Brazil

Tembé indigenous leaders shot by private security forces (only available in Portuguese).

Your Excellencies Governor Helder Barbalho and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, there is no climate justice without the protection of two forests, urban centers, water and land! (Only available in Portuguese).

In the ‘green economy,’ the interests of corporations, governments and the conservation industry intersect. All of these entities, in one way or another, profit from the destruction of forests and the dispossession of communities. In Pará, there are not only increasing REDD projects, but the state governor is seeking to implement jurisdictional REDD throughout the territory.

DW news portal investigated ongoing socio-environmental conflicts in Brazil related to Suzano, which manages over a million hectares of eucalyptus plantations across the country and plans to almost double that in the next decade.

The Brazilian justice system annulled the registration of two properties of Agropalma, the largest sustainable palm oil producer in the Americas, due to the fact that they were usurped lands.

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.

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.