State of Conflict

Around 40 percent of the world’s remaining tropical rainforest is found in the Amazon Basin, a place of enormous ecological importance in sustaining global water and climate systems. Despite decades of intense focus in the spotlight of international environmental concern, the Amazon is today more than ever under siege from the loggers, farmers, and politicians who view it as a modern Eldorado to be plundered for profit. Of all Brazil’s Amazon regions, it is the State of Pará that has suffered the worst impact from logging. The largest timber exporting region of the entire Amazon, Pará has lost an area of rainforest the size of Austria, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland combined. Pará’s story is one that resonates throughout the Amazon. It tells of a ‘boom and bust’ cycle whereby loggers exploit the land, strip it of forest cover and abandon it to cattle ranchers or other large-scale farming ventures. The period of boom, fuelled by the extraction of high-value species such as mahogany and cedar, quickly gives way to decline as lesser species of timber are exhausted in their turn, and the land is transformed into nutrient-poor grazing or farmland, providing little economic opportunity for the community. Fuelling this cycle is a state of lawlessness in which land invasions and illegal occupancy of public land are backed by violence and even murder. Pará has Brazil’s highest rate of assassinations linked to land conflicts, and these are hardly ever investigated. As local forest dwellers who depend on the land for hunting, fishing and small-scale farming are forced away from their territory, the gulf between rich and poor in Pará widens. In remote, hard-to-police areas of the forest, deforestation is frequently driven by slavery. Workers are lured into forest areas with promises of well-paid farm work, and become trapped in debt bondage, working under dangerous and inhumane conditions for little or no pay. Those who try to escape are sometimes killed. The variety of methods of land title falsification that enable loggers and others to lay claim to the rainforest are described by the term ‘grilagem’. Grilagem is made possible by the legal quagmire which characterizes land ownership in the Brazilian Amazon, with little checking by land registration authorities. Loggers exploit the legal and bureaucratic vacuum to seize land using a mixture of grilagem and physical force. Greenpeace produced a detailed map showing grilagem linked to Forest Management Plans in Porto de Moz. This map the first of its kind - was submitted to IBAMA in October 2003 along with a demand for action. The conflict for land and forests today is raging most intensely in two key frontiers in the west of Pará, the Middle Land and Porto de Moz. Here, the Federal Police force has been cut to a quarter of its size twenty years ago, and an illegal assault on the rainforest is underway. Assisted by their political allies, a number of companies which have exploited the legal and bureaucratic tangle to seize land, using a mixture of grilagem and physical force, are leading the charge. In the face of the threat to their traditional lands, local inhabitants are joining forces to propose the creation of Extractive Reserves, areas protected by Federal law for conservation and sustainable use by traditional communities. The proposed “Verde para Sempre’ and ‘Renascer’ reserves have become the target of angry opposition from logging and political interests, particularly since 400 community members took direct action in late 2002 to blockade barges loaded with illegal timber destined for export. Greenpeace has investigated and documented many cases of illegal and predatory behavior by logging interests. Yet the landholders who have already devastated large swathes of the forest are now demanding that the government authorize new areas for exploitation, arguing that they create jobs and contribute to the economic development of regions like Pará. Under pressure from these powerful interests, the Federal and State governments are discussing a new system of concessions. While the debate is reaching the press and the public to some extent, Greenpeace recently discovered that the first ‘authorization of use of public state property’ has been issued by Pará State to a logger in Porto de Moz. Nothing in the contract obliges the logger to do even basic regeneration of the forest after exploiting its resources. Greenpeace believes that the real long-term future of Pará lies in a new social and economic model of sustainable use of the forests combined with areas of protection. Logging companies committed to truly legal, sustainable and certified operations have a place in this future, but the main effort must be concentrated on bringing governance and environmental and social justice to the Amazon. The only way to achieve this is through the strong commitment of the Brazilian Federal and State governments, backed by international cooperation, to empower the traditional communities and other forest dwellers to become the driving force for economic development and environmental protection in the Amazon.