Indigenous peoples worldwide are the victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that humans as a species are not inherently destructive, but a societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy (i.e. civilization) is. DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples.
David Kaimowitz describes his career as a “a 30-year quest to understand what causes deforestation,” one that has brought him full circle to where he started: at the issue of land rights.
Kaimowitz, who heads the Forest and Farm Facility, based at FAO, says the evidence shows that secure communal tenure rights is one of the most cost-effective ways to curb deforestation.
In that time, he’s also seen the discourse around the drivers of deforestation change from blaming smallholders, to realizing that a handful of large commodities companies are responsible for the majority of tropical forest loss.
In an interview with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler, Kaimowitz talks about why it took so long for Indigenous people to be recognized as guardians of the forest, the need for conservation NGOs to address social justice, and society’s capacity to effect meaningful change.
Over the past 20 years, the conservation sector has increasingly recognized the contributions Indigenous communities have made toward achieving conservation goals, including protecting biodiversity and maintaining ecosystems that sustain us. Accordingly, some large conservation NGOs that a generation ago were heavily focused on establishing and fortifying protected areas are today advocating for Indigenous rights and helping communities secure land tenure.
As a researcher who has worked at the intersection of forests, agriculture and local communities for more than 30 years now, David Kaimowitz has been well-positioned to observe the recent evolution of the conservation sector’s relationship with such communities.
“Indigenous Peoples and local communities have increasingly been recast as heroes, rather than villains,” said Kaimowitz, who currently serves as the manager of the Forest and Farm Facility, a partnership between the the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the IUCN, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and the AgriCord Alliance. He attributes this shift to three factors: changing realities on the ground, a growing body of evidence, and better messaging.
“As more and more forest not managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities disappears, the conservation community has realized that increasingly these are the only forests left; at least, the only intact forests with large undisturbed areas,” Kaimowitz told Mongabay. “A growing [amount of] literature showed that, given a favorable policy environment, Indigenous Peoples and local communities often manage common property forests and other natural resources sustainably.
“The Indigenous Peoples and forest community groups themselves have become more effective at getting their messages across and making their voices heard. They have become powerful political forces in many countries and on the global stage, and conservation groups have had to listen.”
But while conservation is changing, it hasn’t yet been transformed: Indigenous peoples and local communities still face marginalization, lack of meaningful engagement, and underrepresentation, especially in conservation decision-making an leadership roles. Kaimowitz says conservation organizations need to become more inclusive.
“The more these organizations reflect the true diversity of the broader societies, the better they will be able to do that,” he said.
“Conservation has two strong long-standing strains. One harks back to nobles and moguls, who wanted to stop villagers from poaching big animals they hunted for trophies. The other finds its voice among those who depend on (and often nurture) nature to survive. The question is who will speak for conservation? The sheriff of Nottingham, protecting his majesty’s fowl and game, or Robin Hood, with his merry men (and women), living in the forest. That same unresolved tensions persist today; and will determine the movements’ future.”
In parts of the world, those tensions have been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led some international conservation groups to pull out of projects, triggered a collapse in ecotourism, disrupted access to markets and the flow of remittances, and led some city dwellers to return to the countryside to farm. In some places, those developments have pushed local communities to take up subsistence farming and hunting in protected areas or become poachers, putting them in conflict with conservationists.
Colombia. Photo credit: Rhett A. Butler
The pandemic, says Kaimowitz, has been devastating to local communities, causing “profound pain” and loss of traditional knowledge with the death of elders. But COVID-19 has also shown us that governments are capable of taking dramatic action when facing a crisis.
“If the pandemic proves anything, it is that political and economic elites can take extraordinary measures to stave off disaster if they decide to do so,” he said. “Many things that ‘could not be done’ suddenly were. Central banks and ministries of finance pulled out their checkbooks and spent money they supposedly did not have. Both governments and the broader society stepped up to the plate. It has not been smooth or easy, but the world has largely pulled back from the abyss.
“Something similar will have to happen to avert catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss; and there are signs that elites are getting the message.”
Kaimowitz spoke about these issues and more during an April 2021 conversation with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler.
Mongabay: What sparked your interest in land rights and land use change?
David Kaimowitz: My whole life has revolved around an intertwined concern for social justice and the environment.
The land rights interest comes from undergraduate courses I took highlighting the huge inequalities in Latin American landholdings. It became clear that, in places where natural resources represent a large share of economic wealth, who owns and manages them influences every aspect of society.
We studied agrarian reforms in class, but I never imagined that one day I would be involved in one myself. Then, by pure coincidence, I entered a doctoral program in Wisconsin, just after the Nicaraguans overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. The university had just gotten funding for a project with Nicaragua’s Ministry of Agricultural Development and Agrarian Reform (MIDINRA), and I became a research assistant. When Somoza fell, the Sandinistas took over many large farms and prominent experts flocked to the country to debate what to do with them. As a budding professional, it was an amazing opportunity to witness history being made.
Soon after, MIDINRA hired me directly, and we were asked to do oral histories of village elders in the northern Segovias region. The elders talked about major changes in how they farmed during their lifetime and the rapid loss of forest cover and soil fertility. That brought home how much daily life and the environment could change in a single lifetime.
Even so, I did not focus on land use change until the 1990s, when the United Nations held the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and “sustainable development” became the buzzword. I had read about how government subsidies and burgeoning export markets for beef triggered mass forest clearing for pastures in Central America. But by 1994 the situation had changed, and the region’s livestock sector was in crisis. That made me wonder if high beef prices and subsidized credit bolstered deforestation, would low prices and no credit bring the forest back? (It turned out, not much; but that is a story for another day.)
This initial puzzle led to a 30-year quest to understand what causes deforestation. Ironically, that has now brought me back full circle, to land rights. Because the evidence shows that secure communal tenure rights is one of the most cost-effective ways to curb deforestation and people won’t restore forests unless they have rights to trees.
Mongabay: What is your current focus at the FAO?
David Kaimowitz: The realization that Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ land and forest rights were so important for protecting forests led me to champion the need for greater funding to that end. It turns out that such rights and community resource management are key for addressing many major global challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, social conflict, and rural poverty, as well as forest loss per se.
So, I left my job in forest research (at CIFOR) and moved to the Ford Foundation to fund this work. Much of my work centered on supporting Indigenous Peoples and community groups and convincing international agencies to do the same. Many colleagues at those agencies found the arguments compelling but did not know how they could fund that work. Some great new initiatives emerged, like the International Forest and Land Tenure Facility, Indigenous and community-managed territorial funds in Brazil, the Nia Tero Fund [Mongabay Interview with Nia Tero’s Peter Seligmann], and the World Bank’s Direct Grant Mechanism, but they were all tiny compared to the need.
Rainforest creek in the Colombian Amazon. Photo by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay.
So, I became manager of the Forest and Farm Facility so I could champion that cause. The Forest and Farm Facility is a partnership between the FAO, IUCN, IIED, and AgriCord, which supports forest and farm organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which has been doing great work since 2013. I saw an opportunity to build on that and demonstrate that international agencies can support rural grassroots organizations effectively and achieve results at scale.
The FFF focuses on improving rural livelihoods and resilience and promoting more climate and biodiversity friendly landscapes. We provide funding and technical support and advocate for local, national, regional, and global farmer, community forestry, and Indigenous Peoples organizations. We also help organizations strengthen their advocacy, community enterprises, and operations, with special attention to women’s rights and youth inclusion, and facilitate links between these rural membership organizations with other internationally funded programs and with private investors and buyers.
Mongabay: How are the drivers of deforestation different today than they were in the 1980s and 1990s?
David Kaimowitz: Not only have the drivers of deforestation changed since then, but people’s thinking has also changed. The discourse of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio was that poverty drove deforestation. Environmental policies might be important, but ultimately the trick was to lift people out of poverty, so they would not have to overexploit their natural resources. While some talked about large cattle ranchers and logging companies, blame for deforestation was squarely on small-scale shifting cultivation.
Deforestation in Kapuas Hulu, Indonesian Borneo. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
That discourse probably overplayed the role of poverty and poor people in forest clearing even back then. Moving to forested regions, logging or clearing large forests and replacing them with crops or livestock requires more capital and labor than poor people usually have. It is true that clearing many small patches of forest can affect large areas — and we definitely see that in some regions — but that has always been responsible for a smaller portion of total tropical forest loss than many people thought.
In any case, since the 1990s large companies and landholders have played a more dominant role in global deforestation, both empirically and in the discourse. An increasing portion of deforestation has been linked to a small number of commodities — beef, palm oil, soy, and pulp and paper — where only a few hundred large companies dominate global value chains. The trend has been toward clearing larger areas (although this has varied over time and by region).
Soy field and forest at the transition zone of the Cerrado, Chaco and Amazon biomes. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
Mining, of various scales, and production of illicit crops and related money laundering have become much more prominent causes of deforestation. In contrast, commercial timber production has lost prominence in the discussion, in part because timber resources have largely been exhausted in many regions, especially in the dipterocarp and teak forests of Southeast Asia.
Small-scale shifting cultivation, logging, and charcoal and fuelwood collection have increasingly disappeared from the global agenda and have lost importance in many regions. The main exception has been Sub-Saharan Africa, where small farms and common property resources remain dominant and burgeoning urban markets for forest products sometimes fuel overexploitation.
Mongabay: You’ve been working at the intersection of forests, agriculture and local communities for more than 30 years now. In that time, what have been the biggest changes in this space?
David Kaimowitz: As I began to discuss earlier, both the drivers of forest loss and the narratives about them have changed. To some extent the narrative change reflected empirical trends, but it is more complex than that.
Indigenous Peoples and local communities have increasingly been recast as heroes, rather than villains. Studies from different regions of the world called into question alarmist reports about the fuelwood crisis, devastating effects of shifting cultivation, and the extent of small farmer deforestation more generally. The motives behind these discourses were also questioned and cataloged as neocolonial attempts to justify stripping poor families of their resources, as often occurred in colonial days.
Indigenous man holding Tinamou eggs.
A growing literature showed that, given a favorable policy environment, Indigenous Peoples and local communities often manage common property forests and other natural resources sustainably. Elinor Ostrom became the first woman (and first non-economist) to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for demonstrating that, and it was a clear sign the tide had changed.
I recently wrote a report about forests in Indigenous and tribal territories in Latin America, published by FAO and FILAC, that cites dozens of relatively new studies that show that these territories’ inhabitants have generally managed their forests better than other groups. The most surprising thing about the peoples’ reaction to that conclusion was that no one was surprised. In a few decades, claiming that Indigenous Peoples were “guardians of the forests” went from being heresy to an established fact.
That is not to say that small farmers, or Indigenous Peoples for that matter, never destroy forests, or that it is not a problem when they do. Poor rural households clearly overexploit forest resources in some places, and the issue must be addressed. However, most experts now hold large-scale actors responsible for a majority of global tropical forest destruction and think it is better to work with communities to reduce smallholder overexploitation of forest resources, rather than repressing them.
Mongabay: Over the past decade, there seems to be much greater awareness in the conservation sector about the contributions Indigenous peoples and local communities have made toward achieving conservation outcomes. What has driven this shift?
David Kaimowitz: Part has to do with changing realities on the ground. As more and more forest not managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities disappears, the conservation community has realized that increasingly these are the only forests left; at least, the only intact forests with large undisturbed areas.
Part also has to do with the avalanche of rigorous research highlighting those contributions. When I did my meta-analysis of research on forests in Indigenous and Afro-descendant territories in Latin America for the FAO-FILAC report, the sheer volume of high-quality recent research that all pointed in the same direction amazed me. These territories’ forests have been better preserved, even when accounting for things such as distance from roads and soil fertility. When the territories have formal rights and additional support, their forests are doing better still.
Finally, the Indigenous Peoples and forest community groups themselves have become more effective at getting their messages across and making their voices heard. They have become powerful political forces in many countries and on the global stage, and conservation groups have had to listen.
Mongabay: We’ve heard a lot more about stakeholder inclusivity in recent years, especially in the context of the past year between the social justice movement in the U.S. and criticisms of colonial practices among some big NGOs. Is this being translated at the levels of decision-making within the institutions that fund and implement conservation projects?
David Kaimowitz: The big conservation NGOs are large bureaucracies with strong institutional cultures, dominated by upper-middle-class whites, like me. In any such bureaucracy, transformative change rarely happens overnight. I do think, though, that the dramatic upswing of the racial justice movement in the United States and elsewhere, and the growing environmental justice movements have shaken them to their core. They have been forced to come to grips with sordid elements in their past, recognize implicit bias against people of color, and focus more on how environmental problems affect poor people and people of color disproportionately.
How far this will get is hard to say. Many previous efforts to get these organizations to address social and racial justice concerns petered out over time. But I am cautiously optimistic that this time will be different, and we will see real change. Many funders that support these organizations expect that.
Mongabay: What do you see as major gaps that still persist in the conservation sector?
David Kaimowitz: Most immediately, there are staffing issues, bringing in more people of color and from low-income households. But more broadly the question is, will they embrace an approach that is not so elite? Can they speak to regular peoples’ daily lives in ways that they can understand and respect those peoples’ lived experience and traditional knowledge, be they rural or urban? The more these organizations reflect the true diversity of the broader societies, the better they will be able to do that.
Clouds reflected in a blackwater oxbow lake in the Peruvian Amazon.
Conservation has two strong long-standing strains. One harks back to nobles and moguls, who wanted to stop villagers from poaching big animals they hunted for trophies. The other finds its voice among those who depend on (and often nurture) nature to survive. The question is who will speak for conservation? The sheriff of Nottingham, protecting his majesty’s fowl and game, or Robin Hood, with his merry men (and women), living in the forest. That same unresolved tensions persist today; and will determine the movement’s future.
Mongabay: You spent some time in the philanthropic sector. What was your most impactful grant during that time? And why? Or if not a single grant, what type of grant was the most impactful?
David Kaimowitz: The greatest impact came from communications grants, which allowed Indigenous and community leaders to be heard for the first time. Most media coverage about tropical forests cites government officials, companies, NGOs, and scientists from the Global North. Everyone except those who live in and from forests and often protect them most. When politicians plant a tree, it is a big photo op. Farmers plant millions of them all the time, and no one seems to notice.
We funded communications firms, filmmakers, social media wizards, innovative digital media groups like Mongabay, and worked with musicians and actors to help grassroots leaders and villagers give their own account, in their own words. Not to be used as props by some NGO or project, but to tell their own story. What they were proud of, worried them, or needed to change.
Arhauco indigenous leader in a former coca-producing area of Colombia.
It was incredibly powerful, authentic, like reality TV. These were people who walked the walk, and often risked their lives; and made the world greener and cooler in the process. These were the real Guardians of the Forests; and their message resonated well beyond Wall Street and ivory towers.
Minutes ago, I watched an advertisement from the Guatemalan government showcasing the community forest concessions in the Peten. That would have been almost unimaginable a few short years ago. These communities that manage the concessions have gone toe to toe to keep some of Central America’s most powerful groups from wresting control over their forests. But once the wider audiences heard their stories, they won the PR battle. Now even the president wants them in the photo.
Something similar happened with the murder of local environmentalists and land rights defenders, many of them Indigenous. This is a long-standing problem, although the situation may be getting worse. But the communications groups were able to shine a light on it, and help people realize that these were not just local disputes over land or water, the outcomes affect us all. Indigenous martyrs like Berta Cáceres in Honduras, Edwin Chota in Peru, Isidro Baldenegro in Mexico, Charlie Taylor in Nicaragua, or Paulo Paulino Guajajara in Brazil died in the defense of Mother Earth, and we all have a stake in that.
At first Global Witness was the only high-profile NGO to raise the issue. But as it got more attention, all the big international human rights groups got on board. The problem is by no means solved, but the intellectual authors of these attacks can no longer be so confident that they can act with total impunity.
Mongabay: COVID-19 has obviously had an enormous impact around the world. What have you heard from the partners and allies you have in the field?
David Kaimowitz: The first thing, of course, is the profound pain. So many leaders and elders lost. People we knew or hoped to meet. Stories, wisdom, languages gone. Sickness, hunger, markets lost. And too many governments shamelessly indifferent.
But also, amazing resilience. One Forest and Farm Facility partner, AgriCord, surveyed grassroots forest and farm organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and found that practically all had stepped up and were responding to the pandemic. They were providing masks and information, planting gardens, finding new markets, pressing governments for support, and caring for those in need. They didn’t sit back and wait for aid. They acted.
A U.N. study about the pandemic and Indigenous Peoples in Latin America found the same thing. Indigenous organizations took the initiative and monitored the virus’s spread, regulated entrance into communities, and supplied Western and traditional medicine, with women often in the lead.
Mongabay: And what do you expect the impacts of the pandemic to be on deforestation in the near term?
David Kaimowitz: It is hard to say. At first, I thought the global economy would practically collapse, and deforestation would decline as a result. Last March and April there were many signs of that. But then the world’s central banks stepped in with huge stimulus plans, which turned things around. Now the global economy is starting to boom and that could easily increase the pressure on forests.
The pandemic has also affected politics, not just economics. For example, one could argue that Trump would still be president in the United States if it were not for the pandemic, and that might have affected what happened to forests. We may see similar stories play out elsewhere, but it is too early to say who stands to benefit.
Mongabay: And what do you see the longer-term impact of COVID-19 being on the relationship between society, especially Western society, and the world around us?
David Kaimowitz: The pandemic made us all feel more vulnerable and realize how fragile and tenuous our societies are. Now when we hear discussions about the devastating effects of climate change, they seem less abstract and distant. COVID-19 was a wake-up call, a reminder that we are still linked to the natural world, and of the many links between forests and health. But it is still unclear how many heard that wake-up call or how long they will stay awake.
Short term, most people are probably desperate to go back to how things were. To go out, socialize, and travel. That will tend to pull us back toward the status quo. But there does seem to be greater awareness of the Anthropocene; that the ecosystems we depend on are severely strained and the limits are not far away. As people experience that in daily life, that awareness will probably grow.
So will the backlash. Denialism, Western fundamentalism. The parallel universe on Facebook and Youtube. Many people are scared and feel threatened, and that rarely leads anywhere good.
Mongabay: You’ve done a lot of research in Latin America. While there are exceptions, taken as a whole, the region is experiencing rising authoritarianism, tropical deforestation, and violence against defenders. Why is this and what’s your medium and long-term outlook for the region in terms of these issues?
David Kaimowitz: Latin America faces difficult dilemmas. The population is increasingly urban, but the economies depend heavily on rural agriculture, oil, and mining. The predominant economic and political model of the last decade was to increase government revenues from extractive activities and use them for clientelist programs that earned political support. But this model has largely run its course; and the environmental costs piled up. Nor can countries simply expect to live off remittances from migrants abroad. Most countries failed to invest enough in education, research, innovation, and technology, so they could transition to less extractive economies, based on more skilled labor. On top of this, the pandemic has left the region much more indebted, and no one knows how it can pay its bills.
All of this has tended to undermine the existing political systems, opening paths for authoritarians. Organized crime has become an erosive force, filling in spaces where governments are fragile, and weakening them even more. Meanwhile, many predominantly white middle-class civil society groups run by professionals concerned with conservation, human rights, feminism, and other important issues failed to connect with the broader public, leaving them vulnerable to attack.
There are no simple solutions or magic bullets, but my vision of a potential route forward includes some of the following: Economic models that depend more on small-scale and communal enterprises that can innovate and produce value added. Less funds for buying votes and more for investing in people and landscapes. A renaissance of local democracy, real recognition of the plurinational and multiracial character of most Latin American societies, and more political space for women and youth.
It will not be simple and may not happen. But the region needs to find a way forward, because it cannot go back to where it was.
Mongabay: What are the levers that need to be pulled to drive systemic change toward averting catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss?
David Kaimowitz: If the pandemic proves anything, it is that political and economic elites can take extraordinary measures to stave off disaster if they decide to do so. Many things that “could not be done” suddenly were. Central banks and ministries of finance pulled out their checkbooks and spent money they supposedly did not have. Both governments and the broader society stepped up to the plate. It has not been smooth or easy, but the world has largely pulled back from the abyss.
Something similar will have to happen to avert catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss; and there are signs that elites are getting the message. We may soon see truly massive investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy. It is less clear whether the forest and biodiversity messages are getting across. There is no way to meet global climate goals without more robust forests, but most people don’t realize that, not even many experts.
Sungai Utik rainforest in Indonesian Borneo. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
In any case these efforts will only succeed if they address inequality. One reason climate action is moving forward is it has been linked to jobs. “Green New Deals” are not just partisan political slogans, they are essential to reach wider audiences. Agriculture and land use are big parts of the problem and must be front and center in the solutions; but the policies must speak to — and with — rural and small-town people, in all their diversity. Cleaner air, more urban trees, parks and gardens, public transportation. It is nice to listen to the scientists; but we also have to listen to workers, farmers, nurses and waitresses, people of faith.
Mongabay: What would you say to young people who are distressed about the current trajectory of the planet?
David Kaimowitz: I am truly sorry we let you down. We thought we knew what we were doing and got many things wrong. But it is not too late, and you have many things going for you that we never had. New ways to organize and communicate, more empathetic and accountable women leaders.
No matter how things seem now they may look different later. Many things I used to believe proved wrong and many I thought were permanent proved ephemeral. Some turned out worse than I expected, but others much better. No matter how things look these days, they can and will change. In the meantime, we cannot afford to stop trying to make things better and learn along the way.
Continue to demand the impossible. It is only impossible until it is not. It may be too late to restore much of the natural and cultural riches we lost, but you/we can still save some; and it is definitely worth the effort.
Georgia – Locals are protesting a large hydro power plant in the valley of the Rioni river in western Georgia. DGR stands in fierce solidarity with grassroots movements fighting the construction of dams and power plants against corrupt governments and multinational cooperations.
The government of Georgia has rented out an area of 281 hectares to a Turkish investor for 99 years to build and run a large dam and hydro electric power plant. Protesters claim that the government has sold another 293 hectares without official documents.
construction of the hydroelectric power stations in Rioni Gorge is being carried out by the Turkish company ENKA. The project is fiercely opposed by the local population because the construction of the hydroelectric power plant will require the relocation of dozens of families, and also by environmentalists who argue that the construction of the hydro power plant will lead to environmental and seismic risks.
The locals have set up a camp to protest against the project, occupying the site for more than 6 months now.
While the government initially tried to ignore the protests, the protesters, calling themselves “Guardians of the Rioni Valley”, have been able to mobilize an impressive number of people to join the occupation. Opponents of the hydro power plant construction could be seen clashing with police while demanding to open barricades to the village where the construction is being carried out. According to Varlam Goletiani, one of the protest organizers, nine protesters were arrested during rallies held on Tuesday and Wednesday, April 13th and 14th.
The activists have also filed a lawsuit in court, in which they are attempting to challenge the permission for the construction of the power plant.
“We are calling on communities in different cities, we will close the entire country, I say it again if our demands are not met. Our action plan today is linked to the sit-in, we will remain here. If the government does not take into account the will of the Georgian people, we will organize protests in different cities and block the whole country. This will continue until our requirements are met. If eventually, they will stay stubborn and not take into account everything that is happening here today against the Namakhvani hydroelectric power station, then we will plan large-scale work in the capital, and thousands of people will take to the streets until we completely break their backs, until they will have the feeling of the government we hired.” stated Goletiani.
“It is clear that the project will not only not contribute to the energy security of the country, as indicated by the government, but that the agreement provides for heavy and indefinite fiscal burdens for the state budget,” EMC reports.
The statement continues, “The agreement also shows a number of guarantees and conditions of support given to the company by the state, which made it possible to circumvent the strict requirements of the legislation and start the construction process by obtaining basic permits.
“The analysis of the agreement shows that the company is actually using Georgia’s natural resources free of charge and does not undertake to sell energy on the domestic market, which invalidates the country’s energy security or even economic benefits.
“The list of possible circumstances in which the company seeks compensation from the state is indefinitely extensive and puts the country in an unequal position due to the fact that it seeks to reinsure risks beyond the control of the state with budgetary funds. Under the agreement, all possible business risks are insured in the state budget in favor of the company.”
The main demand of protesters remains that Enka Renewables leaves the Rioni Valley forever.
Indigenous peoples worldwide are the victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that humans as a species are not inherently destructive, but a societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy (i.e. civilization) is. DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples.
A small community of Brazilian Indians has won a land rights case at Brazil’s Supreme Court that could have major repercussions for indigenous people across the country.
The Court has ruled that a 2014 judicial decision canceling the return of some of their ancestral territory to the Guarani community of Guyra Roka must be revisited because the Guarani themselves were not involved in the process. Now, they must be given a fair hearing before the Court votes again on the return of their territory.
The ruling will potentially affect other communities whose lands have been stolen, but who hope to reclaim them.
However, the chances of the Guarani recovering their land any time soon are remote.
Most of the area has been taken over by a powerful politician and rancher, José Teixeira, who has been implicated in a series of attacks on the Guarani. One of the leaders of Guyra Roka, Ambrosio Vilhalva, who acted in the feature film Birdwatchers, was stabbed to death in 2013.
Vilhalva and others led a “re-occupation” in 2000 to recover a small parcel of their land from the rancher.
Tito Vilhalva, a religious leader of the Guyra Roka community, said: “I’m 99 years old now. [When I was young] Guyra Roka was forest – there was no road, no fences. It was just forest and Indians, monkeys and tapirs. There were no Brazilians then.”
The 2014 cancelation of the Guyra Roka’s territory was based on what campaigners have called the “Time Limit Trick” – a ploy by anti-indigenous politicians to manipulate the constitution and steal indigenous lands.
The Time Limit Trick says that unless indigenous peoples were living on their ancestral lands on October 5, 1988 [the day the Brazilian Constitution was adopted] they no longer have any right to them. If successful, this genocidal manoeuvre would put hundreds of indigenous territories and dozens of uncontacted tribes at grave risk.
The Supreme Court is due to rule in a separate case shortly concerning the Xokleng tribe that will set the definitive precedent for the Time Limit Trick. If it is upheld in that case, indigenous rights will be set back decades and many tribal peoples, and their lands, could be destroyed.
The indigenous lawyer Eloy Terena said: “Instead of protecting indigenous interests, [the state and its agents] worked with the region’s farmers to evict the indigenous people from their lands and to promote genocidal agribusiness.”
Survival’s Research & Advocacy Director Fiona Watson, who has visited the Guyra Roka community, said today: “This is a stunning victory for a group of people who have been relentlessly persecuted for decades but never stopped fighting to recover their land. The Guarani and their many allies around the world will fight for their land to be returned. The Guarani have endured a decades-long humanitarian crisis in which almost all their land has been stolen, their leaders murdered, and their means of survival destroyed. Like other tribal peoples across Brazil, they’re confronting a government whose policies and actions have the clear and genocidal aim of wiping them out.”
Washington D.C. (April 9th, 2021)- The Army Corp announced today that they will not be shutting down the Dakota Access pipeline despite it lacking the proper operating and environmental permits. This move continues to ignore the treaties and voices of the Standing Rock Tribal Nation who have been vocal about their opposition to the pipeline for over five years. The decision comes on the heels of the Standing Rock Youth Council taking over the streets of to D.C. last week with a 318-foot-long snake to deliver 400,000 petition signatures in support of shutting DAPL down to the Army Corps.
The federal judge overseeing the case announced he will be making a decision on whether he will order the pipeline to be shut down or not by April 19th, 2021. Quotes:
Joye Braun, IEN DAPL Frontline Organizer, Cheyenne River Sioux Nation Citizen: “It is imperative that the Biden administration shut down DAPL now. The Army Corps of Engineers should not twist the rule of law to favor big oil interests and further spit on the nation-to-nation relationship between tribal nations and the US Government. The Biden Administration needs to do the right thing and stop this illegal pipeline. Why allow something illegal to continue? Set the example, honor the treaties, and show that the rule of law is greater than oil corporate interests. We will no longer accept being the sacrificial lamb for corporate raping of our Mother Earth and her water.”
Maya Monroe Runnels-Black Fox, Co-chair of the Standing Rock Youth Council: “It’s been a long hard five years, but we are the defenders of the land and protectors of this water. The youth will continue on fighting these black snakes for our people and the next 7 generations to come. President Joe Biden needs to act now and keep his promise to be a climate president.”
Waniya Locke, Standing Rock Grassroots: “The Army Corps of Engineers and Biden have the authority to shut down the illegal Dakota access pipeline and protect 10 million people’s drinking water. Inaction is no longer acceptable behavior when we are in a climate crisis. Our tribal sovereignty can save 10 million people drinking water, if the Amry Corps respected our sovereignty.”
Tasina Sapa Win Smith, Cheyenne River Grassroots Collective: “The Biden administration and ACOE have declared another battle with the Oceti Sakowin First Nations people by allowing the illegal continuation of dirty oil to flow through the Dakota Access Pipeline. Biden’s inaction to protect our fragile ecosystems, natural resources, traditional medicines, and indigenous rights is a clear sign that this administration is the exact opposite of the climate leadership narrative they promised to lead during his campaign. As Indigenous people, it is our inherent right to protect our natural resources and future generations. With that said, the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people are ready to take courage by putting our unarmed bodies on the line and freedoms at risk to stop this ongoing injustice against our nation and all of Turtle Island. That is what true climate leadership takes — courage. Biden, be bold.”
###
Established in 1990, The Indigenous Environmental Network is an international environmental justice nonprofit that works with tribal grassroots organizations to build the capacity of Indigenous communities. I EN’s activities include empowering Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, the health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities.
Indigenous peoples worldwide are the victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that humans as a species are not inherently destructive, but a societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy (i.e. civilization) is. DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples.
Featured image: Aerial view of Biopalma’s Castanheira mill and palm plantation just a few meters away from the Acará River, in Tomé-Açu municipality, in northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 12, 2019. Image by Wilson Paz for Mongabay.
Producers say their supply chains are green and sustainable, but prosecutors cite a long record of land grabbing, deforestation, pollution, and human rights violations
Palm oil, a crop synonymous with deforestation and community conflicts in Southeast Asia, is making inroads in the Brazilian Amazon, where the same issues are playing out.
Indigenous and traditional communities say the plantations in their midst are polluting their water, poisoning their soil, and driving away fish and game.
Scientists have found high levels of agrochemical residues in these communities — though still within Brazil’s legal limits — while prosecutors are pursuing legal cases against the companies for allegedly violating Indigenous and traditional communities’ rights and damaging the environment.
Studies based on satellite imagery also disprove the companies’ claims that they only plant on already deforested land.
TOMÉ-AÇU, Brazil — Guided by an Indigenous leader, we drove down dusty roads in the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve, a “green island” encircled by oil palm plantations in the Brazilian Amazon.
Uniform rows of oil palms cover huge swaths of land here in the northeast of the state of Pará, once home to a vibrant expanse of rainforest. Our Mongabay reporting team was there to discover if the palm oil business, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is sustainable and ecologically responsible, as industry representatives told us.
Federal prosecutors have pursued the country’s leading palm oil exporters in the courts for the past seven years, alleging the companies are contaminating rivers, poisoning the soil, and harming the livelihoods and health of Indigenous and traditional peoples, charges the companies deny.
The stories of abuse we heard from our guide seemed almost unbelievable. After hearing dozens of claims of water contamination in the Indigenous villages, the local chief, Lúcio Tembé, led us to a mill run by Biopalma da Amazônia — Brazil’s top palm oil producer and exporter — close to the Acará River, which meanders through the forest for almost 400 kilometers (250 miles) before spilling out into the Amazon gulf.
“Look,” Tembé said, “they will throw [palm oil] residue in the river!”
Leaving our car, we watched from the riverbank, filming as unmarked trucks, and then a man with a shovel, dumped waste into the waterway. Tembé told us that the dark brown residue was a toxic sludge of organic materials, insecticides and herbicides from local palm oil mills. Every day, dozens of trucks dump this waste into the Acará River, he added.
Industry representatives would later tell us that such things do not happen, and that palm oil production isn’t harmful to human health or to the environment. But the dumping we saw, as well as the rapid onset of coughing, shortness of breath, nausea and headaches when we inhaled the fumes from palm trees doused with pesticides, was enough to convince us that these claims were worth pursuing.
Over the past year we investigated allegations made by local communities of widespread abuses by palm oil companies in Brazil, discovering what appears to be an industry-wide pattern of brazen disregard for Amazon conservation and for the rights of Indigenous people and traditional communities.
“The oil palm only brought a lot of problems. First of all, it brought destruction of our fauna, our flora, our rivers,” Tembé said as he looked out over the Turé River, close to the Turé-Mariquita reserve, an Indigenous territory about 250 km (150 mi) south of the city of Belém on Brazil’s north coast. “This water isn’t clean. But in the past we drank it. This river and the forest around it were like a supermarket for the population; it was where we fished, where we hunted.”
The rights of Indigenous people and traditional communities are protected under Brazil’s Constitution and international accords to which Brazil is a signatory. The Constitution also establishes that all Brazilians have the right to an “ecologically balanced environment.”
But laws issued by Pará state have often overshadowed these commitments in practice. Biopalma’s mill and one of its plantations lie adjacent to the Acará River and were constructed without a buffer zone as is required by law, according to documents seen by Mongabay.
Since 2014, federal prosecutors have faced a legal battle to approve a forensic investigation into pesticide contamination and the socioenvironmental and health impacts in Biopalma’s production zone in the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve. “These are not minor problems faced by Indigenous peoples,” Felício Pontes Júnior, one of the federal prosecutors, wrote in a legal filing in the case. “The defendant [Biopalma] is aware of the Indigenous complaints.”
The claims date back to 2012, when Indigenous and traditional communities first raised the alarm. When the lawsuit was filed, a judge rapidly issued an injunction allowing a forensic investigation, but this was later overturned by another judge. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office appealed and a final ruling is yet to be issued.
“The company says it has no impact. So, if it says it doesn’t have [an impact] and we say it does, let’s do the forensic report,” Pontes Júnior told Mongabay in a phone interview in January.
A troubled industry booms
Palm oil has become ubiquitous in consumer societies. It’s one of the primary vegetable oils produced and traded worldwide. That’s partly because of its immense versatility: 80% of its production is channeled into the food industry, where it’s a key ingredient in consumer products made by conglomerates like Unilever and Nestlé.
Though most of us will never see it in its raw state, many of us will eat it in some form today. Various derivatives of palm oil are found in chocolate, ice cream, cookies, margarine and countless other products. It’s found in hygiene, beauty and cleaning items and even at the gas pump in the form of biodiesel. Rich in vitamins A and E and the best substitute for trans fats, which were banned in the United States in 2018, it is the oil of choice of global capitalism.
But researchers are growing increasingly concerned over the socioenvironmental crises its popularity has brought to many rural communities in tropical nations. The damage done to rainforests, wildlife, Indigenous peoples and water supplies in Malaysia and Indonesia, which together account for 85% of global palm oil production, is well documented, as are problems in Africa, where the industry has grown in recent years. Less studied and publicized to date are its impacts in the Brazilian Amazon.
Though Brazil accounts for just 1% of global palm oil production (about 540,000 tons in 2020), the industry is spreading rapidly here. Oil palm coverage in northern Pará — today responsible for about 90% of Brazilian production — increased almost five-fold to 236,000 hectares (583,169 acres) between 2010 and 2019. While national production dipped slightly in 2018, production in Pará rose by 47,653 tons (3.2%) over the same period.
Despite a push by the government of then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to stimulate palm oil production in 2010 by mandating its use as a biofuel, almost all Brazilian production is still used in the food industry, mostly as a soybean oil substitute. Lula also launched a national biodiesel program in 2004, and a sustainable palm oil production program in 2010, which further stoked demand.
When it was launched, the sustainability policy aimed to guarantee the supply of biofuel while protecting the environment by banning deforestation in native forest areas for the expansion of corporate plantations.
Pará has the highest deforestation rate in Brazil. Although cattle ranching and soy cultivation are the top drivers of deforestation, there are increasingly concerns about the damage associated with palm oil in the region. Researchers expect a massive expansion of the Amazon oil palm crop by 2030, driven by a government target to double the proportion of biodiesel used in the country and phase out fossil fuels.
Most of Brazil’s palm oil production is controlled by eight companies. The top producer, Biopalma, was a subsidiary of Brazilian mining giant Vale, which is responsible for the two most catastrophic environmental disasters in Brazil’s history in terms of affected area. As part of a divestment plan, Vale sold Biopalma at the end of 2020 to Brasil BioFuels S.A. (BBF), an energy company. In a document sent to Brazil’s antitrust regulator, Cade, BBF said all its oil palm is used for power generation.
Brazil exported almost 90,000 tons of palm oil in 2017, mostly to Colombia, the European Union, the U.S. and Mexico, according to Trase, a research group run by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the NGO Global Canopy. Biopalma accounted for almost three-quarters of these exports. The company, which has operated in Pará since 2007, has announced an ambitious goal of becoming the largest palm oil producer in the Americas.
‘Poisoned’ water
As the palm oil industry expands in Brazil, the threat of water contamination has become a growing concern. We visited Turé-Mariquita in the Amazon’s dry season, when companies spray agrochemicals in huge quantities. Activists say that in the rainy season, when river levels rise substantially and flood the land, all the accumulated toxins enter the river system, polluting the water and killing fish and other aquatic life.
We weren’t the first visitors to experience the impact of the oil palm plantations. Researchers Jamilli Medeiros de Oliveira da Silva and Brian Garvey told us how they had bathed in a stream near the Acará River where it flowed past a pesticide-drenched field.
“Our skin itched and we stayed sick for two, three weeks,” says Garvey, a researcher with the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland. “Several studies show that the water is contaminated. We witnessed them [Biopalma staff] dumping poison just a few meters from the river.”
A 2014 analysis by a federal laboratory under the umbrella of the Ministry of Health identified banned pesticides like endosulfan in rivers and streams near oil palm plantations in the Acará region. Researchers collected data from 18 aquatic locations and identified the presence of pesticides in 80% of samples collected during the rainy season, with some agrochemicals linked to hormonal disorders and cancer.
There’s no lack of anecdotal evidence regarding pesticide poisoning. “My husband’s aunt died of cancer,” Indigenous leader Uhu Tembé told Mongabay in the Yriwar village. “We say that’s because of this [oil palm-linked pollution], because these diseases didn’t exist in our village before. And today there is a lot of disease in our village … In the summer, we have a lot of headaches because that’s when they [the companies] throw poison.”
Cíntia Tembé, another resident of the Turé-Mariquita reserve, speaks of witnessing a previously healthy young man, whose job it had been to spray chemicals over the oil palms, fall ill and die in the local hospital. “He arrived there with exaggerated pain in the abdomen,” she said at his home in the Arar Zena’i village. “It was terrible. Blood started to come out of his ear, nose, eyes … as if something had burst inside him.”
Brazil is the largest consumer of agrochemicals on the planet, purchasing about a fifth of all pesticides produced globally. Dr. Peter Clausing, a toxicologist at the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) in Germany, said four out of nine pesticides approved for use in oil palm plantations in Brazil are listed as “highly hazardous.” Two of them — glufosinate-ammonium and methomyl — are banned in the European Union.
Waste generated during palm oil production contains a considerable amount of organic nutrients and heavy metals that can contaminate rivers, pollute the air and generate greenhouse gases. The effluent is typically released into rivers as a cheap and easy disposal method, according to Clausing.
Alleged palm oil residue being dumped in the Acará River, close to Biopalma’s Castanheira mill in Tomé-Açu municipality, northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 12, 2019. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
“My sister died of cancer because she drank water from the [Turé] river,” Emídio Tembé, chief of the Tekena’i Indigenous village, told Mongabay in 2019, during our visit to the Turé-Mariquita reserve. “She died of cancer [three] years ago due to poisoned water,” he added, referring to the pesticides sprayed by Biopalma. “It’s been nine years since we could not drink water from the river because it’s polluted with poison.”
When Biopalma began planting its oil palm crop in the Turé-Mariquita area in 2010, residents told us, locals experienced a mysterious wave of chronic, debilitating, and sometimes fatal, symptoms: headaches, itching, skin rashes and blisters, diarrhea and stomach ailments. Many of the health complaints arose shortly after drinking from or bathing in local streams and coincided with the annual pesticide-spraying season.
The accounts of the impact of oil palm pesticides on Indigenous and traditional communities are supported by a 2017 study that found traces of three pesticides (two of them typically listed among those used in oil palm cultivation) in the major streams and wells used by the Tembé people in Turé-Mariquita.
According to research from the University of Brasília (UnB), the number of reported cases of skin disorders in 2011 and 2012 increased considerably. “About a year after planting, there were many complaints of skin diseases and headaches. It was quite intense for about six months,” a local health worker told the researchers. “In 2005, the rates of skin diseases, diarrhea, flu and headaches were almost zero.”
Among the pesticides found in surface and underground water in the reserve were glyphosate-based herbicides. Glyphosate has been shown to be carcinogenic and has been banned or restricted in more than 20 nations, although not in Brazil. Also detected in samples of surface water and sediment taken by the researchers was the insecticide endosulfan, a persistent organic pollutant banned in Brazil in 2010.
“The most important scientific finding of this study is the identification for the first time, at least as far as we know from the scientific literature, of glyphosate-based herbicide residues in environmental water samples, both superficial and underground, in an Indigenous reserve surrounded by oil palm,” Sandra Damiani, the UnB researcher who conducted the study, told Mongabay. “In addition, our data also corroborates the presence of residues of other organic contaminants in the environment, this time not only in water, but also in sediment samples collected in the same water bodies studied.”
Damiani said they found contaminant residues in all six sampled streams and 40% of the wells sampled. Residue presence in groundwater samples was considered “particularly worrying” because these water sources are the only alternative to streams for Indigenous people in the area.
“We noticed a very large increase [in the number] of water wells after the company arrived,” Damiani told Mongabay. “And the presence of residues in the wells was a surprise, and it was something that caught our attention and requires great care because the [Indigenous] population uses either the stream directly or underground wells. If both have contaminants, what will they do?”
The maximum levels of glyphosate and endosulfan residues found in the water by the researchers were 45.5 micrograms per liter (μg/L) and 0.03 μg/L, respectively. While these are within the legal bounds in Brazil, they are well above the much stricter levels set by the European Union. “This is a controversial discussion,” Rosivaldo Mendes, a researcher at the laboratory that analyzed the samples, told Mongabay. “For me, the safe limit is having nothing [in the water].”
Following the disclosure of her findings to the authorities, Damiani says, she was told that the companies agreed to not use pesticides around Indigenous reserves in the future.
BBF, the energy company that acquired Biopalma, said in a statement it was unable to assess the accuracy of the academic studies since it did not have access to the results of the analysis. The company said it “faithfully complies with the environmental standards and procedures applicable to palm oil production and is unaware of the situation reported in such a study.”
Legally, the glyphosate limit for drinkable water in Brazil is 500 μg/L. “Water is [only] considered unsafe if it is above [this level],” Mendes said, adding he disagrees with this parameter.
Brazilian legislation sets no limits for any pesticide residue found in sediments, even though they could potentially contaminate crops and pose a public health risk. Damiani’s sampled sediments were found to contain DDT and its degradation products at levels that greatly exceed the thresholds established by the National Environment Council, a regulatory body. DDT is banned in more than 40 countries, including Brazil and the U.S. There is no national limit on sediment contamination with endosulfan.
Damiani said they found residues of at least one contaminant in almost a third of the 33 samples collected in the Turé-Mariquita reserve, with a much higher percentage for glyphosate-based herbicides in water collected during the dry season. Two-thirds of the groundwater samples and more than a third of surface samples contained traces of glyphosate-based herbicides.
Research from the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) also detected glyphosate in water samples collected in the municipality of Tailândia, another key oil palm cluster in Pará’s northeast. The 2018 study also found atrazine, a widely used weedkiller, and the presence of aquatic plants, indicative of water pollution from nitrogen-, phosphorus- and potassium-based fertilizers. Its use is not allowed for palm oil in Brazil but family farmers often refer to atrazine as one of the main pesticides used in palm crops, researchers told Mongabay.
In this region, the top palm oil producers are Agropalma, the country’s second-largest producer and exporter, and Belem Bioenergia Brasil (BBB).
Agropalma is the only Brazilian company certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the world’s leading palm oil sustainability certification scheme. It is a subsidiary of the Brazil-based Alfa conglomerate, a major player in the finance, insurance, agribusiness, building materials, communications, leather and hotel sectors.
BBB previously counted Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, the firm at the center of the Lava Jato corruption scandal that landed former president Lula in jail, as one of its main shareholders. It is now controlled by Portuguese oil company Galp and Ecotauá Participações, a holding company.
The UFPA study, led by Rosa Helena Ribeiro Cruz, collected nine water samples in the tributaries of sub-basins of the Anuerá and Aui-Açu rivers. The toxicological tests, carried out by the same laboratory that analyzed the samples collected in the Turé-Mariquita reserve, found “significant levels of glyphosate,” but still within the regulatory limits, from two collection points in the outflowing streams from BBB’s plantations, Cruz said.
Atrazine within Brazil’s regulatory limit of 2 μg/L was also detected at two points — outflowing streams from BBB site and in a community closer to Agropalma’s plantations, the researcher noted — including an intersection between oil palm, corn and soybean crops. Banned in the EU, the herbicide is still often detected in water samples two decades after its use was prohibited. Atrazine is quite toxic, and potentially carcinogenic to humans, and persists in the environment, especially in water bodies.
“There is no way to say that there is no water contamination,” Cruz said. “We came to the conclusion that this pesticide glyphosate is being used. But as they are pesticides that are under the ground, in the water, it will be diluted.” She added that no previous data on river contamination for Tailândia were available.
No traces of pesticides were detected from collection points inside Agropalma’s plantations, where the researchers were escorted by company minders.
“BBB didn’t let us enter the company [plantation area], only Agropalma. But we were accompanied all the time,” Cruz told Mongabay, adding that the collection points were chosen by the company. “Two people were assigned to accompany us and at the same point where we did the collection, they did it too. But then there is this doubt: I don’t know if they really took us to the points where there is leaching into the soil… They wanted us to do my analysis inside their laboratory, they wanted us to stay inside Agropalma, paying for [our] lunch, coffee, dinner, all support, but we didn’t accept it.”
Agropalma’s director of sustainability, Tulio Dias Brito, said the company does not use atrazine. He also challenged the research, claiming that the points where Cruz detected atrazine do not have any connection with Agropalma’s area.
“They are far from Agropalma and … they are upstream… So, there is no way, even if I had sprayed… an atrazine truck at a stream of Agropalma, it would not reach this point,” Brito told Mongabay in an interview in February.
Geographer Daniel Sombra, coordinator at UFPA’s Laboratory of Environmental Analysis and Cartographic Representations, disagrees. Although the natural watercourse is upstream, he said, it could also flow downstream, given the high level of variation of the tides of the Amazon rivers.
“[This point] is 2 km upstream on the Aiu-Açu river… It may be that they [the pesticides] came from upstream plantations, which are from other properties, including family farms cultivating oil palm, some linked to BBB. But it is not impossible that the effects deposited downstream could move 2 km upwards,” noted Sombra, who built the maps for Cruz’ thesis. “So, it is undetermined whether it really came from upstream or downstream. The fact is: the pesticides collected are typical residues of palm monoculture.”
Brito also challenged the research’s allegations about the presence of aquatic plants as indicative of water pollution from nitrogen-, phosphorus- and potassium-based fertilizers, claiming that the photos from the study didn’t show any macrophyte superpopulation; the existence of many factors in the area could have triggered macrophyte growth, including sun incidence and a nearby road, while laboratory testing for these substances was lacking. Brito also argued that none of the collection points are close to Agropalma, adding that other factors should be taken into account.
Brito says Agropalma has collected water samples from the outflowing streams and within its area as well to check the presence of phosphorus and nitrogen at eight pre-selected points since 2015, as one of the requirements of the Palm Oil Innovation Group (POIG), an industry group. The results of the sampling are recorded and published in the company’s annual sustainability report.
“When comparing streams that cross the palm plantation, we compare them with streams that only cross primary forests,” Brito said. “The species composition is not exactly the same: some populations are favored, others are disadvantaged, but the ecological function is fulfilled. And the water quality is adequate, it is good.”
Moreover, he said that Agropalma has monitored watercourses within its farms in partnership with NGO Conservation International and UFPA’s department of biological sciences, which monitor water quality and aquatic fauna on company property. “So far, we have not received any indication of contamination,” he noted. He also cited a UFPA study that found that oil palm plantations “appear to be one of the least deleterious for native fauna” compared to the different options available for use of soil in the Amazon basin.
According to Brito, Agropalma only uses herbicides, mostly glyphosate, but is testing other compounds. “Our mission is not to use [glyphosate] anymore,” he said. “But it is very difficult because we have to keep the crown of the plants clean. And we also publish every year the amount of active ingredients that we use.”
Smallholders quoted in Cruz’s research said that glyphosate, known locally as mata-mato, was the main pesticide used in oil palm cultivation in Tailândia, even though they said the risks are unknown.
Brito said Agropalma only provides glyphosate after carrying out the due training with farmers.
In a statement, Gilberto Cabral, a BBB spokesman, said the company observes “the best practices applicable in environmental terms” and “without substantial change in land use.” According to him, the trees were planted between 2011 and 2015 in areas that had been used as pastures or areas that were already degraded before 2005.
However, he noted, Tailândia’s land is also used by independent palm producers and by producers of other crops, such as corn and soybeans, “with recurrent use of pesticides in all areas sown.”
As a means of environmental monitoring, Cabral said, the company periodically analyzes surface waters, upstream and downstream, and underground, in order to detect any changes.
“The company strictly observes the dosages and other instructions expressed on the labels and package inserts of the few pesticides it uses, since we prioritize preventive, mechanical (brushing) and biological (Bacillus thuringiensis) means of control on a large scale,” he wrote.
Roberto Yokoyama, the head of the Brazilian Association of Palm Oil Producers (Abrapalma), said if the contamination of watercourses has indeed occurred in Pará, there should be an official investigation.
Yokoyama challenged Cruz’ research, claiming the levels of atrazine found in watercourses and the fertilization period were misrepresented. He also challenged the methodology used by the researcher and argued that the study did not present evidence that proved palm oil plantations were the source.
“The data and results that the master’s thesis presents, in fact, do not indicate that oil palm plantations were responsible for the application of atrazine and glyphosate in their plantations,” Yokoyama wrote.
Aerial view of palm crops in Tomé-Açu municipality, in northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 11, 2019. Image by Wilson Paz for Mongabay.
Scientific evidence of health impacts
Several studies provide evidence of the harmful health impacts of the contaminants found in Turé-Mariquita and Tailândia. Endosulfan levels of 0.01 μg/L (a third of the concentration found in the water in Damiani’s study), for example, have been shown to be lethal to fish. Studies also detected serious health issues linked to exposure to DDT, diuron and glyphosate-based herbicide residues. There is also growing evidence for atrazine’s carcinogenic potential.
Brazil banned the use of endosulfan in 2010 and DDT in phases from 1985 to 2009, citing their high toxicity and the capacity for bioaccumulation and persistence in the environment. Both are considered persistent organic pollutants under the Stockholm Convention, a global treaty.
It’s thought the DDT found in the Turé-Mariquita samples may have originated from its widespread use to control malaria-bearing mosquitos in the Amazon.
At least seven herbicides and 16 insecticides are currently used in oil palm cultivation in Brazil and other countries that grow the crop. Damiani notes the lack of transparency regarding agrochemicals used by Brazilian palm oil companies, as well as the amounts and periods of application — a lack of publicly available data that could potentially conceal much higher exposure of Amazonian communities to oil palm pesticides.
Damiani obtained access to pesticide data collected by prosecutors from Biopalma and other palm oil firms. “Scientific research corroborates the Tembé’s claims,” she said. But “this data we obtained is [just] a snapshot of a reality that requires more frequent monitoring.”
Another study in 2014 by the Instituto Evandro Chagas (IEC), the federal laboratory that carried out the testing for Damiani’s and Cruz’ studies, found endosulfan residues and cyanobacteria, but no pesticide residues, in another oil palm-growing area. According to Mendes, the lab researcher, further systematic analysis of the impacts of oil palm plantations’ pesticide use in Pará is needed, but previous attempts to secure funding have failed.
While the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve’s residents can point to Damiani’s study to corroborate their claims, their neighbors, including in the Tembé Indigenous Reserve, have voiced similar contamination and disease concerns, but lack any scientific evidence to support their accounts.
Their ancestral lands abut oil palm plantations owned and operated by BBB. The reserve’s Indigenous inhabitants say BBB is shirking its obligations by denying the existence of a tributary of the Acará-Mirim River that runs inside one of their oil palm plantations. Mongabay visited the area and verified the existence of a river inside the property.
In the nearby village of Acará-Mirim, Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, has set up a water supply system at the center of the community. But it doesn’t reach Nazaré Coutinho Pereira’s house by the banks of the Acará-Mirim River. “We keep drinking this water because there’s no [other] option,” Pereira said. “We consume a lot of water to drink, to wash, [but] the body always becomes itchy and we need to take medicine.
“[When] we fill a can with this water, in a few hours we can see a finger of mud in the bottom of the pan,” she added. Come the rainy season, she said, “all the poisons, all the dirt comes … dead animals on top, oxen, horse, they throw everything in the river … and we drink the juice from it all.”
Pereira said she has experienced symptoms including diarrhea after drinking the once-clean river water, something that didn’t happen in the past. “I feel my stomach get big, it gets full, unwilling to eat,” she said. “I also have urinary infections very often.” Residents who drink from Funai’s water supply also describe similar symptoms, she added.
In a statement, BBB denied the use of pesticides, saying it only used “mineral fertilizers that contribute to the growth of plants, both cultivated and native.” The company acknowledged the existence of a river called “Rio Pequeno” near its farm, but said that its plantations “are within a regulatory distance from this water body.”
It added its technicians are investigating the situation, including “rigorous analysis of all water bodies near the plantations.” The company said it received on February 18 a complaint from the Tembé Indigenous Association of Vale do Acará about the carrying of liquid effluents, distributed in the planting plots as complementary organic fertilizer, for streams that flow into the river that serves the community in which they live.
A decade-long legal battle
Local communities have frequently pursued legal action against Brazil’s major palm oil players. Biopalma has been targeted by the Tembé people of the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve and by small farmers and Afro slave-descendant quilombola communities.
The Tembé say they were not properly consultated before Biopalma’s oil palm venture got up and running. “We were not listened to for this project; when we saw it, the project was already established around our territory,” Lúcio Tembé, chief of the Turé Indigenous village, said. Pontes Júnior, the federal prosecutor, points to a loophole in Brazilian law that requires a buffer zone of 10 km (6 mi) and a socio-environmental impact study for ventures around conservation areas, but not around Indigenous reserves.
For large development projects, like dams, such a buffer zone is also mandatory for Indigenous reserves, given the potentially harmful impacts of these types of developments. But palm oil plantations are considered an “agrosilvopastoral culture” with “low polluting and degrading potential” by the state environmental council, and so are not required to go through the same licensing process, instead qualifying for a simplified licensing process.
Brazil is a party to international conventions that require consultation with, and consent by, Indigenous and traditional communities who will be impacted by major development projects. In this case, however, there was no prior consultation, and the impact was not assessed, Pontes Júnior said. “Everything depends on [getting] this forensic report. From this forensic report, a series of other actions will be triggered… [But] without this forensic report I have my hands tied in this action,” he said.
In a statement, the Federal Circuit Court for the First Region in Brasília said a ruling may be made in March.
Another enabling factor in the oil palm industry’s environmental violations can be found in the plantation licensing process. In Pará, the state government didn’t acknowledge the presence of Indigenous or traditional communities when granting licenses for oil palm cultivation, prosecutors say.
The Turé-Mariquita reserve, for example, was demarcated in 1991, 16 years before Biopalma arrived in the region. The Tembé themselves have been present in Pará since the second half of the 19th century, when they were forced to migrate from neighboring Maranhão state.
Since their first recorded contact with Portuguese colonizers in 1615 in Maranhão, the Tembé have had to face forced proselytization by missionaries, slavery, infectious diseases, persecution, conflict, and extreme droughts that devastated the land. A branch of the Tupi-Guarani family, they called themselves Tenetehara but in the migration process came to be called the Tembé in Pará; those who remained in Maranhão are called the Guajajara.
The presence of several quilombola settlements, or quilombos, also dating back more than a century was similarly ignored during the licensing process. State and federal prosecutors say this renders the process invalid, given the lack of attention paid to the impacts on these communities. Pontes Júnior and state prosecutors Eliane Cristina Pinto Moreira and Raimundo Moraes have also called on the Pará state environmental council, Coema, to reform its palm oil licensing policy to introduce more regulation, but the requests have been rejected.
Researchers at UFPA have found that Biopalma’s Castanheira processing mill, next to the Acará River, received two separate licenses — one from the municipality of Acará and one from the state — yet neither defines any buffer zone requirements. “The conditions are ridiculous, i.e., annual reports of activities, something that the legislation already establishes… The environmental authority simply relies on the companies’ self-monitoring procedures,” lead researcher Elielson Pereira da Silva told Mongabay. He added that the environment secretary in Acará had only shown him the documents on condition he not make any copies or photograph them.
In a statement, Pará’s Secretariat of Environment and Sustainability (Semas-PA) said
it carried out inspections from May to December 2019 in six municipalities, including Acará and Tomé Açu, and at the time “there were no violations of current environmental standards.”
In relation to the pollution of watercourses, Semas-PA said it plans to inspect the area; there are also scheduled inspections for Tailândia’s oil palm farms, but monitoring rivers and streams within Indigenous Reserves is the responsibility of the federal government, it added.
Brazil’s Ministry of Health, Funai, and the municipalities of Acará and Tailândia did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
‘Desperate’ strategy to be heard
Brazilian companies like Biopalma portray their operations as sustainable to consumers in Latin America, Europe and the U.S. But palm oil companies the world over have long been accused of destroying traditional livelihoods, leaving poverty and social deprivation in their wake. In Pará, the industry has left many Indigenous and traditional residents feeling estranged from their culture, which is deeply intertwined with the natural world.
By 2019, Biopalma’s plantations had encircled the Tembé’s lands, and local resistance morphed into campaigns of direct action against the company. Tired of nearly a decade of fruitless campaigning for compensation through official channels, the Tembé took direct action, seizing company vehicles in the hope of forcing Biopalma to hear their concerns. Uhu Tembé, an Indigenous leader, told Mongabay how she and her husband seized a Biopalma tractor during the protest and used it to bulldoze oil palm trees near the village of Yriwar in the Turé-Mariquita reserve.
On November 12, 2019, Indigenous leader Uhu Tembé told Mongabay in village of Yriwar in the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve how she and her husband seized a Biopalma tractor during a protest and used it to bulldoze oil palm trees near hear house. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
“We have been asking for [Biopalma’s] help for a long time to clean the area so we can plant; they never answered. Then we decided to get their machinery to do it ourselves … because we’ve been asking them for ten years,” Uhu said, pointing to the tractor that sat outside her home for three months. “We are cleaning it up here to plant our cassava, corn, rice. We don’t eat this here,” she added, pointing to oil palms. “They did not respect our land, our area. That’s why we feel outraged.”
Frustration with palm oil companies has grown across the region over the last years, and the seizure of company property by the Turé-Mariquita residents is not an isolated case.
Like the Indigenous communities, the quilombolas have also protested against Biopalma, blocking roads to call for development assistance. But such actions may have provoked violence, including the murder of a quilombola leader in 2018, and an arson attack on the home of another.
The Mongabay team visited the village of Acará-Mirim in the neighboring Tembé Indigenous Reserve the day after residents had seized tractors and a car from BBB. Indigenous leader Valdevan Evangelista dos Santos Tembé said their goal was to force a dialogue with the company, and that they would return the vehicles once an agreement was reached. In the meantime, residents used the machinery to prepare the area to plant crops.
“All Indigenous leaders in Acará-Mirim and Cuxiu-Mirim villages agreed to do this protest. We agreed to put on war paint [over] our bodies, take our bows and arrows and seize the company’s … tractors,” Valdevan Tembé said. “What was our objective? To bring the company’s manager to our village to talk to us and sign an agreement. We would only give them back their machines after they start the construction works they promised us.”
The protests have had some successes. For Valdevan Tembé and his neighbors, BBB committed to conducting a social and environmental impact study to determine if the plantations had damaged the Indigenous communities. BBB said the study was contracted and is being carried out at the moment, with completion expected for the first semester of this year to be “the basis for the adoption of measures to mitigate any impacts.”
BBB also made some improvements to the road requested by the Acará-Mirim villagers, Lúcio Tembé said.
The Mongabay team visited the village of Acará-Mirim in the Tembé Indigenous Reserve the day after residents had seized tractors and a car from palm oil company Belem Bionergia Brasil (BBB). On November 14, 2019, Indigenous leader Valdevan Evangelista dos Santos Tembé said their goal was to force a dialogue with the company, and that they would return the vehicles once an agreement was reached. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
In Turé-Mariquita, Biopalma went to court to get its machines back. The villagers handed them back three months after seizing them, with the company agreeing to pay each community 30,000 reais (about $5,600) quarterly for three years to finance local development projects, according to Urutaw Turiwar Tembé, chief of the Yriwar Indigenous village. “It is not enough for us, but it was what they gave us. We fought for more, but we failed,” he said.
But none of these projects have been completed so far, Urutaw Tembé said, due to higher costs amid the COVID-19 pandemic. According to him, instead of paying the quarterly amount, Biopalma only paid annually.
The Indigenous have tried to seal a new deal to replace the amount for the obligation for carrying out the projects, regardless of the amount but “it became very complicated to negotiate” after Biopalma’s sale to BBF, Urutaw Tembé noted.
In a statement, BBF said its relationship with Indigenous communities close to palm plantation areas “is always maintained in a spirit of technical and social cooperation” under agreements made last year that included providing clean drinking water, ensuring food security, and educational and cultural schemes.
November 2015 saw the first major mobilization of Indigenous people, quilombolas, ribeirinhos (traditional riverside dwellers) and residents of neighboring communities against the palm oil firms. About 140 people came together and occupied Biopalma’s Vera Cruz headquarters, paralyzing the company for 11 days.
The protest began when Biopalma started operating a ferry on the Acará River, close to the Vila Formosa quilombola community. The quilombolas asked if they could also use the company ferry to travel to other communities or even to the city, but were rebuffed, leading to the occupation. Days later, a judge intervened and the protesters left peacefully. Biopalma denounced the occupation, alleging its property had been looted, and a judge in Acará ordered the arrest of the leaders of the associations involved in the occupation. One quilombola leader was jailed for eight months.
However, in a counterargument of appeal signed in early 2020 in defense of the Tembé’s November 2019 protests against Biopalma, federal prosecutor Felipe Moura de Palha e Silva said the demonstration was a legitimate act of Indigenous resistance made in response “to the years of illicit conduct by the company, which severely damages their health,” and was carried out “in a desperate attempt to at least be heard [in] a dispute over Indigenous rights.”
The prosecutor encouraged both sides in the conflict to engage in mediation over Biopalma’s omission of environmental impacts and the need for corrective environmental licensing, among other points of contention. “For these issues, the company omits and tries to criminalize the demonstration of the Indigenous people through lawfare and police procedures,” Silva wrote.
In a statement, Biopalma said it filed a repossession suit given “the repeated undue seizures of agricultural machinery” through “serious threats like wielding melee weapons against Biopalma employees.”
Fewer game animals, more pests
The arrival of the oil palm plantations in the Amazon has driven out the wildlife that Indigenous and traditional communities often hunt for food and ushered in an influx of disease-carrying insects and venomous snakes, the communities say.
Before the plantations encircled the reserve, “we [easily] found, very close to here, paca, armadillo, a lot of fish,” said Nazaré Coutinho Pereira from Acará-Mirim village. “Hunting has changed because there are no more [animals]. It is difficult for us to find [animals to hunt] … There’s nothing else [left], neither hunting nor fish.”
In Yriwar village, residents say game animals like tapir and tortoise have disappeared since Biopalma arrived. And even when they do catch animals, they are afraid to eat them due to the risk of pesticide poisoning. The few animals that remain, such as foxes, reportedly also suffer symptoms such as hair loss, while many others have been found dead from no obvious cause, according to Lúcio Tembé.
The cultivation of oil palms close to Indigenous reserves affects livelihoods and lifestyle quality in other ways beyond depriving residents of hunting and fishing. Urutaw Tembé said they have seen an increase in the number of insects and snakes.
The plantations “touched our territory [and] didn’t respect the buffer zone. This has brought us a lot of damage today: insects, lizards … that we had never seen [before]. Venomous snakes, many snake species … flies, flies that bother us. It ends up hurting the children’s bodies, triggering allergies,” he said.
According to Indigenous residents, the swarms of pests are caused by the loss of native vegetation and the large number of rodents attracted by fallen palm leaves. The snakes, in turn, are drawn by the abundance of the rodents, posing a serious health threat to residents, for whom the nearest clinic is an hour’s drive away and the closest hospital about four hours away.
Urutaw Tembé also complained about the damage caused by the planting of pueraria (Pueraria phaseoloides), a crop in the pea family that is used by the oil palm companies to fix nitrogen in the soil, control weeds, and reduce erosion. The Tembé say it attracts insects during the dry season that burrow beneath the skin, causing rashes.
Indigenous chief Lúcio Tembé poses for a photograph in front of Biopalma’s Castanheira mill, just a few meters away from the Acará River, in Tomé-Açu municipality, northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 12, 2019. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
Forests replaced by palm crops
Biopalma has said in the past that it established its plantations only on already cleared land, but Indigenous residents and researchers dispute this.
Sandra Damiani from UnB, who investigated the pesticide use in the area, said she found evidence of about 300 hectares (740 acres) of deforestation for oil palm around Turé-Mariquita, where old-growth forests were felled as loggers first encroached, followed by agricultural settlers, a mining company whose pipeline crosses the reserve, and finally by Biopalma.
Studies have shown that the conversion of forests into oil palm plantations is a major problem, not only locally, but across northeast Pará. Research suggests between 9% and 39% of oil palm production occurred in deforested areas in Pará between 1989 and 2014, raising concerns about future expansion. This casts into doubt Biopalma’s claim, and that of other companies, that their oil palm production stems only from previously cleared land.
The use of heavy machinery on the plantations also has an impact on biodiversity by scaring off game animals, Damiani said. The reduction in both abundance and diversity of animals was noticed immediately by Indigenous people after the planting of palm oil crops bordering their land, she said. Numerous bird species, for example, were no longer seen after the conversion to oil palm.
The native vegetation in the now-deforested territory outside the Indigenous reserve was important for the community to collect non-timber forest products, including herbs and honey that are used as medicines, vines for making of utensils, seeds for handicrafts, and fruits such as pequiá (Caryocar villosum), uxi (Endopleura uchi), bacuri (Platonia insignis) and bacaba (Oenocarpus bacaba).
The Indigenous people initially welcomed the increased access to urban centers that the new roads laid by Biopalma facilitated. But the roads also increased exposure to outsiders, making them feel that they were losing control of their territory. Another consequence of more roads has been an increase in illegal logging in the area. Numerous studies in the Amazon have identified road construction as an important vector of deforestation, and the Mongabay team regularly saw trucks loaded with timber passing through the area.
In a statement, BBF said it has identified “the role of illegal deforestation gangs in areas close to its farms” since it took control of Biopalma in November 2020 and had reported the allegations to the authorities. It added that palm oil crops were “planted in the parcels of land authorized under the terms of the applicable environmental legislation.”
Truck loaded with palm oil fruits in Tomé-Açu municipality, northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 12, 2019. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
Deforestation in quilombola areas is also occurring as the direct result of oil palm expansion. Nearly 4,800 hectares (11,900 acres) of forest was cleared between 2007 and 2018 to make way for oil palms in the municipality of Acará, according to research by Jamilli Medeiros de Oliveira da Silva at São Paulo State University (UNESP). The study looked at satellite imagery from Mapbiomas — a network of NGOs, universities and tech firms that include Google — and crosschecked them with NASA’s Landsat 5 and 8 data.
This further disproves the companies’ and government’s claims that oil palm plantations were established only on previously cleared land.
In 2010, the federal government launched an agroecological zoning program for palm oil cultivation in deforested areas in the states that make up the Brazilian Amazon. Called ZAE-Dendê, it offered benefits to palm oil companies for meeting certain sustainability requirements. But as Damiani and da Silva found in their research, some areas were deforested and overlapped onto traditional quilombola communities.
Adriano Venturieri, the researcher who led the palm oil agroecological zoning program, said the quilombola communities were not considered because their presence was not formally acknowledged at the time. He added the program may be updated at any time to include this data.
Quilombolas affected
Like the Indigenous communities impacted by the plantations, the quilombola communities in Acará — the third-largest palm oil-producing municipality in Brazil —complain about similar issues arising from the plantations, including deforestation, reduced water levels in their streams, and pesticide pollution.
“They wanted to plant oil palm here. We did not allow it,” José Renato Gomes de Gusmão told Mongabay at his home in 19 de Massaranduba, a quilombola village in the Tomé-Açu region. “People who live close [to the palm plantations] got sick [with] too much poison. The waters are gone, with so much poison that they throw. The streams are all gone.
“I don’t like it,” he added. “The palm brought a lot of income, a lot of jobs… [But] it is not healthy.”
Researchers Brian Garvey and Jamilli Medeiros de Oliveira da Silva said they heard similar stories of water contamination in quilombola communities close to the Acará River. In 2016, a palm oil spill in the river left a yellow slick on the water’s surface for more than a week. Quilombola communities including Vila Formosa village, where the protest over Biopalma’s ferry began, were devastated as the fish they relied on died out. Since then, fish catches have declined, and even the river dolphins have disappeared, residents say.
In 2019, two palm oil spills near Agropalma’s plantations in Tailândia polluted the Acará River and its tributaries. The company’s director of sustainability, Tulio Dias Brito, said all of the oil was collected and the impact was “virtually nonexistent.”
“We have the floating barriers that surround oil in the river … We managed to surround the oil there and we managed to collect it to the last drop,” he told Mongabay. “No fish, no tree died. So, there was no environmental impact. Although the volume was a few tons of hollow oil, which is a relatively large volume, the environmental impact was zero, objectively speaking … We have all the proof: the photo before, the photo after.”
Elielson da Silva from UFPA visited the area in the days after the second oil spill in October 2019 and documented the environmental impacts, including water contamination and the death of animals and fish. “There was contamination. I was there. I photographed people, I witnessed the [damages of the] oil spill,” he told Mongabay, adding that residents said that there were three oil spills that year.
Water contamination issues derived from both pesticides and oil spills have been faced by quilombola communities close to Agropalma’s concession for several decades, but the situation worsens each year, especially the degree of fish contamination, a quilombola, who talked on condition of anonymity after receiving death threats, told Mongabay.
“The water is muddy, it’s dark; it’s so dark that we cannot have any visibility,” the source said.
After the 2019 oil spills, the source noted, one of the main impacts was scarcity of fish. The fishes are only coming back now, the source noted. “The fish eat the palm oil; it fills its belly. Then you go fishing, when you open the fish, where its tripe ends from its gills, everything is full of oil palm… The oil hardens inside the fish… The fish dies with that inside.”
Photographs from an environmental inspection released by Tailândia municipality and seen by Mongabay corroborate the allegations of negative environmental impacts from Agropalma’s oil spill. The document, dated May 2019, ordered that steps be taken to repair the rivers and streams.
In a statement, Semas-PA said it had recorded an infraction notice against Agropalma, without providing further details.
Palm fruits stored on the road in Tomé-Açu municipality, northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 12, 2019. Image by Thaís Borges for Mongabay.
Community-wide impacts
During our investigation, we witnessed how the oil palm plantations impact the daily lives of people living in the wider Pará community — at a school, for example, which was surrounded by palm trees. Although the companies say the agrochemicals they use are not toxic, this particular school endured a forced three-day closure while the firm was spraying, residents told Mongabay.
“There was no class for three days [and] no one could pass through the area,” said Alex de Oliveira Pimentel, a local farmer. “[The company] said [the pesticide used] was organic, [that] it wasn’t unhealthy… But the requirement was that nobody could pass through the area for 48 hours.”
Aerial view of a school completely surrounded by oil palm plantations in Tomé-Açu municipality, in northern Amazon’s Pará state, on November 13, 2019. Image by Wilson Paz for Mongabay.
Beyond the contamination of the soil and water, Pimentel said farmers have lost their crops due to the spread of pests and disease from the palm plantations, including butterfly infestations destroying fruit crops like dragon fruit and cashew.
When the big agribusiness companies first came to the Tomé-Açu region, they approached several small farmers with an offer to lease their lands for oil palm cultivation. Some resisted, unwilling to turn over their land to grow a then-unknown crop.
Among them was José Edimilson Ramos Rodrigues, one of many farmers in his community who rejected the lease offer. But that has not stopped the community from feeling the impact of the plantations, which now surround them. The residents have regularly complained about water contamination, reduced fish catches, and animal deaths since the oil palms were planted close to the river.
Rodrigues said he has noticed some changes in local crops, including a vine that now grows in coconut trees and which he said didn’t exist before. He said the damage done far outweighs any benefits from the lease offer. “There’s no way. What we must do is try to avoid … so that it won’t happen again,” he said.
Lax agrochemical controls
The spread of pesticide use in Indigenous and traditional communities has once again shone a light on the lax regulatory climate governing the sales and use of harmful chemicals in Brazil. Only one company is officially approved by Pará state to sell pesticides in Tailândia, but a thriving illegal market has flourished, selling glyphosate under the local name mata-mato. The farmers’ union in Tailândia, Sintraf, told UFPA researcher Rosa Helena Ribeiro Cruz that the palm oil companies do not dispose of the packaging properly, opening the possibility for misuse later on. Proper package disposal is regulated by a federal law, which holds the farmer, vendor and manufacturer legally responsible for any such misuse.
Tailândia’s farmers also said they were initially given personal protective equipment by Agropalma and BBB, but the supplies were short-lived, even though people began falling ill due to the use of pesticides.
Brito, the Agropalma director, denied all the accusations. According to him, the company collects the agrochemical packaging, which is incinerated. He said Agropalma also controls all glyphosate provided to farmers and provides appropriate safety equipment.
Cabral, BBB spokesman, said it is common for farmers to plant other crops in areas adjacent to palm groves, which are managed separately. Pesticide packaging supplied by the company is “inert and recyclable” and is collected by local companies after use; the use of appropriate safety equipment is also inspected, he added.
Sintraf also told Cruz that the use of pesticides by the palm oil firms had led many local farmers to adopt new practices, heavily reliant on agrochemical use, and abandon their traditional farming methods. This has compounded the pollution of rivers, as up to half the farmers in some communities have switched to using pesticides.
The Ministry of Health launched a health surveillance program in the 1990s for people exposed to pesticides, but the system failed to produce any reports for Tailândia, Cruz noted.
For some federal prosecutors, the problems caused by the palm oil industry’s inroads into the Amazon over the past decade are a repeat of what they witnessed with the cattle, soy and mining sectors and all development projects.
“The palm oil [sector] doesn’t differ at all from the other monocultures established here in the Amazon,” prosecutor Felipe Moura de Palha e Silva told Mongabay. “The modus operandi follows a primer as well, which is a primer for violating the rights of communities.”
In Tomé-Açú, game animals and fish were once plentiful. Now only oil palm trees grow, in some cases within meters of the Indigenous reserves.
“The palm oil company left us in a space like an egg … Only the company profits,” said Urutaw Tembé, pointing to oil palms just a few feet from his home in Yriwar village. “We are dying with pesticides, with water contamination. How does a company like this come from outside to enrich [itself] on our land? We don’t accept it … We will keep fighting.”
Karla Mendes is a staff contributing editor for Mongabay in Brazil. Find her on Twitter: @karlamendes
Citations:
Damiani, S., Ferreira Guimarães, S. M., Leite Montalvão, M. T., & Sousa Passos, C. J. (2020). “All that’s left is bare land and sky”: Palm oil culture and socioenvironmental impacts on a Tembé Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon. Ambiente & Sociedade, 23. doi:10.1590/1809-4422asoc20190049r2vu2020l6ao
Da Silva, J. M. O. (2020). O território quilombola do Alto Acará/PA como resistência à expansão do agronegócio do dendê (The quilombola territory of Alto Acará / PA as resistance to the expansion of palm oil agribusiness) (Master’s thesis, São Paulo State University, São Paulo, Brazil). Retrieved from https://repositorio.unesp.br/handle/11449/194439
Kogevinas, M. (2019). Probable carcinogenicity of glyphosate. BMJ, 365, l1613. doi:10.1136/bmj.l1613
Benami, E., Curran, L. M., Cochrane, M., Venturieri, A., Franco, R., Kneipp, J., & Swartos, A. (2018). Oil palm land conversion in Parà, Brazil, from 2006-2014: Evaluating the 2010 Brazilian sustainable palm oil production program. Environmental Research Letters, 13(3), 034037. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aaa270
Cruz, R. H. (2018). Impactos socioambientais de produção de palma de dendê na Amazônia paraense: Uso de agrotóxicos e poluição ambiental nas sub-bacias hidrográficas, Tailândia (PA) (Socioenvironmental impacts of palm oil production in Amazonian Pará: Use of pesticides and environmental pollution in hydrographic sub-basins, Tailândia (PA)) (Master’s thesis, Federal University of Pará, Belém, Brazil). Retrieved from http://repositorio.ufpa.br/jspui/handle/2011/10316
Smedbol, É., Gomes, M. P., Paquet, S., Labrecque, M., Lepage, L., Lucotte, M., & Juneau, P. (2018). Effects of low concentrations of glyphosate-based herbicide factor 540® on an agricultural stream freshwater phytoplankton community. Chemosphere, 192, 133-141. doi:10.1016/j.chemosphere.2017.10.128
Damiani, S. (2017). Impactos socioambientais do cultivo de dendê na terra indígena Turé-Mariquita no nordeste do Pará (Socioenvironmental impacts of oil palm cultivation in the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Territory in northeastern Pará) (Master’s thesis, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil). Retrieved from https://repositorio.unb.br/handle/10482/31503
Furumo, P. R., & Aide, T. M. (2017). Characterizing commercial oil palm expansion in Latin America: Land use change and trade. Environmental Research Letters, 12(2), 024008. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aa5892
Myers, J. P., Antoniou, M. N., Blumberg, B., Carroll, L., Colborn, T., Everett, L. G., … Benbrook, C. M. (2016). Concerns over use of glyphosate-based herbicides and risks associated with exposures: A consensus statement. Environmental Health, 15(1). doi:10.1186/s12940-016-0117-0
Dislich, C., Keyel, A. C., Salecker, J., Kisel, Y., Meyer, K. M., Auliya, M., … Wiegand, K. (2016). A review of the ecosystem functions in oil palm plantations, using forests as a reference system. Biological Reviews, 92(3), 1539-1569. doi:10.1111/brv.12295
Vijay, V., Pimm, S. L., Jenkins, C. N., & Smith, S. J. (2016). The impacts of oil palm on recent deforestation and biodiversity loss. PLOS ONE, 11(7), e0159668. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0159668
Mesnage, R., Arno, M., Costanzo, M., Malatesta, M., Séralini, G.-E., & Antoniou, M. N. (2015). Transcriptome profile analysis reflects rat liver and kidney damage following chronic ultra-low dose roundup exposure. Environmental Health, 14(1). doi:10.1186/s12940-015-0056-1
Mesnage, R., Defarge, N., Spiroux de Vendômois, J., & Séralini, G.-E. (2014). Major pesticides are more toxic to human cells than their declared active principles. BioMed Research International, 2014, 1-8. doi:10.1155/2014/179691
Saldanha, G. C., Bastos, W. R., Torres, J. P. M., & Malm, O. (2010). DDT in fishes and soils of lakes from Brazilian Amazon: Case study of Puruzinho Lake (Amazon, Brazil). Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society, 21(2), 306-311. doi:10.1590/s0103-50532010000200016
Stanley, K. A., Curtis, L. R., Massey Simonich, S. L., & Tanguay, R. L. (2009). Endosulfan I and endosulfan sulfate disrupts zebrafish embryonic development. Aquatic Toxicology, 95(4), 355-361. doi:10.1016/j.aquatox.2009.10.008
Indigenous peoples worldwide are the victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that humans as a species are not inherently destructive, but a societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy (i.e. civilization) is. DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples.
Hundreds of Jenu Kuruba people have launched an indefinite protest in the Nagarhole National Park, India, to demand that the authorities stop trying to evict them, and recognize their rights to the forest.
According to India’s Forest Rights Act (FRA), the tribe has rights to live in, “protect” and “conserve” their lands.
The Jenu Kuruba’s rights to their lands should have been recognized many years ago – they first submitted their claims in 2009. But like many tribes across the country, their claims have been ignored.
JK Thimma, a Jenu Kuruba leader from Nagarhole, said today: “We Adivasi [tribal] people know how to take care of the forest and animals and we can do this much better than them. This is what we should fight for. We want the Forest Department to leave and hand over the forest to us, we will take care of the forest.”
The evictions and harassment that the Jenu Kuruba have endured are part of a racist and colonial conservation model that takes indigenous peoples’ land and turns it into protected areas for tourism, accompanied by gross human rights abuses.
The protest comes at a time when dissent is being brutally crushed in Modi’s authoritarian India. The police response to farmers’ protests in Delhi sparked international outrage and many Adivasi activists, such as Hidme Markam, have been arrested and imprisoned for speaking out.
For many years, WCS India has led the call for the relocation of tribal peoples from tiger reserves, insisting these are “voluntary relocations” which benefit the tribes. Yet communities report worse living conditions and a desire to return to their forest, prompting the US government to halt funding for relocations in the name of conservation.
JK Thimma told Survival: “WCS go to the Forest Department and bring officials and come here to tell us to leave.” He added: “We don’t want any money. We want to live free in the forest. The tribes, the forest and the animals are all one thing. If the officials come and shoot us we are ready to die, but not to leave the forest.”
The Jenu Kuruba have lived in and protected the forests of Karnataka for millennia.
They worship the tiger, and their careful management of the forest has ensured a healthy tiger population.
Muthamma, a Jenu Kuruba woman explained: “We’ve lived together with tigers for centuries, we don’t kill them and the tigers don’t kill us. We revere the tiger as a deity; we have a tiger altar over in the forest. The conservationists from the city don’t understand the forest. As long as we’re alive the tigers will still be safe. If we disappear, the loggers and poachers will have free rein.”
Another forest-dwelling tribe, the Soliga, were the first tribe to get their community forest rights recognised in a tiger reserve – which then saw tiger numbers increase far more than the national average.
Survival’s Senior Researcher Sophie Grig said today: “The Jenu Kuruba face constant harassment and threats from forest guards, who stop them from growing their food, building their houses, practicing rituals in their sacred groves or accessing their family graves. All these are flagrant violations of their rights. The Jenu Kuruba are the true conservationists and protectors of Nagarhole’s forests – it’s high time that their rights to live in, protect and conserve their ancestral lands are recognised.”
