiversity by introducing trees. Yet there are no controls on eucalyptus plantations, as they lie outside the National Park.

Another risk: Tatinha says mining companies are encroaching on communal land. “Mining is entering in full force, especially now during the pandemic, when everything is at a standstill. [The companies] do not hold public consultations with the communities or carry out environmental impact studies. Even so, they are taking over our territories.”

According to Fernanda Monteiro, a variety of mining companies of different sizes have been arriving in the Serra, advancing exploratory plans for several ores, including manganese, iron and quartzite.

In the midst of the communities’ struggles to maintain free access to their commonly held lands, and to carry on with their ancestral ways of life, the FAO designation has given them hope, along with a new weapon — publicity.

Community members say the FAO designation allows them to campaign more effectively to gain land titles. “It makes no sense for the government to accept the designation of the flower-gatherers’ way of life as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS), and then to break up the[ir] territory, allowing in mining companies and eucalyptus monoculture, and to privatize the Park,” says Tatinha.

“We lived in invisibility for many centuries until external threats put an end to our peace,” she concludes. “Now our new visibility must bring the public policies needed to keep our way of life alive.”

This article appeared originally in Mongabay – https://news.mongabay.com

Instead of expanding destructive farming and logging, Brazil should “develop” the Amazon region by producing high-value products from its indigenous biodiversity, from nuts and fruits to medicinal plants, a top forest researcher said.

Sequencing the genomes of its many unique species, for example, could result in earnings as firms look for new medicines, or as agencies try to monitor pathogens that could spur new pandemics, he said.

Growing açaí – a native palm fruit increasingly popular internationally as a super food – similarly could net producers 10 times as much income as growing soybeans, according to Carlos Nobre, an earth systems scientist at the University of São Paulo.

The region might even be able to come up a new kind of chocolate, created from cupuaçu, an Amazon fruit, said Nobre, an Amazon expert and president of the Brazilian Panel on Climate Change.

Such shifts could potentially create millions of dollars in annual revenue for the region, and help curb forest losses that are contributing to runaway climate change and nature decline, he said.

Right now, “everything the Amazon provides goes abroad as primary products”, Nobre said. But “it is possible to have value-added products”.

Since taking office, right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro has pushed development of the Amazon region through expanded soybean farming, cattle ranching and mining.

But human rights activists say that has led to an increase in violations of indigenous rights as miners, ranchers, farmers and loggers invade indigenous land and destroy forests.

Shifting instead to more profitable use of Amazonian native species could help curb deforestation, protect indigenous communities and shore up declining rainfall in southern Brazil, experts say.

The risks of not rethinking the current Amazon development model are substantial, researchers say.

Last year, an area the size of Israel was deforested in the Amazon – which spans nine countries in South America – as destruction surged 21% in the region, according to the Amazon Conservation organization.

Amazon forest losses are changing rainfall patterns across swathes of South America, driving worsening droughts that threaten agriculture and natural area like the Pantanal, a huge wetlands that saw wildfires torch a third of its area last year.

Such shifts could have enormous economic consequences for Brazil’s broader economy, from agriculture to tourism, economic experts say.

Continuing forest losses also threaten to push the world’s biggest tropical forest into a death spiral where it begins to shift toward becoming a grasslands – a switch with huge global consequences for climate change.

“We are very close to that point of no return. If global warming continues with its pace, and if we go from 20% to 25% (deforestation), we will reach a process of savanization of 50% of the Amazon,” Nobre said by phone.

But what Nobre calls an “Amazon 4.0” development model – a shift from the current system built on expanding cattle and soybeans – could change that trajectory.

The model – based on forest conservation and better use of the region’s vast biodiversity, and involving indigenous and other traditional communities – aims to generate lasting incomes by better understanding and tapping into forest riches.

Amazon Brazil nut harvesters and acai growers, for instance, have long earned an income from standing Amazon forests.

But carrying out genetic sequencing of more of the region’s biodiversity is likely to unveil new potential harvests – including potentially new medicines.

Nobre envisions a future of Amazonian communities using 3D printers to produce fancy chocolates for the international market.

Growing use of drones could also help deliver Amazon-manufactured products to urban areas without the need for new roads and rail lines that spur forest destruction, he said.

Expanding production and processing existing forest products – including the Amazon’s huge variety of fruits and nuts – into higher-value items, rather than simply exporting the raw materials, could also bring the region boosted incomes, he said.

Researchers aim to work this year, for instance, on creating new varieties of chocolate from the Amazon’s native cacao trees but also from cupuaçu, a tree fruit often made into a sour juice but with a pod similar to cocoa.

As well, researchers are looking at how to create new products from Brazil nuts, and to produce more gourmet oils from the Amazon’s plethora of indigenous fruits and nuts, such as patauá and buriti, both harvested from forest palms.

Some of the ideas and processes are currently being tried out in an experimental laboratory in São José dos Campos in São Paulo state, Nobre said, with hopes the first of four planned laboratories in the Amazon will open by mid-year.

The local labs aim to help generate “an ecosystem” of start-ups and innovation in Amazon communities, Nobre said.

The fledgling Amazon 4.0 project, launched in 2018, is led by a group of Amazon researchers, including Nobre, and experts in new technologies.

It hopes to attract funding from banks and investment firms in 2021 to begin developing small companies in traditional Amazon communities to boost local processing industries and export businesses.

It has already received initial backing from a range of Brazilian and international foundations and institutes, as well as Australia’s government and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Perhaps its most ambitious aim is to help traditional communities in the Amazon sequence the genomes of species and microorganisms they depend on and use in things such as traditional medicine.

That could potentially provide new medical treatments or other discoveries that could be commercialized while ensuring communities that hold the traditional knowledge benefit from it.

It could also help persuade policymakers that leaving forests intact has important economic value, backers say.

Better harnessing the forest’s potential medicinal wealth is particularly important as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the world, raising demand for new medical treatments.

Hints of such benefits are already emerging, with the Kayapó indigenous people of Brazil’s Amazon Pará state currently using a drink made from vines that they say has helped them ward off the worst effects of COVID-19 – though its usefulness has not been confirmed by scientists.

What remains hugely unclear is whether income from genome sequencing and better use of the region’s biodiversity could eventually match the money to be made from ranching, mining and logging.

Displacing a development model built on agribusiness expansion also will be very difficult in a country where the industry has close ties to political power, Nobre said.

But Amazon researchers say the need for a shift in development models is obvious.

With forest losses surging, threatening to spark runaway climate change, “we need a zero-deforestation policy,” Nobre said.

Fábio Zuker is the author of The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon. He is a writer of essays, chronicles, and reports. He holds a master’s degree from Paris’s School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences and is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of São Paulo

This article was produced by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Visit them at https://news.trust.org/

When the dam holding back a trailings pond from the Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine burst, some 13 million cubic meters (460 million cubic feet) of mud suddenly rushed through the valley.

Two-hundred-and-seventy people are thought to have been buried alive by the wave of mud, with local residents and employees of the Vale mining company among them. Four days after the accident, aid workers found the body of Helena’s son Luiz, and then the bodies of Camila and her father two days after that.

Luiz’s wife Fernanda was not found until 22 days later, and her mother-in-law is among those whom aid workers are still trying to find. Neither the mining company Vale nor any government authorities have ever contacted Helena.

“During the past year, I thought things were getting better, but the pain is still enormous — especially because we know that it could have been avoided,” the 62-year-old said.

A Clear Warning Ignored

The event shocked Brazil, especially as the public was already familiar with such images. Three years prior, another iron ore trailings dam had burst just 120 kilometers (75 miles) away from Brumadinho.

Nineteen people were killed in the city of Mariana, where thousands became homeless in an instant, and rivers in the region, including the Rio Doce, were heavily contaminated.

Vale, a subsidiary of the Samarco mining company, promised to quickly compensate victims and their families, as well as pledging to rebuild the region. Still, despite promises that such a tragedy would never be allowed to happen again, it did once again in Brumadinho. “Looking back, Mariana was a clear warning; unfortunately, that warning went unheeded,” says Helena Taliberti.

Mining expert Susanne Friess of the Germany-based Catholic aid organization Misereor visited Brumadinho two months before the dam burst. Her organization oversees a number of social and environmental projects in the mining region.

“At the time, a number of people told me they had been trying to protect local water sources and block the expansion of mining projects,” Friess tells. “They were also very concerned that a tragedy like that in Mariana could happen in Brumadinho.”

Lawsuit Against German Inspectors

Earlier this week, state prosecutors in the state of Minas Gerais filed manslaughter charges against 11 Vale managers as well as five employees of the German Technical Inspection Association (TÜV), which certifies dam safety.

Investigators claim that those responsible were well aware of the unstable nature of the dam, but consciously determined to hide that fact. Investigators also discovered a secret list of 10 other dangerous dams compiled by managers at Vale.

Susanne Friess sees that as a clear indication that the catastrophes at Mariana and Brumadinho share a common cause: “The companies were well aware of the situation, but neglected to act in either case. Therefore, I have to conclude that no lessons were learnt from the dam burst in Mariana.”

Still, Friess says the approach of Brazil’s prosecutors gives her grounds for hope. She says that during private conversations with prosecutors she has had the impression that they are determined to learn from past tragedies and ensure that nothing similar happens again in the future.

Yet, even now, she says, four years after the Mariana tragedy, the region is mired in chaos, with no one stepping up to take responsibility and companies and authorities unwilling to provide compensation to victims.

Ticking Time Bomb

Despite Friess’ optimism about prosecutors’ intentions, she says she gets an uneasy feeling when looking at Brazil’s 770 similar dams. “The construction and inspection of those dams represent a ticking time bomb. Those bombs could be defused, but that would require the political will to do so,” she says, adding, “They could be decommissioned and stabilized; that would at least delay any future catastrophe.”

According to media reports, some 55 Brazilian dams are currently being operated without proper certification, and another 41 have been temporarily shut down due to acute safety concerns.

“That is extremely worrisome for people living near those dams. They are completely incapable of deterring just how high the risks are,” says Friess. “They cannot count on authorities, nor can they count on the inspectors or the mining companies. And the big question is: Who can guarantee their safety?”

Brazil’s current federal government is intent on expanding mining in the country, even in the largely unspoiled Amazon region. When Susanne Friess thinks of the billions of tons of tailings that such a program would produce, she calls it “a nightmare scenario.”

“I don’t think mining can ever be sustainable. That concept itself is a contradiction,” she says, adding that the best one could ever hope for in that instance would be to avoid the worst possible catastrophes.

Yet Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has so far seemed more interested in weakening the country’s environmental and safety standards rather than strengthening them. “The political power constellation does not look good right now,” says Friess.

DW

The reason for the difference is that past research only looked at the mines themselves, and not at the ancillary development that accompanies and surrounds the mines.

Using satellite data, the researchers found that deforestation from mining encompassed 11,670 square kilometers (roughly 4,500 square miles) between 2005 and 2015, an area twice the size of the state of Delaware.

The startling level of Amazon deforestation, they say, demands immediate action on the part of mining companies and government — especially because Brazil’s Temer administration seems intent on opening vast swathes of the country to mining in the near future.

The international group of researchers, organized around the University of Vermont, published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

The research used satellite monitoring to study the fifty largest mining sites in the Amazon region, and analyzed the rates of deforestation in and around those sites between 2005 and 2015.

Strikingly, the study found that deforestation outside of and surrounding the mining-lease areas removes twelve times as many trees as within the lease boundaries.

Further, this loss extends to as much as 70 kilometers (approximately 43 miles) from the lease areas as infrastructure such as roads, staff housing, and airports cut into the forest.

“Our findings show that Amazon deforestation associated with mining extends remarkable distances from the point of mineral extraction,” said Gillian Galford, a study co-author with the Gund Institute and Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont (UVM).

Meanwhile, a preliminary study from Brazil’s space agency, INPE, found that deforestation in Brazil decreased 16 percent between August 2016 and July 2017.

Laura Sonter, a co-author of the UVM study and also with the Gund Institute and Rubenstein School, warned that the INPE finding doesn’t mean things are fine: “The problem is that deforestation rates are still up over the last 3 years compared to years before that, and a drop in deforestation still means that 6,624 square kilometers [some 2,557 square miles] of Amazon forest was cleared [from August 2016 to July 2017].

Additionally, deforestation rates are expected to increase again next year, due to the current drought and expected rural fires.” Amazon wildfires are at record levels this year, with most of them caused by people.

Sonter told Mongabay that the UVM research is significant because of the way it reassesses the impact mining has on deforestation. “Mining is typically thought to cause about 1 percent of tropical deforestation worldwide, but our results suggest impacts are almost 10 times greater than this.

“We found most deforestation occurred outside mining leases and we were also surprised to find these off-lease impacts to extend 70 kilometers from the site of operation. Previous estimates suggest indirect effects occur only up to 10 kilometers.”

“The threats and potential consequences of mining on deforestation in the Amazon are significant,” Sonter added.

These findings come as Brazil’s government considers a series of measures to ease restrictions on mining in the Amazon region. In August, an international outcry spurred the country’s judiciary to block President Temer’s plans to open up the RENCA reserve to mining.

The reserve covers 4.6 million hectares (17,800 square miles), an area roughly equal to Denmark. RENCA holds minerals such as gold, nickel and manganese, but it is also rich in biodiversity with large tracts of rainforest and numerous protected conservation units. The area is also home to two indigenous reserves, which experts say would be put at serious risk if mining operations began nearby.

Pará state deputy Eduardo Costa said that he suspects that the areas affected by deforestation due to mining “are much greater than the figure the study presents.”

He explained that although pig-iron smelters are not as active in the Amazon region as they once were, the remaining facilities still use charcoal obtained from wood. “Maybe 90 percent of the wood that was used in these ovens that process pig-iron came from illegal sources, and this created a big impact on deforestation.”

A 2012 report in Carta Capital pointed to criminal activities in the pig-iron production chain, including illegal charcoal operations, bribes and slave labor.

In August, the Brazilian forest research institute IMAZON noted that a Temer administration decree to reduce protections for the Jamanxim National Forest would also benefit mining companies.

Although the measure ordering this reduction was vetoed, the president has since re-submitted the rollback in the conserved area’s size under a bill to congress, and experts believe it is likely to be approved.

Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy said that it was unprepared to comment on the study presented in Nature Communications or on measures the government is taking to prevent deforestation. A representative of the country’s mining agency did not respond to calls or an email request for comment.

Nilo D’Avila manages Greenpeace’s campaigns in Brazil. He said that Greenpeace wasn’t surprised by the study findings. “The government uses [the Carajás mine] as an example of mining and [forest] preservation. But when we look around the Carajás mine, we find deforestation that is much higher than average.”

Carajás is an open-pit mine operated by the Vale Mining Company in the Amazonian state of Pará. It is the world’s largest iron mine. Located within the Carajás National Forest, it is estimated to contain 7.2 billion tons of iron.

The Carajás mine serves as an example of the economic potential of mining and of mining’s environmental impact in the Amazon region. Iron ore is Brazil’s largest mineral export and accounts for 10 percent of the country’s total exports. However, satellite time-lapse photography from the UVM study shows how the mine has contributed to deforestation.

D’Avila said that the government is considering easing mining restrictions in a vast area along Brazil’s northern and western borders — a mostly wild region 300 times the size of RENCA, covering 1.7 million square kilometers of the Amazon biome.

These are “areas that are still not designated [as protected], with few conservation areas. Brazil has few relationships, especially in the Amazon region, with its neighbors. So, the Brazilian government sees a way of having business relationships with these countries through mining, road construction, through ‘progress.'”

The findings of the UVM study clearly demonstrate that opening such a large area of native forest to mining and its accompanying infrastructure would result in significant deforestation.

Also, just as clearly, mining companies are eager to enlarge their Amazonian footprint: “Throughout Brazil, mining leases, concessions, and exploration permits cover 1.65 million square kilometers [637,068 square miles] of land, of which 60 percent is located in the Amazon forest,” notes the UVM study.

A closer look at the Carajás mine shows what could lie ahead environmentally for the Amazon and other parts of Brazil if these many leases, concessions and exploration permits are allowed to advance. A railway carries the iron from the Carajás mine to foundries in Bacarena and São Luís.

Both the mine and the railway were funded by the World Bank in the 1980s. Residents have been fighting to stop the company from doubling the rail line for years. One reason for the battle, Brazil’s G1 news outlet reported earlier this year, is the number of people who are killed or maimed by the freight trains.

Also, the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI) and other human rights groups say that the doubling of the railway was approved before an environmental impact assessment was completed and without consulting the indigenous communities affected, a violation of Brazil’s international agreements.

Prof. Philip Fearnside, who studies hydroelectric dams in the Amazon region, spoke about the Carajás mine. “Aside from the hole in the ground, the big impact is the charcoal [used to process the ore]. What limits that is these pig-iron smelters, not the amount of ore that is dug out.”

In May of this year, Brazil’s environmental agency, IBAMA, destroyed 66 illegal ovens for producing charcoal in northeastern Pará. Between 1998 and 2014, deforestation in Pará outpaced all other states in the Amazon region, and mining contributed to that impact.

The Carajás mine is largely powered by hydroelectricity from the Tucuruí dam, which brings up another major concern. Environmental impact assessments for proposed mines in Brazil don’t cover the massive energy requirements for processing ore, energy which in the Amazon generally comes from hydroelectric dams.

Hydropower has its own suite of environmental hazards, including deforestation, major greenhouse gas releases from reservoirs, and disrupted aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem. Dams, like mines, also bring ancillary development, as laborers arrive in a region to build infrastructure, and then settle locally.

Dams also bring new roads and transmission lines. They often do substantial social harm as well, disrupting and displacing indigenous and traditional riverine settlements.

Mining, experts agree, is both a boon and bane to modern civilization: it provides critical materials for everyday items ranging from cell phones and computers to cars and home appliances. But without regulation it can cause major deforestation and pollute rivers and aquifers.

Iron tailings dam collapse that killed 19 people and contaminated 500 miles of the Rio Doce all the way to the Atlantic Ocean — Brazil’s worst environmental disaster — is a warning to the nation and the world of what can happen when mining profits trump environmental protection and public safety, say experts.

Sonter suggested one important step Brazil could take to minimize mining-related deforestation: require an assessment not only of the immediate on-site impacts of mines, but also of off-lease impacts prior to approving projects.

“With this information, action can then be taken to avoid, reduce and mitigate [impacts]. Avoidance measures could involve siting new roads in areas of degraded and cleared [land], rather than through intact pristine forest.

Mitigation efforts may involve establishment and management of new protected areas in the surrounding landscape to prevent further deforestation.” Likewise, assessments should review whether new Amazon mines will require new hydroelectric dams to power the ore’s processing.

Considering the threat that mining poses to Amazonian forests, and the crucial importance of the region’s forests to carbon storage and to curbing climate change, controlling mining impacts could be crucial to the future of both Brazil and the planet.

Galford is hopeful that the UVM study’s findings will lead to positive action: “Many of these [mining] corporations may take this as an opportunity to step up and take responsibility for off-site deforestation. In fact, the world may demand it.”

Citation:

Sonter, L. J., Herrera, D., Barrett, D. J., Galford, G. L., Moran, C. J., Soares-Filho, B. S.: (2017) Mining drives extensive deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Nature Communications; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00557-w

This article appeared originally in Mongabay – https://news.mongabay.com

The reserve, which was established in 1984, covers about 18,000 square miles (46,610 square kilometers) and is thought to be rich in minerals such as copper and gold.

The government framed the decision as an effort to bring new investment and jobs to a country that recently emerged from the longest recession in its history. It also said that just under a third of the reserve would be opened up to mining, and that permissions would only be granted in specific areas.

“Permission to develop research and mining applies only to areas where there are no other restrictions, such as protection of native vegetation, conservation units, indigenous lands and areas in border strips,” a statement by the government said.

The decree comes as the country reported a 21-percent fall in deforestation rates within the country’s Legal Amazon region, which includes Amapá and Pará, in the two years from August 2015.

In July, Brazil announced a plan to revitalize its mining sector, and increase its share of the economy from four percent to six percent. The industry employs 200,000 people in a country where a record 14 million are out of work.

However, activists argue that the move could damage the world’s largest and most diverse tropical rainforest. Opposition politician Randolfe Rodrigues called it “the biggest crime against the Amazon forest since the 1970s.”

Brazilian public policy coordinator of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Michel de Souza, described the announcement as a “catastrophe,” which failed to consult the public and could leave the region vulnerable to corruption and conflict.

A report released by the WWF last week also warned that mining in the area would cause “demographic explosion, deforestation, the destruction of water resources, the loss of biodiversity and the creation of land conflict.”
The Amazon rainforest covers an area of 1.2 billion acres and produces 20 percent of the world’s oxygen. But deforestation and mining have destroyed it at an alarming rate.

Non-profit organization The Rainforest Foundation estimates that about one acre (4,046 square meters) is wiped out every second, and an estimated 20 percent of the rainforest has been destroyed over the past 40 years.

DW

In the late 1970s, Raimunda Gomes da Silva and her husband, João Pereira da Silva, moved to Tucuruí in Pará state. João went to work on the dam being built there. With the money he earned, the couple bought a plot of land and built a home.

“This same money that we bought with the dam, the dam took back,” Raimunda said during an interview in Altamira.

“Our land was flooded. Our house was flooded. So we left Tucuruí and, in the 90s, landed on the island.” The island Raimunda refers to lies in the Xingu River, also in Pará state. While it offered the couple a safe haven for some twenty years, another big hydroelectric dam, Belo Monte, forced them out. This time, João suffered a stroke, which Raimunda says turned him from her husband into a child.

Tragic stories of displacement and loss like this one are fairly common in the Brazilian Amazon as new dams are built. But what is little mentioned in the retelling is the intimate relationship between the hydropower boom and a thriving mining industry with its hunger for thousands of megawatts of generating capacity.

Some 40 new dams with generating capacities of more than 30 megawatts (MW) are slated for the Brazilian Amazon over the next twenty years. Meanwhile the Ministry of Mines and Energy’s National Mining Plan 2030 calls Amazonia “the current frontier of expansion for mining in Brazil, which sparks optimism and, at the same time, concerns.”

Victims of Mining Expansion

One of the central concerns identified by Brazil’s mining plan is the clash between land use and occupation (such as that experienced by Raimunda and João).

Conflicts arise over widely divergent views regarding development, where the lives and livelihoods of indigenous and traditional inhabitants collide with the interests of large, export-driven, capital-intensive mega-mining and dam projects designed by corporations and supported by the government.

Raimunda and João’s lives were upended twice by the mining industry’s energy demands. The link was explicit with the Tucuruí dam, built on the Tocantins River primarily to power nearby aluminum production facilities.

According to 1987 projections by Electronorte made three years after the dam was completed, 49.9 percent of Tucuruí’s energy was destined for aluminum and alumina production at Albrás in Bacarena and Alumar in São Luís, Maranhão.

Likewise with the couple’s relocation from the island on the Xingu River. Canadian gold mining firm Belo Sun plans to open the largest gold mine in Brazil adjacent to the new Belo Monte dam. The firm’s website claims more than a million ounces of gold can be garnered from the mine and that its energy will come directly from a substation at Belo Monte.

Still, the website indicates there is only about 1 gram of gold per ton. According to mining engineer Juan Doblas, who works with the environmental advocacy group Instituto SocioAmbiental (ISA), without the dam’s energy, the mine wouldn’t be feasible.

Mining Energy Use

With the introduction in 1995 of Brazil’s National Interconnected System (SIN) electrical transmission grid, it has become harder to pinpoint the direct relationship between a specific new dam and foundries.

Philip Fearnside, a researcher who focuses on Brazilian hydropower dams and climate change, described the change. “Before, with Tucuruí, there was a special transmission line that was straight from there. Two of them: one to [Albrás] and one to Alumar. Whereas now it’s all mixed in the SIN.”

Still, residents along the Tapajós River are highly suspicious concerning the true purpose behind the controversial São Luiz de Tapajós mega-dam. Many believe its 10,000 MW of generating power were destined for the nearby Juruti bauxite mine to make aluminum for export.

Environmental activists, indigenous communities and traditional riverside dwellers in the Tapajós River basin recently fought successfully to halt construction of São Luiz de Tapajós. IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental regulatory agency, archived the project last year. Nonetheless, opponents are concerned that the government could re-start the project any time.

Interviewed shortly after IBAMA’s decision last year, Cacique Juarez Saw Munduruku of the Sawré Muybu indigenous community, revealed he wasn’t resting easy.

“I worry a little. I worry because I don’t believe in the Brazilian government. They could appeal the decision on the licensing to re-start the studies. That’s my concern. So that’s why we can’t stop fighting. We’re going to keep fighting until the government abandons building anywhere on the Tapajós because the Tapajós is part of the Munduruku.”

A spokesperson for Alcoa, which operates the Juruti mine, countered that producing energy at the São Luiz de Tapajós dam wouldn’t necessarily benefit them. “From the energy perspective, Juruti’s connection to the grid depends on transmission infrastructure, not on new generation.”

Though SIN has erased the obvious one-to-one link between a particular dam and a particular mine, that doesn’t diminish the mining industry’s urgent need for energy, which can be met by Amazon hydropower.

The Pará state Mining Plan 2013-2030 issued by the Secretary of Economic Development, Mining and Energy makes clear that a lack of affordable energy stands in the way of attracting new investments.

The plan affirms that a lack of energy “represents a significant challenge to the growth of the state’s industrial chain,” which ultimately “threatens the aluminum industry itself in Brazil.”

Amazonian Mineral Wealth

The northern Brazilian state of Pará, traversed by the lower Amazon River and major tributaries including the Tapajós and Xingu rivers, is one of Brazil’s leading mineral producers. It also illustrates Brazil’s mineral wealth.

The state’s Secretary of Economic Development, Mining and Energy (SEDEME) stated that the mining sector makes up two-thirds of Pará’s exports and accounts for 13 percent of the state’s Gross Domestic Product. An overwhelming 85 percent of Brazil’s total bauxite originates in Pará, SEDEME said.

Bauxite is the essential ore needed in the highly energy-intensive process for making aluminum. Alcoa has been operating the Juruti mine on the western edge of Pará state since 2006. Juruti sits atop what some estimate to be the largest bauxite deposit in the world.

Lúcio Flávio Pinto, a recognized journalist from the region, estimates that its three strata layers hold 700 million tons of bauxite. Alcoa says there are 21.1 million bone-dry metric tons (bdmt) there.

The company’s website notes that Alcoa World Alumina and Chemicals (AWAC) has contracts for its bauxite with customers in China, Brazil, Europe and the United States, and the company estimates the value of these 2017 third-party supply agreements at nearly $665 million.

Bauxite is Brazil’s second-largest mineral export, with 10.4 million tons sent abroad in 2016. Manganese is third with two million tons. In terms of market value, however, gold is Brazil’s second most important mineral. Gold exports in 2016 were valued at US$ 2.89 billion.

Iron ore is Brazil’s largest mineral export, although price slumps halved its value from nearly US$ 26 billion in 2014 to just over US$ 13 billion in 2016. Still, the amounts mined stayed relatively stable, increasing from 344 million tons in 2014 to 373.9 million tons in 2016.

Minerals such as these are critical to the world economy and ubiquitous to daily life. People across the world use aluminum in cell phones, bicycles and cars, for example. And the power from hydroelectric dams ensures that refrigerators, lights and air conditioning keep running.

Still, Brazil’s citizens and environment pay for the country’s commitment to large-scale mining — and for its lack of commitment to safety and stewardship. For example, the country’s largest-ever environmental disaster occurred in 2015, when the Fundão iron mine tailings dam failed in Minas Gerais.

The dam collapse killed 19 people and impacted 1.6 million people in the region. Its failure poured 50 million tons of ore and toxic waste into Brazil’s Doce River, polluting the stream and croplands, killing fish and wildlife.

It also contaminated drinking water with toxic sludge for the river’s 853-kilometer (530 mile) length. People in Pará worry because the same technology is now being proposed to store waste from Belo Sun’s proposed gold mine near the Belo Monte dam.

Similarly, Alcoa’s Juruti mine has been controversial since its inception, and has seen public mobilization and protests against its negative social and environmental impacts, such as water pollution.

The Tucuruí dam, which was built before Brazil passed a law requiring environmental impact assessments prior to construction, eliminated 1,783 square kilometers (688 square miles) of forested land, displaced indigenous and traditional riverside dwellers, and damaged fisheries.

Fearnside argues that since so much power from the dam was committed to aluminum production, other dams had to be built to provide electricity to cities in the region. Further, like other dams in the tropics, rotting vegetation in the reservoir produces methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.

These impacts, he wrote, can only be properly assessed once it’s clear who benefits from a dam. “Unfortunately, this did not occur in the case of Tucuruí, which mainly benefits multinational aluminum companies.”

Marriage of Mining and Dams

The relationship between mining and hydropower is easily explained: the mining and processing of metals, particularly aluminum, requires vast amounts of electricity. Fearnside reports that fifty percent of Alcoa’s overhead at its Albrás and Alumar facilities stem from energy costs, that’s according to a statement by the company’s Latin America and the Caribbean Director at the 2010 International Aluminum Conference in São Paulo, Brazil.

However, the abundance of rivers in the Amazon basin combined with the region’s impressive mineral wealth, have made it attractive for planners to think strategically about supplying the energy for processing ore through hydropower.

The hitch, according to Doblas, is that little heed is being paid to the environmental and social consequences of this strategy. “The truth is that installing a hydropower dam provokes the installation of mining projects. This never, or extremely rarely, is integrated into the licensing process as a synergetic effect.”

In Ocekadi, a book published by International Rivers last year, Daniela Fernandes Alarcon, Maurício Torres and Natalia Ribas Guerrero highlight the financial interests — including mining — behind the infrastructure plans in the Tapajós region, pointing to evidence in Brazil’s media.

For example, in 2011, the Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s most respected newspapers, reported on a round of investment aimed at the Amazon region, and concluded that: “the electricity sector is the driving force behind this investment.”

The report described plans for hydroelectric dams such as Belo Monte on the Xingu River, Santo Antonio on the Teles Pires River and the São Luiz de Tapajós project. It said that these dams should produce a 13-percent increase in energy from the region and thus “[become] one of the engines for growth.”

The Amazon basin, and Pará state in particular, offer several clear examples of mines associated with hydropower projects. Besides the Tucuruí dam and the foundries in Bacarena and São Luis, there is also the bauxite mine at Paragominas which the Norwegian firm Hydro acquired from Alcoa last year. Although not active yet, the Belo Sun gold mine would take advantage of the Belo Monte dam’s power supply.

Itaituba is a small city on the Tapajós River that has been a hub for the gold mining industry since the 1980s. Mongabay reached out to members of Itaituba’s Chamber of Commerce to get their perspective on the benefits of mining and dams to the region, but they declined to comment.

Generally, proposed Amazon hydropower dams are dissociated from the mining they will support. The 2,350 MW Cachoeira Porteira dam, for example, was first proposed in the 1980s as an alternative power supply for the city of Manaus and has yet to be built. But the prospective location is in Pará on the Trombetas River near Cruz Alta, home to a large bauxite deposit that Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN) aims to begin mining in 2022.

Complicating matters, the bauxite lies underneath land claimed by a quilombola, a community of the descendants of escaped slaves. The slow titling process which would give a land deed to the community, and the proximity of the mining interests offer an example of simmering land rights tensions in the region.

MRN is a consortium made of up mining companies including Vale, Alcoa, BHP Billiton, RioTintoAlcan, CBA, and the Norwegian firm Hydro. A spokesperson for MRN said that the company has no relationship with the Cachoeira Porteira dam project or any other hydroelectric dam along the Trombetas River. He also said: “There are no conflicts between MRN and quilombola communities that seek land titling.”

Yet Lúcia Andrade of the Pro-Indian Commission disputed this. “Since 2013, MRN has been expanding its extraction area inside the quilombola territories. Now, in April 2017, MRN requested a preliminary license to expand mining even further onto Quilombola land.”

For Doblas, the idea that MRN has no interest in the Cachoeira Porteira dam is laughable. “The mining companies aren’t paying for these projects directly. They’re not lobbying for these projects. But they will benefit, and these projects will facilitate the arrival of more mining.”

Dams are just one element in a growing infrastructure web in the Amazon. New roads, railway lines and shipping canals, facilitated by locks associated with dams, are being planned in the Tapajós basin and elsewhere to cheaply transport commodities.

For Greenpeace’s Danicley Aguiar, this development is taking place without prioritizing the interests and needs of the region’s most vulnerable: “You have a construction boom, and you get a surge in job opportunities and what-not, but once the project is done, the only winners are short-term interests.”

The Belo Monte dam’s reservoir showing how dry weather has reduced its water level and exposed trees that had previously been submerged. This fluctuation in water levels contributes significantly to greenhouse gas formation when new plant growth on exposed ground is covered again with water and decomposes.

As a result, Amazon dams contribute to climate change, so they not only have local and regional environmental impacts, but also global ones. Photo by Zoe Sullivan
Industry lobbies government

Interests such as mining and agribusiness make their influence felt in Brasilia. Aluminum exporters, for example, have been given large breaks on their energy costs, and they pay a lower tax rate than companies that produce for the domestic market.

Corporate profitability, for example, was guaranteed to Albrás in the final years of Brazil’s dictatorship. At the time, the government granted Albrás a 20-year energy contract that guaranteed the price of electricity wouldn’t exceed 20 percent of the global price of aluminum, ensuring ongoing profits.

Fearnside reports that the contract was renewed in 2004 with substantial new subsidies. Norwegian firm Hydro is now the majority shareholder in Albrás, along with a consortium of Japanese companies.

Aluminum exports are likewise exempt from the country’s main tax, ICMS, (Imposto sobre Circulação de Mercadorias e Serviços – Tax on Circulation of Merchandise and Services). Since aluminum produced in the Amazon is mainly for export, this has a significant impact.

Fearnside says that Albrás and Alumar pay roughly 8 percent in taxes once incentives and other benefits are taken into consideration. Their colleagues in the southern part of the country, producing for the domestic market, pay a 20 percent tax rate. This corporate welfare impacts competitiveness, giving exporters a serious advantage.

“Our raw materials leave without paying taxes, so we are still like a colony from the early times of our history,” Eduardo Costa told Mongabay. Costa is a physician and has been a conservative member of Pará’s state legislature since 2002.

He argues that Brazil’s Kandir law, which would allow states to tax unfinished goods, needs to be implemented urgently. Since only finished goods are taxed, Costa says, the state is losing out on a significant potential stream of revenue because both ore and the energy produced by hydropower dams leaves the state untaxed.

“Neither mining, which the Kandir law [neglects] and has been costing the state for years, nor our own energy production generate dividends for the state,” he told Mongabay.

At the same time, he said, dams and other projects have social impacts. “There are areas of misery that were created by these mega-projects,” Costa told Mongabay, describing the dramatic increase in violence in Altamira since the construction of the nearby Belo Monte dam.

While some companies benefit, Brazil accumulates a series of financial, social and environmental impacts. In 2013, Brazil exported aluminum bars worth US $789.9 million, generating US $63.2 million in tax income, a figure Fearnside’s book calls “minuscule in comparison to the financial cost and the damages inflicted by the hydroelectric dams that are behind the industry.”

He argues as well that substantial government subsidies for export-oriented industries end up undercutting the power of domestically-focused industries. This has shifted the balance of political influence to exporters through a feedback loop that means they are likely to see more policies enacted that benefit them, such as dam, canal and railway construction.

The Resource Curse

Raimunda and João’s story brings the human impact of mining and dam construction into focus. It is also an example of the “resource curse” — a phenomenon in which many of the world’s most mineral-wealthy countries nonetheless report staggering levels of poverty and inequality.

Experiences like those of Raimunda and João are the focus for Daniel Rondinelli Roquetti’s doctoral research at the University of São Paulo. He is studying the lifestyle changes faced by people who have been displaced by hydropower dams.

“Brazil generally exports people’s lives in aluminum bars,” he says. “There are a series of impacts in terms of human rights and environmental damage.” These impacts, Roquetti argues, don’t figure into costs the country shoulders to produce aluminum.

Before the Belo Monte dam was built, Raimunda and João split their time between their island home where they fished, gathered fruit, and planted vegetables; and a city home that gave them access to markets to sell their produce.

Their city home was a humble place in an informal community next to the river’s edge, minutes from central Altamira. The community flooded seasonally, yet was vibrant with fisherfolk and other families.

Now the couple lives in a cinder block house in a resettlement community four kilometers from the river. Since there’s no public transportation, Raimunda must pay for a motorbike taxi to get from the house to the city center. The informal social network the couple once enjoyed has been disrupted because all the riverside families have been displaced.

In the shady gap between their cinder block house and the concrete wall surrounding it live Raimunda’s tortoises. She feeds them tomatoes and other vegetables. She also identifies with them. “I’ve promised not to eat them,” she explains.

Once she and João can return to their island, Raimunda has promised to free the creatures. “I’m going to live where I like, and they’re going to live where they need to be.”

This article appeared originally in Mongabay – https://news.mongabay.com

What we expected to find was a serious crime involving illegal timber extraction on federal lands, and possible infringement of labor laws, with workers held in conditions analogous to slavery.

What we encountered instead was a broader context of criminal activities that appears to explain legislation just rushed through Brazil’s National Congress and awaiting President Temer’s signature to turn over very large swaths of already protected Amazon rainforest to land thieves, mining interests and agribusiness.

Using satellite images, experts had identified illegal logging activities to the east of BR-163, just south of the town of Vila de Três Bueiros, in the rural district of Trairão, in Pará state. To reach the illegal logging camp, we needed to drive a precarious dirt road that crossed the Branco River on a bridge built by the loggers themselves.

After a few miles, our truck got stuck and we got out to push. As we sank deeper into the mud, a man, about 40, appeared from the direction of the river. Visibly exhausted, and initially mistrustful, he said he’d come from a garimpo, a mine.

That was the first inkling we had that in addition to illegal loggers, there were miners operating inside the conservation unit illegally extracting cassiterite, the ore from which tin is extracted.

The miner, on the verge of collapse, begrudgingly told us he’d left the mine due to the terrible working conditions and because he hadn’t been paid. He’d been walking since the previous day, initially with a companion, who had given up, completely worn out. Turning one last look eastward to the way he’d come, he walked quickly west.

Then a logger arrived on a tractor and, thanks to his vast experience with Amazonian mud, we were soon hauled out. He warned us in a friendly, unembarrassed way: “The bridge you need to cross doesn’t exist anymore. We destroyed it so IBAMA and ICMBio (Brazil’s environmental agencies) won’t disturb us. Without a bridge, they only get there by helicopter.”

We weren’t sure whether to believe the logger, but just to be sure, we detoured south to where the BR-163 crosses the Branco River. There we rented a canoe with an outboard motor and traveled upriver for an hour to where the bridge should have been.

Sure enough, we came round a river bend and saw the wrecked bridge, plus a dilapidated ferryboat on the east bank at the border of the conservation unit. So the logger had been truthful: the illegal loggers decided who came across and who didn’t.

Another surprise at the ferry port: six men were stranded on the opposite bank, trying to get hold of the cables to haul the ferry over. Reluctant to say much, they indicated that they weren’t working for the loggers.

They, too, were miners, who had fallen out with the mine owner, who, they said, had “done them over.” Trying to get away, they’d set up an impromptu camp two days earlier and now had little food and no drinking water.

The predicament in which these men found themselves was no surprise: impoverished workers at clandestine mines are almost always severely exploited by the mine “owners,” who make fortunes at their expense. Something similar goes on with illegal logging operations in the Amazon, where sawmill owners, hiding behind a façade of legality, exploit local rural laborers who often work in slavery-like conditions.

What we hadn’t expected in our search for illegal loggers on federal lands, was to instead find illegal miners there. But, as we learned first hand, for the wealthy men behind such operations, it makes no difference whether they are extracting timber or tin: what is important is to make money.

Forest Degradation

Brazilian authorities have known for some time that illegal logging was occurring on a considerable scale in the region. In February 2006, the federal government created a corridor of conservation units on both sides of the BR-163 to put an end to illegal deforestation, which had grown exponentially due to the access the road offered.

The conservation units had not been implemented, but their creation had stopped most deforestation, since it was mainly land thieves who were partially clearing the forest at that time with the intention of selling the cleared land at high prices to cattle ranchers.

Once the conservation units were created, it meant the land could not be as easily bought or sold for big profits, so the cutting declined.

But other ways of exploiting the land and making money were found.

According to Juan Doblas, from the geoprocessing laboratory of the Brazilian NGO Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA), “while deforestation for cattle ranching ended, the plundering of the forest by loggers gained momentum.”

This activity was more difficult to monitor and control because the loggers don’t clear the entire forest, but only extract the valuable trees. The severe damage they do to the understory, officially called “forest degradation,” mostly goes undetected by satellite monitoring, which only records what is known as “forest devastation” — the clear cutting of rainforest.

“Warming” Wood

According to studies, almost all timber leaving this region is illegal, as it is mainly harvested on indigenous lands and conservation units. But once cut, the wood is transported, traded and even exported as if it had been logged legally.

Public Prosecutor Fabiana Schneider explained to Mongabay that there are various ways of “warming” wood, as the magic of legalizing illegal timber is called.

“The techniques go from attaching licenses granted for one area where logging is permitted to timber plundered from protected areas to using sophisticated devices, such as license cloning or even to the hacking of the computers of [federal] environmental bodies to print licenses.”

The claims as to timber origins on these licenses are often patently false. Mongabay was shown a license, issued in 2007, for timber in a sawmill yard owned by Valmir Climaco, now mayor of the town of Itaituba.

According to this document, the timber was bought in the city of Belém close to the Atlantic Ocean and had been transported 1,132 kilometers inland, up the Amazon River to Itaituba on the Tapajós River to be milled.

That’s an absurd official story made more absurd by the timber-rich conservation units located near the mill. And clearly, law enforcement is either grossly negligent or corrupt in monitoring such licenses.

We tracked Climaco down at the Itaituba town garage, packed full of broken-down public vehicles. After we showed him the license, he replied, with no signs of embarrassment:

“We get timber from many different places. It must be wood that we bought in Belém, unprocessed, to cut into planks in our mill.” Not a convincing explanation as, according to the license, the wood had already been processed when it was purchased.

As for the absurdity of transporting timber so far? The mayor, who has been fined millions of dollars for environmental crimes, had a ready answer: “My dear, do you know what is the cheapest means of transport in the world? It’s by river.”

Luiz Carlos Tremonte, president of the Union of Timber Industries of Southwest Pará (Simaspa) for many years, was blunt in explaining what goes on:

“You get approval for a forestry management project in one area, which has little wood, and extract the timber from an area beside it or from anywhere else. The license you get from the project “warms” the timber. It’s illegal to do this? Yes, but it’s what happens and everyone knows about it.”

Tremonte is an avid supporter of the timber industry. He argues that logging is so healthy for the forest that the government ought to create a program to pay loggers for taking out timber because “the logger extends the life of the forest.” Even so, he openly admits: “The timber industry operates illegally.”

In the Amazon, it is quite common for those committing environmental crimes, such as Tremonte and Climaco, to hold political positions. Another example: the mayor of Trairão, Valdinei José Ferreira, nicknamed Django, also a logger, has been fined millions of dollars for illegal logging, though his profits likely far exceed that.

He and his fellow loggers regard environmental crime and the fines it may bring as a bureaucratic detail — simply a cost of doing business.

When we asked Climaco if the loggers face problems in their logging operations, he replied on camera: “It’s easy today to extract timber. What is difficult is to sell it without documentation.”

Public Prosecutor Fabiana Schneider explained that illegal logging is “highly profitable and socially acceptable, or even seen as something good, so the criminals are falsely seen as a successful businessmen and creators of jobs.”

According to the prosecutor, this aura of public approval covers up the fact that “crimes are being committed — contemporary slavery, rural homicide, invasion of public lands, stealing and receiving public property, along with a huge chain of corruption.”

Far from being viewed as a minor offense, “this kind of crime needs to be seen for what it is: criminal organizations plundering one of our greatest environmental riches — the forest and its biodiversity,” Schneider said.

For Tremonte, a major problem that forces the timber sector to operate illegally arises from the country’s labor legislation, which, according to him, “is implemented very strictly in the region. You the boss are always wrong.”

The boss, he says, “is seen as the enemy by the state, and the boss is not the enemy, quite the contrary.”

His opinion isn’t shared by Friar Xavier Plassat, coordinator of the Campaign Against Slave Labor run by the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT).

A Dominican friar internationally known for his struggle to combat contemporary slavery, Plassat says that it is not just a question of the loggers not complying with the country’s labor laws.

He told Mongabay: “The research on this issue shows that it is impossible not to have slave labor in illegal logging. The reason for this is simple: logging in this region is born illegal, criminal, because it is based on the use of fraudulent licenses, which is the only way loggers can extract timber in areas where logging is banned.

“So this criminal activity can only be carried out if it is invisible. This means that it must use slave labor, zero infrastructure, zero trail, the ability to appear and then disappear back into the forest.”

We interviewed a worker who had been involved in illegal logging in the Uruará region, along the Pará section of the Transamazonian Highway. For understandable reasons, he didn’t give his name:

“We live in an awful way. It’s perhaps best when they don’t send food, for then we have to hunt. If not, we’re given rotten meat and food that’s gone off,” he explained.

“We only have water from the creeks to drink and, if there isn’t one nearby, tractors bring us 200 liter drums and the water stays there until it turns green. But it’s a choice between drinking that or going thirsty. So we drink.”

These life-threatening conditions aren’t only found in the forest camps. A teacher from a community near Trairão, who also didn’t want to be named, told us that among the 13- to 15-year-old children in the school, several had fingers and hands permanently injured in accidents while doing illegal logging, something on which the village’s livelihood depends.

Slave labor doesn’t only exist in illegal logging. It’s also found in the mines.

Cassiterite Fever

On our trip, we learned that the focus of environmental crime in the region we were exploring has changed, with mining now gaining prominence over logging. “You’re out of touch with reality here,” said one miner, who works illegally inside Jamanxim National Park.

“The road arrived here because of logging, but now the big money is in mining.” And it’s no longer gold mining as in the past. The new fever is for cassiterite.

We decided to see what was happening in the forest. Unable to reach our destination by road or river, we decided to go by air. We took off from Itaituba in a single-engine plane. It was a tense flight, under heavy rain, with one door open, so we could film and take photos.

What we found after an hour’s flight took our breath away: creeks (igarapés) and the surrounding vegetation destroyed, mine machinery operating freely, and many holes in the ground — mining likely done by slave labor, as the laborer we met on the road had told us.

In the second week of June, IBAMA undertook an operation to dismantle the criminal groups mining for cassiterite and gold in the region’s conservation units.

According to Renê Luiz de Oliveira, IBAMA’s coordinator for environmental monitoring, “illicit acts were happening everywhere we looked.” With respect to the specific area visited, he confirmed that “no activity was properly licensed.”

And that damage to the Amazon rainforest and its rivers is about to get very much worse, thanks to new pieces of legislation which have already moved through Congress and are currently awaiting the president’s signature.

On our trip, it struck us forcefully just how closely President Temer and the Congress align their legislative actions to the agenda of the bancada ruralista, the rural lobby that dominates Brazilian politics, and how the bancada itself caters to the immediate demands for profit made by their wealthy constituents in the countryside — with little regard for the impact on the nation’s environmental and social future.

Environmental Crime

“Today, I don’t want the land to log, but to mine,” one land thief told us, claiming to own several thousand hectares within the National Park of Jamanxim. He had already plundered the area for valuable timber, “warming” his logs with false certificates.

However, mining is far more visible from the air than logging, which is a problem for him and others like him, when the area they want to mine is also part of a conservation unit.

Which helps explain the new provisional measures (MP 756 and MP 758) legislation initiated by President Temer. Among other alterations, the MPs will drastically reduce the size of Jamanxim National Park, while also downgrading the protection of a large part of the National Forest of Jamanxim, converting this land to an Area of Environmental Protection (APA), where both logging and mining are allowed.

In essence, Temer and the Congress, with the stroke of a pen, are moving to legalize and legitimize illegal Amazon logging and mining, and to turn over vast swaths of federally protected rainforest to wealthy land thieves.

Efforts were made by the bancada to make the MPs even more extreme as they went through Congress, with talk at one time of eliminating protections from 1.2 million hectares (4,633 square miles).

Thanks to vigorous lobbying by environmentalists and other activists, the worst was avoided: the MPs were converted into bills (PLC 4 and PLC 5), which will remove protection from just 600,000 hectares (2,317 square miles) of Amazon forest.

In a response that pulled no punches, Asema, an association of federal government employees linked to environmental agencies, issued an “open letter to society” in which it condemned the government measures, noting that they affect a federally protected area “where there is a fierce struggle for control over the land, with the advancement of the agricultural and cattle frontiers, mega-projects, illegal logging and mining activities, and land grabbing.”

Asema condemned the reduction in the Jamanxim conservation units as an “authoritarian act to suppress rights carried out by a government brought to power by a coup, with the support of the bancada ruralista in the National Congress.”

President Temer has until 22 June to approve or to veto, wholly or partially, the new legislation.

In a press release, the Ministry of the Environment has recommended that he use his veto, because, the measures “represent a setback to the efforts of the Brazilian government to respect the commitments it made under the Paris Agreement to combat global warming.”

With Amazon deforestation again on the rise, and Brazil’s international climate change commitments under threat, we are now a few days away from Temer’s decision.

This article appeared originally in Mongabay – https://news.mongabay.com

The Brazilian arm of the international environmental group WWF has said there may be a link between the proposed bill and companies seeking to mine protected federal areas for valuable minerals.

The bill, which was proposed by legislators from Amazonas state, aims to reduce in size four conservation reserves and completely do away with the Campos de Manicoré Environmental Protection Area.

The text of the bill has already been prepared and was discussed last week by parliamentarians from Amazonas and Eliseu Padilha, chief of staff of the country’s executive office.

The protected areas were originally created under ousted President Dilma Rousseff in August 2016.

If approved, the legislation would be put into effect by the beginning of March. If the proposal goes forward, the Amazon will lose more than 1 million hectares in areas once protected by law, according to a post on WWF-Brazil’s website.

These areas are “considered to be of high value for conservation and strategic for confronting deforestation” in the region, the organization said.

Now, researchers with WWF-Brazil say the legislation might be connected to plans put forward by companies to mine the areas for natural resources like gold, diamonds and niobium, which is used in steel.
By analyzing data from the National Department of Mineral Production (DNPM) and comparing it with the areas under scrutiny in the new legislation, WWF was able to find significant overlap between where companies want to mine and the conservation areas politicians want to reduce.

“Even with the decree that created the conservation units in 2016, DNPM requests continued to be made for these areas, indicating a commitment to change the law,” said Richard Mello, coordinator of the WWF-Brazil Amazon Program.

The investigation found that in the Acari National Park alone there were around 40 prospecting requests from research and mining organizations. Under the new legislation, the park would be reduced in size by about 240,000 hectares.

According to WWF, the decimation of protected areas in the country has been an ongoing problem and leads to social consequences for its population, with areas affected by deforestation plagued by violence, human exploitation, prostitution, the violation of indigenous human rights and the contamination of food and water.

Deforestation, agricultural expansion and fires have destroyed nearly 60 percent of the world’s most biologically rich savanna, the Cerrado.

How can species-rich nations protect their natural wealth and local knowledge when commercial companies come knocking for biological resources to develop crops, cures and cosmetics? A global treaty may have the answer.

DW