Brazil

The Mumbai-Porto Alegre (MPA) Forest Initiative is intended to serve as a platform for the joining of forces and for the building of solidarity between actors working on a wide spectrum of issues related to social and environmental justice and forests. As economic globalisation is increasingly affecting local communities, the need to create a global movement for ensuring peoples’ rights and forest conservation became an imperative that a number of participants to the World Social Forum decided to set in motion.

The following Statement was issued on 24/11/05 in Vitoria, Espirito Santo, Brazil at an international meeting on building support for local communities against large-scale tree plantations and GMO trees. This meeting was co-sponsored by World Rainforest Movement, FASE-ES and Global Justice Ecology Project.

Wherever the pulp and paper industry operates, it brings with it the promise of jobs. Unfortunately, for the people living in the area that the industry takes over, these promises rarely bring work. In a recent report for World Rainforest Movement, Alacri De'Nadai, Winfridus Overbeek and Luiz Alberto Soares, record how Aracruz Celulose, the world's largest producer of bleached eucalyptus pulp, has failed to provide work for local people.

Six months ago, indigenous Tupinikim and Guarani people reclaimed just over 11,000 hectares of their land from the Brazilian pulp giant Aracruz Celulose. They chopped down thousands of eucalyptus trees to demarcate their territory and built two indigenous villages with a large meeting house and several other houses on the land. Several indigenous families are living in the houses.

What is happening in Brazil is a historic event, not only for Brazil, but for all of us who are struggling against the advance of large scale monoculture tree plantations.

“The worst immorality is a studied ignorance, a purposeful refusal to see or know” (Andrea Dworkin)

In 1979, when occupying one of the last remaining forest areas of the Mata Atlântica (Atlantic Rainforest), not yet cut by the former Aracruz Florestal --currently Aracruz Celulose-- the Tupinikim and Guarani indigenous peoples in the State of Espírito Santo started a long struggle to get their lands back. This struggle was interrupted in 1998, when Tupinikim and Guarani indigenous communities, isolated and under great pressure, had to sign an agreement with Aracruz Celulose.

Edited by The Network Alert against the Green Desert and the WRM By: Alacir De'Nadai, Winfridus Overbeek, Luiz Alberto Soares. Promises of Jobs and Destruction of Work. The case of Aracruz Celulose in Brazil

The world's largest producer of bleached eucalyptus pulp has plans to become even bigger. Last year, Aracruz Cellulose produced 2.5 million tons of pulp. The company is looking at five possible sites to build a new, one million tons a year pulp mill. Over the next two years, Aracruz will spend US$600 million on upgrading its existing pulp mills and expanding its 305,000 hectare plantation area.

For the second time, the Clean Development Mechanism's (CDM) Executive Board has rejected the reasons of Vallourec & Mannesmann do Brasil for requesting carbon credit money for industrial tree plantations.

The World Social Forum is not a space for dreaming, but a place for sharing ideas on how to make a common aspiration come true. The message is clear: another world IS possible. What world? A world where social justice prevails, where peace is a reality, where nature is respected, where people interact as equals.

A number of participants at the World Social Forum 2004 met in Mumbai and believing that forest issues are in essence social and political and that forest communities are increasingly affected by globalization --and new forms of trade and economic liberalization that comes in its way-- agreed on the need to create a global movement to ensure forest conservation and peoples' rights over forests. The principles on which the movement would be based were agreed upon and circulated by the groups as the Mumbai Forest Initiative - Statement of Principles.