Brazil

In Brazil, oil palm plantations are expanding rapidly, mainly in the Amazonian state of Pará. BBF (Brasil BioFuels), the largest oil palm company in Brazil, stands accused of environmental crimes and violence against indigenous, quilombola and peasant communities such as Virgílio Serrão Sacramento, a community linked to the Small Farmers’ Movement (MPA).

A conversation with the president of the Volta Miúda Quilombola Association and of the Southernmost part of Bahia Quilombola Cooperative revealed how Suzano, the world’s largest paper and cellulose corporation, continues to operate with serious violations and illegalities. Communities keep fighting to reclaim their lands back.

More than 50 organizations, networks and movements from Brazil and around the world denounce the release into the environment and the commercial use of a new transgenic eucalyptus from the Brazilian company Suzano Papel e Celulose.

The Munduruku People in Brazil say the anti-Indigenous rhetoric of the Jair Bolsonaro administration has emboldened illegal loggers and miners, and put them under greater risk. As a response, three young Munduruku women run an audiovisual collective that uses social media to raise awareness about illegal invasions of their territory.

This publication gathers eleven articles that reflect on fundamental and dangerous dimensions of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), the dominant forest policy around the world since 2007.

Letícia Yawanawa, an indigenous leader from Acre, and Dercy Teles de Carvalho, ex-president of the Xapuri Rural Workers’ Union and an advocate for "extrativistas" talk about how REDD+ has affected the lives of women in communities that depend on forests.

This article shows what are the main programs and projects being promoted under the heading of Nature based Solutions (NbS), how they are related to REDD, who are the proponents and what are their interests.

On 15 March, over 360 organisations launched a statement exposing that "Nature Based Solutions" will cause huge new land grabs and promote harmful practices like monoculture tree plantations and industrial agriculture.

What a certain historiography terms civilizational expansion or capital’s expansion has in fact been the invasion and de-territorialization of peoples and communities using much epistemic and territorial violence. Concessions have been granted in areas that are not demographic voids, a colonial concept that ignores the fact that they have been populated for millennia.

Women from the Ribeira River Valley -in the state of São Paulo, Brazil- have devoted themselves to opposing the concession of one of the region’s most important tourist parks. Their struggle is fundamental, and part of diverse resistances against the privatizing trend of creating ‘territories without people’. They remind us that their territory has been and is rooted in their stories, voices and resistance.

A Public Civil Action from the Prosecutor of Agrarian Justice in the state of Pará, Brazil, against the Jari Cellulose Group requested that part of their land titles be annulled.

With the title, ‘Ima Bote Madjacca: Madja Myths,’ anthropologist Rosenilda Nunes Padilha (Rose) has launched a book of the myths of the Madja people (also known as the Kulina).