Brazil

A new cycle in the increasing of production of eucalyptus pulp for export began in northern Espirito Santo, the southern region of Bahia and north-eastern Minas Gerais, with the opening in 2002 of the new Aracruz Celulose mill. This company increased its annual pulp production from 1.2 to 2.0 million tons, and expects to reach 2.4 million tons. Veracel Celulose, jointly owned by Aracruz and the Swedish-Finnish Stora Enso, is currently building its first eucalyptus pulp mill, the biggest in the world, with an annual production capacity of 900 thousand tons.

Pulp mills’ extremely large scale makes it necessary for them to simplify under a central authority not only landscapes, biological diversity and genetic diversity, but also political systems. The sheer size of the mills and the landscape they reorganize around them means that to survive, they need constantly to attract subsidies, stimulate demand – and above all, control resistance, both from ordinary people and from the landscape.

With the presence of a delegate from the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment, the third Meeting convened by the Alert Against the Green Desert Network took place in the city of Belo Horizonte on 6 and 7 May. This Network, comprising over 100 member organizations, gathered many representatives of the Landless People's Movement, peasants, indigenous peoples, Afro-Brazilian communities, small farmers and social movements from the States of Minas Gerais, Espirito Santo, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro.

On 8 March, a major mobilization took place on Route BR-101 North in the Brazilian State of Espirito Santo, in the locality of São Mateus. Coinciding with International Women’s Day, and with numerous women participants, close on 600 Tupinikim and Guarani indigenous people, representatives of the Quilombos (Afro-Brazilian communities) and members of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (the well-known MST) and of the Small Farmers’ Movement (MPA, a member of the Via Campesina), occupied the highway and halted traffic.

It is not by chance that femininity is linked to nature, to the origins and to mystery. Women are those who make life, suckle the species, communicate oral tradition and are the jealous guardians of secrets. When the conquest of El Dorado started, the great boa woman meandered from the memory of time through the Amazon forest. She was the cosmic serpent, the great river with her long and enormous arms of water, with her quiet havens and warm and fertile lagoons.

The Center for International Forestry Research has implemented a program called Adaptive Collaborative Management of Forests (ACM) for more than five years. At its most extensive, we worked in 11 countries (Nepal, Indonesia, Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Malawi, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Madagascar, Bolivia and Brazil); and activities continue in eight. One of the striking elements of this work has been our success at involving women (and other marginalized groups) in our work with communities.

The Plantar forestry company located in the State of Minas Gerais has large eucalyptus plantations in the zone, established at the expense of evicting the local populations. They were also established at the expense of the typical forest in the zone (the “cerrado”), and the trees were converted into charcoal to supply the iron and steel industry and replaced by eucalyptus, planted for the same objective.

The Greater Amazonia that stretches over approximately 7,8854,331 km2 (*) possesses the largest rainforest in the world, with flora and fauna that constitute, on their own, over half the world’s biota, comprising hundreds of thousands of plants and millions of animals, many still unknown to western science. At the same time, its waters represent between 15 and 20% of the planet’s total fresh water reserves, and the great River Amazon alone empties 15.5% of the non-salt water into the Atlantic Ocean.

By the World Rainforest Movement Concern over the spread of tree monocultures and their certification is at the centre of this book. However, this concern is merely one part of much broader concerns concerning forests, forest peoples’ livelihoods and communities of living things.

What's wrong with a company pursuing a green seal for 'sustainable forest management' and a climate-friendly credit for planting trees that help soak up carbon from the atmosphere? Potentially a lot, especially when both of these claims are rather dubious, as the WRM Bulletin coverage on the Brazilian company Plantar S/A indicates. And even more problematic if a company, when faced with criticism about its carbon sinks project, resorts to such tactics as the distortion of facts to discredit its critics.

In Minas Gerais during the last week-end in March, more precisely during the night of Friday 28 a deposit for chemical products belonging to the paper mill "Industria Cataguazes" collapsed. The mill, close to the city of Cataguazes, is located on the Pomba river, where millions of litres of caustic soda, chlorine and other toxic products used in making paper leaked out.

In spite of the fact that it is one of the country's most wretched zones, the Valley of Jequitinhonha in Minas Gerais has been the main and paradigmatic goal of the "citizen caravans" of the candidate Lula --in more than one of his presidential campaigns-- and one of the zones chosen to play the new government's strong card --the Hunger Zero plan-- it is odd to note that nothing has been said about the concrete reason (in addition to generic reasons due to socio-economic and perhaps political underdevelopment) that has led this part of the territory of Minas Gerais to such a degraded and ec