Brazil

In this booklet you will find basic information about GE trees, in particular about two varieties of eucalyptus trees that have already been approved in Brazil, which is the first country to authorize their commercial use.

Amid the flurry of news about investments in carbon markets, a new WRM study has taken a closer look at a REDD initiative underway in the municipality of Portel, in the state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon. The case illustrates what is known as "carbon colonialism".

We invite you to reflect with an activist who explores resistance processes and the challenges they face, based on her experience with struggles in Brazil. In this reflection, we also invite you to join the collective resistance from your own contexts and spaces of organization. The fight continues and the fight is one!

The quilombola communities of the Acará Valley, Pará State, Brazil, through the AMARQUALTA association, together with Tembê and Turiwara indigenous communities, denounce one more violent action by the oil palm plantation company Brazil Biofuels (BBF).

We urge you to express solidarity with MST (Movement of Landless Rural Workers) and send an urgent message to the state government in order to prevent that 200 families will be evicted from a land occupation in a eucalyptus plantation area of the transnational pulp and paper company Suzano.

Suzano is a Brazilian multinational company that produces cellulose and paper products from eucalyptus grown on large-scale plantations. Read this booklet produced by the ‘Alert Against the Green Desert’ Network and find out important facts that are often hidden by this mega-company’s propaganda machine.

Brazil and Indonesia share a particular similarity: at some point its rulers decided to build a new capital city. While rulers in Brazil built Brasilia some 60 years ago, construction of the new Indonesian capital is currently underway. Both projects reinforce a colonial State, in spite of their promoters claiming the opposite. Both stories however, also show the role of social struggles as a way to revert a history of colonialism. (Available also in Bahasa Indonesia)

In line with certain aspects of a recent WRM study, we show how four REDD projects in the municipality of Portel, in the state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon, contribute to perpetuating certain fantasies inherent to the idea of carbon trading through the REDD mechanism.

Most of the causes of deforestation that were identified in a UN-led global analysis from 1999 continue to exist. Yet, the “solutions” proposed since then have become new underlying causes of deforestation. In this scenario, projects that destroy the forest and “green” projects depend on each other in order to be viable.

The news portal Metrópoles travelled 5,700 km to denounce how the palm oil production chain affects quilombola communities and Indigenous Peoples in the state of Pará, Brazil—namely through expropriation of traditional communities, environmental impacts, and a labor history analogous to slavery.

Support and sign the request made by quilombola communities in the Far South of Bahia, Brazil, for the immediate halt to destructive and illegal road works by Suzano Papel e Celulose in their territories. Suzano, Brazil’s largest eucalyptus plantation owner and one of the world’s largest paper and pulp corporations, continues with its violent and destructive actions in the territories of quilombola, peasant and indigenous communities.

The network that brings together movements, organizations and communities in the fight against tree plantations met in the Far South of the State of Bahia. This September 21st, it once again denounced the impacts of this violent and unjust model, which is based on large-scale plantations mostly for pulp export.