Brazil

Monoculture eucalyptus plantations are advancing over vast areas of the country, occupying traditional peoples’ territories, displacing them, evicting people from rural areas, thus contributing to the creation of poverty belts, with the context of violence and criminality these necessarily imply. And as if this were not enough, they also have their quota of bloodshed.

Ethanol is a biofuel usually made from maize (corn) or sugar cane, which is being enthusiastically promoted as an alternative fuel which can be blended into ordinary petrol or burned directly in special "flex-fuel" engines.

The present energy matrix is basically compounded by oil (35%), coal (23%) and natural gas (21%). The nations of the OECD -- the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- which account for 56% of the planet’s energy consumption are desperately in need of a liquid fuel replacement for oil. Worldwide petroleum extraction rates are expected to peak this year, and global supply will likely dwindle significantly in the next fifty years.

Only available in Spanish -  Por Raúl Zibechi

The Enawene Nawe -- a small Amazonian tribe (over 420) who live by fishing and gathering in Mato Grosso state, Brazil -- are a relatively isolated people who were first contacted in 1974. They grow manioc and corn in gardens and gather forest products, like honey but fishing is their main livelihood and fish are a vital part of their diet, as they are one of the few tribes who eat no red meat. During the fishing season, the men build large dams across rivers and spend several months camped in the forest, catching and smoking the fish which is then transported by canoe to their village.

The Veracel pulp mill is located in the south of the Brazilian state of Bahia, some 45 kilometres from the coast, on the border between the municipalities of Eunapolis and Belmonte. Veracel is a corporation in which the Swedish-Finnish group Stora Enso and the Brazilian Aracruz group have equal shares, today managing one of the world’s largest eucalyptus plantation and industrialization projects.

Today [December 12], hundreds of indigenous people from the seven Tupinikim and Guarani communities in the state of Espirito Santo, Brazil, occupied the harbor Portocel, from where the cellulose of the company Aracruz Celulose is being exported to Europe, the USA and Asia.

In Brazil, production through agriculture of a new energy model is present every day in the mass media and increasingly the development of this field is gaining social endorsement and economic justification. Rapidly, the use of land to produce food is sharing its space with the fuel production. This change in social perception is very evident in the repeated news features showing farmers and landowners as the new “oil field” owners.

Infrastructure development in the name of regional economic integration poses one of the greatest challenges to environmental sustainability and social justice today. The initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) is a striking example of this new trend. IIRSA proposes a series of large-scale, high-risk and debt-heavy mega-projects that would result in extensive alterations to landscapes and livelihoods in the region.

On 11 September 2006 the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) (the Brazilian environmental authority) approved the Environmental Impact Assessment on the construction of two dams in Brazilian territory on the Madera River, the largest tributary to the Amazon River.

In 2004, the Brazilian Network campaigning against the spread of tree plantations came up with the idea of instituting an International Day Against Monoculture Tree Plantations on 21 September, which is National Tree Day in that country. The idea was supported by organizations from all over the world, who since then carry out a number of special activities on this day. It is important to stress that this is certainly not a day aimed at opposing tree planting in general, but an activity focusing on one type of plantation in particular: large scale tree monocultures.

A team comprising Alvaro Santos, Emiliano Camacho and the author travelled from Montevideo, Uruguay to the state of Para in the Brazilian Amazon in the framework of a national and international campaign on “An end to violence in rural areas!” “Cut out this scourge from the root!” promoted by the Latin American Secretariat of the International Union of Food workers (Rel-UITA) and the Brazilian National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG), against rural violence in that country.