Brazil

On 16 March 2010, Henrique de Souza Pereira, 24-years old, was killed by a team of guards of the private ‘security’ company hired by Fibria, former Aracruz Celulose and partner of Stora Enso in the Veracel Celulose company.

The building of hydroelectric dams in Brazil has been marked by a lack of respect for the environment and society and more so by a lack of respect for the affected communities that see how their lives are radically changed and how they are annulled in the name of “capitalist society development.”  In Brazil, over 2,000 dams have been built, resulting in the eviction of over 1 million people from their lands. There are federal government projects foreseeing the construction of 1,443 more dams over the next 20 years.

What is happiness? We can find many answers and we may even consider that being happy is a strictly personal matter. However, at least two aspects of happiness are universal: we all want it and it would be hard to find someone who could declare him/herself happy when confronting hunger, homelessness or when lacking access to the knowledge constructed and accumulated by humanity.  

Plantar S.A. Reflorestamentos, a pig-iron and plantation company operating in Brazil, in the state of Minas Gerais, has been trying hard to get money through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

As experts like geographer Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves have repeatedly stressed, economic models based on monoculture plantation activities will always be incompatible with a healthy, balanced environment. Any industrial-scale monoculture activity, and especially plantations of millions of cloned eucalyptus trees, cannot contribute to the goal of so-called sustainable development.

In mid-July the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) Executive Board accepted a new methodology proposed as part of the controversial Plantar project in Minas Gerais, Brazil (see background on Plantar on WRM bulletins 84,http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/84/Plantar.html, 70 and 72).

For over a decade, the World Rainforest Movement has been denouncing that -by certifying large scale tree plantations- the FSC is greenwashing the destructive activities of plantation companies in Southern countries (for further information seehttp://www.wrm.org.uy/actors/FSC/index.html).

On 9 July 2008 the Brazilian Senate adopted a provision by the Executive known as a “provisional measure,” subject to the subsequent approval of the Legislative. The provision has been harshly questioned by environmentalists and various political and social sectors in Brazil, including the former Minister of the Environment, Senator Marina Silva. 

One year ago, Judson Barros, Coordinator of the Piaui Environmental Network stated that “the south of Piaui has been destroyed, its rivers and streams poisoned to satisfy the voraciousness of some companies that seek easy profit through the destruction of ecosystems, with their coal, soybean, timber, castor-oil and eucalyptus activities.  The wealth produced remains in the hands of a few people, while most of the population continues living but not enjoying the assets offered for free by Mother Nature.

“Eucalyptus is the perfect neoliberal tree. It grows quickly, turns a quick profit in the global market and destroys the earth.”—Jaime Aviles, La Jornada

On International Women’s Day in Brazil, once again women lead the struggle against monoculture tree plantations. Starting in 2006, when close on 2 thousand peasant women from Via Campesina destroyed greenhouses and nearly 8 million eucalyptus saplings belonging to the pulp mill company Aracruz Celulose (see WRM Bulletin No. 104), 8 March has now become a day for mobilization and complaints against monoculture tree plantations. 

April 17 has been declared by La Via Campesina the “International Day of Peasant’s Struggles” to commemorate the slaughter by the Brazilian police in 1996 of 19 peasants of the “landless” movement while they mobilized to get access to some land.  The land issue has becoming a major one in Brasil and the Movement of Landless Rural Workers ­MST ­have been very active.