Brazil

In this booklet we share basic information about GE trees, in particular about seven varieties of eucalyptus trees that have already been approved in Brazil. This is the first country besides China to approve the large-scale use of GE trees.

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!

Com o apoio de 60 organizações de diversos países do mundo, o Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores (MPA) do Brasil apresentou uma carta às autoridades do Estado do Pará solicitando que de forma urgente regularizem as terras de três comunidades camponesas ameaçadas de despejo.

Using the argument of “sustainable development”, governments in the Amazon region continue providing incentives for extractivism. In the face of this, indigenous leader Alessandra Munduruku vents her thoughts: “What we need is the demarcation of indigenous territories. Enough talk of bioeconomy, of sustainability, when there is violence in the here and now.”

The Amazon region is one of the final frontiers of resistance to capital expansion. This is epitomized by the struggles of social activists such as Chico Mendes, as well as by the presence of most of the earth’s remaining indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. However, different forms of ‘green’ extractivism are currently and increasingly advancing on this territory.

In the Acará Valley, Pará state, the Tembé and Turiwara indigenous peoples, and quilombola and peasant communities are fighting to take back part of the living spaces they traditionally occupied. It is not just a struggle for territory, but one to reverse a history of oppression and injustice. Today, they are denouncing structural violence and state omission.

The Ka'apor live in Alto Turiaçu, in the northwestern part of Maranhão state in Brazil. It is the largest indigenous territory of the Eastern Amazon and the largest portion of preserved rainforest in the region. Foreign companies have arrived there to propose REDD projects; this has caused conflict, and part of the community is rejecting these projects and organizing to resist.

The Brazilian Coalition Agro é Fogo is made up of social movements and organizations that have worked for decades to defend the Amazon, Cerrado, and Pantanal regions, and the rights of their Peoples and communities.

The production of audio-visual tools, videos and podcasts in the Amazon, where Indigenous Peoples talk about their realities and resistance struggles, is increasing.

Between August 4 and 7 2023, there were attempts on the lives of four Tembés as a consequence of the fight to take territories back from the hands of BBF company. Given this situation, the Brazilian Anthropological Association (ABA) sent a formal letter to the authoritiesrequesting the resumption of the process of regularization of indigenous and quilombola territories, as well as the investigation of mechanisms of criminalization of leadership figures and the suspension of incentives to companies involved in violence.

Em 8 de agosto de 2023, o Conselho Nacional de Direitos Humanos (CNDH) enviou recomendação às autoridades federais e estaduais sobre medidas de proteção, promoção e defesa dos povos indígenas, quilombolas, ribeirinhos, agricultores e agroextrativistas do estado do Pará.

In the past two years, tree plantation initiatives aimed at generating carbon credits have doubled. Whether as large monocultures or as nicely sounding projects with grassroots communities, tree plantations for carbon offsetting are neither a solution to the climate chaos nor beneficial to rural communities in the Global South.