Fishing

Brazil’s president has until 22 June to approve or veto two bills (PLC 4 and PLC 5) turning over more than 600,000 hectares (2,317 square miles) of federally protected Amazon forest to illegal loggers, illegal miners and land thieves. The measures, initiated by Temer and already approved by Congress, are seen as a reward to the bancada ruralista...

Na terceira de seis postagens, uma discussão sobre os problemas dos colonos (barragens, legislação ambiental, grileiros) e uma visita a uma fazenda “fantasma”. Tradução: Maria Luíza Camargo. A matéria original, em inglês, pode ser lida aqui no LAB ou aqui no Mongabay. Aqui, a primeira e a segunda postagem.  Publicado originalmente em inglês em 23 de março de 2016. Em janeiro de...

Na segunda de seis postagens, Sue Branford fala de uma área onde a criação de uma unidade de conservação ambiental coloca comunidades tradicionais sob o risco de perder o território onde vivem há gerações. Tradução: Maria Luíza Camargo. A matéria original, em inglês, pode ser lida aqui no LAB: ou no Mongabay.  Em janeiro 2016, a jornalista britânica Sue...

Main image: Gamela indigenous people talk to police after the brutal attack by farmers in Maranhão state, Brazil. Photo: Ana Mendes/Indigenous Missionary Congress (CIMI) SÃO PAULO, 9 May, 2017 − A recent violent attack on a group of indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest of northern Brazil is seen by environmentalists as a symptom of a new climate of hostility...

The battle for the Amazon is being fought over two opposing viewpoints: the first, mostly held by indigenous and traditional people and their conservationist allies, sees forests and rivers as valuable for their own sake, and for the livelihoods, biodiversity, ecological services and climate change mitigation they provide. For them the forests need protection. The second worldview holds...

According to 2014 data for Legal Amazonia, 59 percent of that year’s illegal deforestation occurred on privately held lands, 27 percent in conservation units, 13 percent in agrarian reform settlements, and a mere 1 percent on indigenous lands — demonstrating that indigenous land stewards are the best at limiting deforestation. Indigenous groups control large reserves in the Amazon...

In the Brazilian Amazon, the paving of highways makes adjacent forests far more attractive to land thieves, resulting in major deforestation. The Sustainable BR-163 Plan of 2006 created vast swathes of protected land — eight new conservation units — to prevent land theft and deforestation from happening near the vulnerable BR-163 highway in Pará state. From the start, land speculators...

Land grabbing and illegal ranching (even on public lands) has long been, and still is, big business in the Brazilian Amazon. Last year the Brazilian government launched its most ambitious crackdown ever. And some of the criminals caught up in the federal police net were members of Brazil’s richest families. In June 2016, federal law enforcement pounced on...

In the early 2000s, public outrage over Amazon clear cutting for soy production caused transnational grain companies including Cargill, Bunge and Brazil’s Amaggi, to join with soy producers and environmental NGOs including Greenpeace to sign the voluntary Amazon Soy Moratorium, banning direct conversion of Amazon forests to soy after 2006. The agreement’s signatories have long proclaimed its phenomenal...

The development over the last 40 years of Mato Grosso state in Brazil’s interior as an industrial agribusiness powerhouse has, from the beginning, been hindered by a major economic problem: how to get the commodities to the coast for profitable export. The first route of export from Mato Grosso was a costly and time-consuming southern one, with commodities...