Brazil

In this booklet we share basic information about GE trees, in particular about seven varieties of eucalyptus trees that have already been approved in Brazil. This is the first country besides China to approve the large-scale use of GE trees.

We invite you to reflect with an activist who explores resistance processes and the challenges they face, based on her experience with struggles in Brazil. In this reflection, we also invite you to join the collective resistance from your own contexts and spaces of organization. The fight continues and the fight is one!

Behind every tree plantation developed for carbon offsets, there are external agents seeking to profit from increased control over the land. And while they all have the same colonial approach, these plantations can vary widely: they can be large-scale monocultures or schemes with smallholder farmers; they can include exotic species or native species; and some of them may even exist on paper only.

The podcast “Faroeste carbono” tells the story of how Carbonext, one of the largest carbon offset companies in Brazil, convinced quilombola communities in the state of Para in the Brazilian Amazon to sign a contract that restricts their autonomy and food production. Community members talk about the unfulfilled promises of carbon money and how the project is dividing people.

An investigation exposed how carbon credits from three of the largest carbon offset projects in the Brazilian Amazon are linked to a criminal operation.

São famílias da Comunidade de Virgílio Serrão Sacramento no município de Moju (estado do Pará, Brasil) que coletivamente somam forças desde o final de 2015 quando reocuparam o território conhecido pela ação dos grileiros, no qual já fizeram várias vítimas. Desde então, o Acampamento ocupa sua terra com moradias, plantações, produção e fornecimento de alimentos.

Once again the Ka’apor people, through their ancestral organization TUXA TA PAME, has demonstrated its strength, on May 12, 13 and 14. They denounce the atrocities that Indigenous Peoples and quilombola and peasant traditional communities suffer in the hands large-scale landowners, loggers, mining corporations, gold diggers, carbon credit speculators and the agribusiness sector.

Oil palm plantations are spreading like wildfire across the eastern Brazilian Amazon. But local communities are standing up to the palm oil industry’s brutality and sweeping land grabs, demanding the return of their ancestral lands and calling on the authorities to protect them from encroachment and violence.

Brazil’s Small Farmers’ Movement (MPA) has written to the state of Pará’s authorities requesting that they urgently regularize the land tenure of three peasant communities threatened with eviction. The letter has the support of 60 organizations from several countries.

Using the argument of “sustainable development”, governments in the Amazon region continue providing incentives for extractivism. In the face of this, indigenous leader Alessandra Munduruku vents her thoughts: “What we need is the demarcation of indigenous territories. Enough talk of bioeconomy, of sustainability, when there is violence in the here and now.”

The Amazon region is one of the final frontiers of resistance to capital expansion. This is epitomized by the struggles of social activists such as Chico Mendes, as well as by the presence of most of the earth’s remaining indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. However, different forms of ‘green’ extractivism are currently and increasingly advancing on this territory.

In the Acará Valley, Pará state, the Tembé and Turiwara indigenous peoples, and quilombola and peasant communities are fighting to take back part of the living spaces they traditionally occupied. It is not just a struggle for territory, but one to reverse a history of oppression and injustice. Today, they are denouncing structural violence and state omission.