Brazil

The Amazon produces vast quantities of food, yet millions still face hunger. This article examines the links between environmental justice, inequality, food sovereignty, and COP30 in Brazil, arguing that the issue is not production, but the system that governs distribution.

As Belém prepared for COP30, urban redevelopment projects deepened long-standing inequalities between the city centre and the baixadas, where rivers continue to disappear beneath concrete channels. Written before COP30 all the issues remain valid today for Belém and other cities hosting major international events.

Sue Branford reviews Alex Ungrateeb Flynn's book Pathways to Utopia - Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers' Movement of Brazil.

Indigenous leader Auricélia Arapiun describes the occupation of the Cargill terminal, in Pará, which forced the government to concede after 33 days, repealing the controversial decree 12.600, which provided concessions to developers hoping to turn the Tapajós, Madeira and Tocantins tributaries of the Amazon into waterways for the export of soya and the other fruits of extraction.

COP30 in Belém raised hopes that the Amazon would finally move to the centre of global climate action. While governments agreed to expand adaptation finance and launch new forest-protection initiatives, binding commitments on deforestation, fossil fuels and Indigenous land rights remained absent. As Brazil hosted the climate summit in the heart of the rainforest, the gap between diplomatic ambition and enforceable protection became stark.

In an impassioned article, LAB author Marcos Colón denounces the double-standards afflicting the mainstream press in Brazil, prompt to condemn those who defend the Amazon, its rivers and people as radicals and vandals, while they hail the confidence, predictability and business-friendly character of projects to dredge rivers and construct massive ports for exporting soya.

Brazil's National Museum of Indigenous Peoples is struggling. Its funding has been cut to below 2015 levels; it is dependent on FUNAI; and institutional wrangling has left it unable to fulfill its mission. The crumbling museum building is closed to the public and important exhibits are left in limbo. Who will come to its rescue?

Jasmine Haniff reviews Alex Ungprateeb Flynn’s book about Brazil’s landless worker’s movement, which offers a compelling framework for understanding how a social movement can develop an alternative collective future, through decades of grassroots struggle.

Sometime in early January 2005, a photograph of a lone man standing on a beach aiming a bow and arrow toward a camera, made...

Marcos Colón reviews the Cannes and Golden Globe award-winning Brazilian film The Secret Agent, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, starring Wagner Moura. The film engages questions of state censorship, political repression, and surveillance not by following a reporter chasing a story, but, this time, by following a man hunted by a system terrified of memory.