We in DGR do not believe that there are any technological solutions to climate change. Technocrats like Bill Gates represent the insanity and human supremacy of this culture, believing that they can play God and engineer the planet. We consider this a very dangerous approach. The only real solution to climate change is a large scale ecological restoration.
This article originally appeared on Counterpunch and Patrick Mazza’s substack blog The Raven.
Featured image: The Sami flag (public domain)
The first ever stratospheric test of geoengineering technology, funded by Bill Gates, has been suspended under pressure from the indigenous people over whose heads it would take place, the Saami of northern Scandinavia. It may be moved back to the United States.
At the recommendation of the project’s Advisory Committee, the scheduled June test has been called off. That became public March 31.
When Bill Gates $4.5 million investment in geoengineering research came to light in 2010, one of the scientists he put in charge of the project, Ken Caldeira, said the money was not funding any field experiments. But as the project has grown and moved to Harvard, that line was crossed. In a first-of-a-kind test of geoengineering technologies in the stratosphere, the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment – SCoPEx for short – intends to release around a kilogram of calcium carbonate, essentially chalk dust, from a propelled balloon-gondola rig 12 miles up. Particles would cover the equivalent of 11 football fields and test the material’s potential to block a portion of solar radiation, countering the heat-trapping effects of carbon dioxide. The June test would not have released any particles, only tried out the rig’s technologies.
Last December SCoPEx announced it was moving the rig test to Sweden because of the pandemic. It was to have been in Arizona and New Mexico. The new test site was to be Swedish Space Corporation’s launch center at Kiruna near the Arctic Circle, the Saami homeland. Trouble was, nobody had talked to the Saami or anyone else in Sweden.
The Saami Council, which defends the rights of the reindeer-herding people from Norway to Russia, on Feb. 24 sent a letter to the SCoPEx Advisory Committee opposing not only the experiment, but the entire premise of geoengineering research outside an international consensus. It was co-signed by leaders of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, Friends of the Earth Sweden and Greenpeace Sweden. Environmental groups had previously weighed in on their own.
The Saami have reason to be concerned about what’s flying over their heads. Winds from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster dumped radiation on their villages and reindeer grazing lands. Thousands of animals had to be slaughtered, and decades later reindeer meat must still be tested for radiation. The Saami have also taken an active stance on climate, persuading Norway’s second largest pension fund to divest from fossil fuels. And they showed up at Standing Rock in 2017 to support tribes resisting the oil-carrying Dakota Access Pipeline under the Missouri River.
HAZARDS MORAL AND OTHERWISE
The letter from the Saami and their allies economically summarizes the fundamental contradiction of the Harvard research and geoengineering experiments in general – private governing bodies assuming powers and making decisions of such immense potential impacts that democratic accountability is required.
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), write the Saami and environmentalists, “entails risks of catastrophic consequences including . . . uncontrolled termination . . . ” – If it was stopped, the heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide would kick back in and cause sudden heating, like a junkie having withdrawals from addiction – “and irreversible sociopolitical effects that could compromise the world’s necessary efforts to achieve zero-carbon societies.” In other words, geoengineering would provide an excuse for powerful interests to continue burning the fossil fuels that add to atmospheric CO2. By offering protection from risks it would reduce the incentive to eliminate them. This is known as moral hazard. “There are therefore no acceptable reasons for allowing the SCoPEx project to be conducted either in Sweden or elsewhere.”
The ways research creates moral hazard is illustrated by Alex Lenferma, a South African climate analyst writing for the Carnegie Council. “David Keith (a lead in the Harvard project whom Gates tapped to help distribute his 2010 funding) tells us that geoengineering could be very inexpensive. According to him, it would cost just $10 billion (annually), or one ten-thousandth of global GDP, whereas its benefits could be more than 1 percent of global GDP—a return one thousand times greater than its cost. While Keith warns that solar geoengineering does not spare us the need to reduce emissions, other team members do not seem so convinced.
“Fellow Harvard teammate Richard Zeckhauser tells us that ‘solar geoengineering is the most promising technology we have today.’ It is so promising that Zeckhauser says he would be fine if we redirected some of our efforts from greenhouse gas emission reduction to geoengineering, a statement that borders on encouraging moral hazard . . . “
Research illustrates the dangers of moving ahead in a Wild West atmosphere of independent initiatives taken outside a global governance structure. Releasing solar shielding particles in the northern hemisphere alone could increase droughts in India and the Sahel of Africa even as it benefits the north. Jacob Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative, told Carbon Brief, “If one country decided to put its own interests first – say the leader of that country thought ‘our country needs cooling down, let’s do some regional solar geoengineering’ – that could have potentially catastrophic effects in other parts of the world.”
Keith was the co-author of a 2020 modeling study that downplayed the danger. Previous studies showed solar shielding worsening climate impacts over 9% of the Earth’s land area. But if shielding aimed to reduce just half of warming it “would only exacerbate change over 1.3% of the land area,” said co-author Peter Irvine. “Our results suggest that when used at the right dose and alongside reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, stratospheric aerosol geoengineering could be useful for managing the impacts of climate change.”
“There is a real potential, maybe a significant potential, to reduce the risks of climate change this century – by a lot,” Keith said.
Research showing geoengineering could be cheap, reduce climate damage and have minimal impacts in “the right dose” has the appearance of making a case for geoengineering. Even though the scientists acknowledge uncertainty, such research at least entertains moral hazard. This is particularly so absent a framework of global governance or democratic accountability.
THE SAAMI CALL OUT HARVARD
The Saami and their allies took direct aim at the accountability issue and the Harvard-appointed Advisory Committee. It is worth quoting at length. There are “serious problems in terms of governance and decision-making in relation to SCoPEx. We find it remarkable that the project has gone so far as to establish an agreement with SSC (Swedish Space Corporation) on test flying without, as we understand, having applied for any permits or entered into any dialogue with either the Swedish government, its authorities, the Swedish research community, Swedish civil society, or the Saami people, despite the controversial nature of SCoPEx . . . “
“It is noteworthy that Harvard University considers it reasonable for a committee whose role it is to decide whether this controversial project should go ahead, to not have any representation from the intended host country, Sweden. Instead, the committee is composed of almost exclusively US citizens and/or residents. We note that SCoPEx ‘independent’ Advisory Committee appears to be extremely homogeneous, is far from representative and appointed through Harvard itself, without any inclusion of affected groups and without directly critical and non-US voices. (Members are listed here.)
“The SCoPEx project’s comment on its Advisory Committee’s draft ‘Engagement Process for SCoPEx’ highlights core issues and shows the project’s problematic approach to ethics, responsibility and decision making. The SCoPEx project states that no one research project should have to answer questions such as ‘Does solar geoengineering research or deployment pose a moral hazard? Is it ethical to deploy solar geoengineering, and who should decide? Can solar geoengineering deployment be governed, and can we trust that governance? Is research a slippery slope to deployment?’. The SCoPEx project states that under such requirements research would have to halt, and complains that this has not been the case for other areas of research, and therefore ‘should not be the burden for solar geoengineering research.’
“We state that precisely because of the extraordinary and particular risks associated with SAI, this technology and SCoPEx cannot be treated like other research. The type of key issues cited above must be considered first, and in forums that are significantly more representative and inclusive than the SCopEx Advisory Committee. Experimentation and technology development through projects such as SCoPEx must therefore be halted.
“We call on the SCoPEx Advisory Committee as well as SSC to recognise these shortcomings, and to cancel the planned test flight in Kiruna. The SCoPEx plans for Kiruna constitute a real moral hazard . . . Stratospheric Aerosol Injection research and technology development have implications for the whole world, and must not be advanced in the absence of full, global consensus on its acceptability.”
HARVARD RETREATS
Indigenous and environmental opposition has backed SSC and Advisory Committee down. On March 31, MIT Technology review reported that the SSC had withdrawn from the project, and the committee in “an unexpected move” advised suspending the June test. The group said it has begun a public engagement process to “help the committee understand Swedish and Indigenous perspectives and make an informed and responsive recommendation about the equipment test flights in Sweden.” SCoPEx principal investigator Frank Keutsch said flights will be suspended until the committee can make a recommendation “based on robust public engagement in Sweden that is broadly inclusive of indigenous populations . . . “
It is likely tests will not be conducted before 2022 and not in Sweden. With the pandemic abating the tests may return to the U.S.
It took the Saami and environmental allies calling out the Harvard project and the Advisory Committee to begin a consultation process. That it came as an afterthought underscores the basic point. In geoengineering as with so many crucial issues, private institutions and individuals are acting as de facto governments, making decisions potentially affecting billions of people without democratic accountability. Harvard, the premier university in the U.S. and the world, is a preeminent case in point. Resistant to campaigns for fossil fuel divestment, it is researching technologies that could diminish the drive to end fossil fuel burning. A poster for moral hazard. To move toward the first stratospheric experiment of highly controversial geoengineering technology in a foreign country without thinking to consult the country’s civil society, let alone indigenous people over whose lands you will conduct that experiment, evidences a certain HAA-VUD “we-know-better-than-you” arrogance. It is the essence of private government over democratic accountability.
SHOULD SCIENTISTS LEAD?
Announcement of the suspension came only days after release of a National Academy of Sciences report calling for a program of geoengineering research.
“This proposal is dangerous,” wrote Frank Bierrman, Utrecht University professor of global governance and founder of the Earth System Governance Project. “Solar geoengineering technologies remain speculative and assume a level of understanding of the planetary system that does not exist. Numerous studies have pointed to the risks especially for developing countries and vulnerable populations if anything goes wrong with ‘hacking the climate’. Most importantly, the governance challenges of solar geoengineering are unsurmountable in today’s global political system.”
“The NAS report’s vision for global governance is clear: it is the United States that should lead the way, at least for now. Other countries are invited to join, but there is no indication that the NAS authors envision to place geoengineering technology under global control with a binding veto power for those countries in the Global South that are most vulnerable . . . Instead, the vision of the NAS report seems to be that scientists should lead, especially US scientists. Based on that, a global network of experts could autonomously govern research. It is widely known, however – and acknowledged by the NAS report itself – that this global research community is vastly skewed in favour of a few industrialized countries. Research governance by experts is governance by the Global North, with some ‘consultation’ of others on the side. It is, as I argued earlier, a ‘rich man’s solution’.”
Penn State Climatologist Michael Mann, a member of the NAS, issued his own concerns. “A report like this is as much about the policy message it conveys as it is about the scientific assessment, for it will be used immediately by policy advocates. And here I’m honestly troubled at the fodder it provides for mis-framing of the risks . . . the report itself, in my view, really puts a thumb on the scales. It falls victim to the moral hazard that I warn about in The New Climate War . . . “
Mann quotes from the widely acclaimed new book, “A fundamental problem with geoengineering is that it presents what is known as a moral hazard, namely, a scenario in which one party (e.g., the fossil fuel industry) promotes actions that are risky for another party (e.g., the rest of us), but seemingly advantageous to itself. Geoengineering provides a potential crutch for beneficiaries of our continued dependence on fossil fuels. Why threaten our economy with draconian regulations on carbon when we have a cheap alternative? The two main problems with that argument are that (1) climate change poses a far greater threat to our economy than decarbonization, and (2) geoengineering is hardly cheap – it comes with great potential harm.”
GATES: ENGINEERING OVER POLITICS
Gates has made several other geoengineering plays. He joined with Microsoft’s old chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, and his company, Intellectual Ventures, in which Gates is an investor, on a 2008 geoengineering patent application that envisions using cold sea water to tamp down hurricane intensities. In 2010 he announced an investment in Sea Spray, a company researching a technology that would spray seawater into the atmosphere to seed sunlight-reflecting white clouds. Gates also funded David Keith to create a company that captures CO2 directly from the atmosphere. Carbon Engineering has built a plant in British Columbia and plans another with partner Occidental Petroleum in the Permian Basin of Texas, one of the fracking centers of the continent. CO2’s current market is for enhancing oil recovery by pumping it into wells. Chevron and BHP are other oil company investors in Carbon Engineering, as is Alberta tar sands financier N. Murray Edwards.
Criticism of Gates’ investments ranges well beyond geoengineering to the disproportionate influence his foundation exerts in global health and development as well as education policy. The foundation’s support for industrialized agriculture models in Africa and the teach-to-test-oriented “Common Core” plan for U.S. education have come under scrutiny. Critical reviews of his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, have called out his focus on technology as opposed to political solutions.
Wrote climate activist Bill McKibben in his New York Times review, “ . . . politics . . . is where Gates really wears blinders. ‘I think more like an engineer than a political scientist,’ he says proudly — but that means he can write an entire book about the ‘climate disaster’ without discussing the role that the fossil fuel industry played, and continues to play, in preventing action . . . That’s why we’ve wasted almost three decades of scientific warning. ‘I don’t have a solution to the politics of climate change,’ Gates writes, but in fact he does: He founded, and his foundation is a shareholder in, a company that has donated money to exactly the politicians who are in the pocket of big oil. A Bloomberg analysis last fall found that Microsoft had given only a third of its contributions to ‘climate-friendly’ politicians.”
NOBODY’S SMART ENOUGH ON THEIR OWN
In today’s world, money and power are being super-concentrated, aggregating to massive corporations, wealthy individuals such as Gates, and influential institutions such as Harvard. There is a tendency, especially among the successful, to believe their success translates into broad insight on how the world should be managed. With their money, resources and prestige, they speak with the loudest voices, often drowning out others.
But no matter how brilliant or even well intentioned we may be, each one of us human beings is limited by our own perspectives. We all have blind spots. We all make mistakes. The greater our reach, the more injurious the potential impact. That is the downfall of the private governance structures becoming ever more powerful in the world. Inclusive frameworks of democratic accountability are required to gain the widest range of knowledge and insights, reflect the broadest interests, and avoid pitfalls.
The Saami, speaking with the growing moral authority of the indigenous, along with their environmental allies, have brought a crucial voice to the geoengineering table. That they were not asked their views, but had to raise their voice, says everything about the flawed assumptions of private government. This is true for the range of challenges confronting our world. It is nowhere truer than in a field with such global and potentially catastrophic impacts as geoengineering.
This first appeared on Patrick Mazza’s substack blog The Raven.
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.”
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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
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DGR stands in fierce solidarity with all people who resist logging. Let’s not forget that the legal system is set up by the rich and powerful to serve them, which is why it has proven ineffective in resisting the destruction by large companies in most cases.
Transport Bois Négoce International (TBNI), a Chinese forestry company, has built new roads in preparation to cut timber in a concession which includes a previously unlogged forest in northeastern Gabon.
Residents of the village of Massaha, on the northern edge of this forest, have been managing hunting and other use of this forest since 2019; they formally requested reclassification of the forest as a protected area in August 2020.
Gabon’s forest code makes explicit provision for local communities to initiate reclassification of sensitive forest as a protected area, and villagers are anxious for the government to respond before TBNI advances any further.
A forestry company in Gabon has built new roads to log a forest in the northeastern province of Ogooué-Ivindo. Villagers had applied to the government last August to reclassify this valuable forest as a protected area, and say they are alarmed by the company’s rapid advance while they wait for a formal response.
Rural communities in this area rely on local forests for fishing, hunting and gathering. These livelihoods and the wildlife populations they depend on are increasingly threatened by mining, intensive logging, and poaching for the illegal ivory trade and unregulated commercial hunting for bushmeat. A massive increase in logging by foreign companies over the last decade — around 40 companies hold logging concessions covering most of the area — and associated road building has opened access to formerly intact forests and razed local ecosystems.
In response, three Ogooué-Ivindo villages have taken steps to protect the environment and their way of life. The villages of Latta, Ebessi, and Massaha have established management plans to regulate hunting practices and delineate informal protected reserves in their forests.
Massaha village: the first Gabonese community to apply to the government to declare its forest a protected area
With logging rapidly expanding, the village of Massaha, 56 kilometers (35 miles) from the provincial capital of Makokou, has gone one step further. A portion of the forest relied on by villagers is also part of a vast 41,000-hectare (101,300-acre) logging concession (called UFG-2, Unité forestières de gestion 2) held by a Chinese forestry company, Transport Bois Négoce International (TBNI). The company was the subject of a 2019 investigation by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), which exposed TBNI’s involvement in bribery, transfer pricing and other corrupt methods to evade taxes and maximize profits.
Massaha has submitted an official request for 11,300 hectares (27,900 acres) of UFG-2 to be reclassified as a protected area with sustainable hunting management.
A pioneering application of Gabon’s Forest Code: Under Articles 55 and 67 of Gabon’s Forest Code, an area already allocated for forestry may be declassified when “significant biological richness, high heritage value, or substantial environmental risks” are identified. The villagers of Massaha have applied for 11,300 ha (27,900 acres) of the logging concession known as Unité forestières de gestion 2 to be declassified following the procedure set out in Article 2 of Decree No. 001032-PE-MEFEPEPN of 1/12/2004, which states that such a process may be initiated at the request of a local community.
According to Gabon’s Forest Code, forest already allocated to a logging concession may be declassified if it is found to have “significant biological richness, high heritage value, or substantial environmental risks.” Outlining the procedure for such reclassification, the code explicitly states that the process may be initiated “at the express request of a local community.” This is the first time that a rural Gabonese community has launched such an appeal.
The forest in the concession area south of the Liboumba River has never been logged. It is home to threatened species such as forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis), chimpanzees, gorillas, leopards, and pangolins, as well as an abundance of centuries-old trees including protected species such as moabi (Baillonella toxisperma) and kevazingo (Guibourtia tesmannii).
The villagers use their forest for hunting, fishing, and farming; the forest here also contains ancestral villages and ritual sites of invaluable cultural wealth. Serge Ekazama-Koto, a local researcher, explains what is at stake for his community: “TBNI’s logging practices in this area will inevitably destroy the entire foundation of our village. We do not want to be a village without roots or history; our ancestors founded this village, their graves are found there, and the forest is sacred to us.”
Two new logging roads already open, sign of imminent logging by TBNI
Since 2018, authorization for logging is conditional upon companies having a state-validated wildlife protection plan, drawn up with the participation of all stakeholders and readily accessible to all interested parties. While its wildlife protection plan is still under review, TBNI has been allowed to continue logging. The company’s wildlife manager for the area, Junior Peme, told Mongabay the company is using camera traps to determine the species diversity in the area, and mapping the impacts of human activity in the area on medium-size and large mammals.
The company’s environmental integrity has been called into question by the village of Latta (whose forest lies in a section of UFG-2 that TBNI has already logged). Community patrols there have found evidence of hunting with wire snares (illegal in Gabon) by company employees inside the village’s self-designated management area, where they themselves have prohibited hunting by outsiders. The village’s management plan is not legally binding but has been acknowledged by both provincial authorities and TBNI.
Peme declined to comment on Massaha’s reclassification request, but the company has already completed an inventory of timber in a portion of the logging concession within the proposed protected area. In February 2021, it built two new logging roads there, running from the national road that passes through the village to near the northern shore of the Liboumba River. Logging could begin at any time, threatening the reclassification request before it has been formally considered. All this with the results of TBNI’s inventories of flora and fauna not available.
Massaha awaiting response from national authorities
The village delivered its request in official letters to the governor of Ogooué-Ivindo, the provincial director of water and forests, and TBNI on Aug. 6, 2020. The provincial director formally responded to the request on Aug. 19, and transferred the file to the national ministerial authority the next day. Following this, village leaders met with him several times. A string of back-and-forth correspondence among the various entities has ensued, but no concrete action has yet been taken. All the while, preparation for logging in the proposed protected area moves forward apace.
The provincial director of water and forests was unavailable for comment, as he is currently out of the province on extended business. But villagers say they are confident their request will find a favorable audience in government. In May 2020, Lee White, Gabon’s minister of forests, oceans, environment and climate change, said the country “must take ownership” of the initiative to protect 30% of lands and seas by 2030, proposed under the Convention on Biological Diversity.
At a village meeting held in Massaha on Feb. 20 this year, the villagers reaffirmed their commitment to seeing their forest reclassified as a protected area. On March 3, they delivered another letter to the provincial director of water and forests, asking for news on the status of their application.
They have yet to receive a reply. But TBNI employees have since arrived and are now staying in the village.
On March 30, the village wrote a letter addressed to the national minister stating they “reserve the right to take multifaceted actions if an answer is not given […] as soon as possible.”
Benjamin Evine-Binet is the director of Ivindo FM community radio station in Makokou. Madeleine Barois contributed to producing this report.
Fort McDermitt, Nevada — Opposition to lithium mining is growing in native communities in Nevada. On Monday, the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe formally resolved to cancel a Project Engagement Agreement with mining company Lithium Nevada, citing threats to land, water, wildlife, hunting and gathering areas, and sacred sites.
The Tribal Council also agreed to initiate a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management for violations of federal law in permitting the Thacker Pass lithium mine project to proceed.
These moves, from a tribal council which was previously supportive or neutral towards the mine, come after pressure from traditionalists in the Fort McDermitt community. On March 22, these traditionalists brought a petition to the tribal government asking that they “stop all partnerships with any mining company and to file a lawsuit against Lithium Nevada Corp LNC, Lithium America, Jindalee Resources Limited and any other company associated to stop the development of the proposed Lithium Mine at Thacker Pass, Nevada.”
The group cited violations of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and other laws.
Opposition to the Thacker Pass mine has been growing since January 15th, when the Bureau of Land Management approved the federal permit for the project and—on the same day—a protest camp was established on the proposed mine site. Members of the Fort McDermitt tribe have played an important role in resupplying and overseeing the camp, which is located on their traditional lands. Over the past two months, community members, elders, families, and spiritual leaders have spent time at Thacker Pass engaging in ceremony, including a 273-mile prayer walk ending at the site, and visitors have come from many nearby reservations.
The Thacker Pass mine is also broadly opposed by residents of Orovada and King’s River, two nearby unincorporated communities. One rancher has filed a lawsuit, citing impacts to groundwater, streams, and to threatened Lahontan cutthroat trout, and a local community group, “Thacker Pass Concerned Citizens,” has formed with the majority of members expressing opposition or serious concerns. A coalition of four environmental groups has also filed a lawsuit against the project, and the group “Protect Thacker Pass” setup the protect camp nearly three months ago.
The lithium industry is booming worldwide as governments shift subsidies towards electric vehicles, which are powered by lithium-ion batteries, and towards wind and solar power which often require battery storage for periods when wind stops and nighttime or clouds block the sun.
There are numerous proposed lithium mine projects in Nevada and the United States. The petition filed Monday night also mentions Jindalee Resources, an Australian mining company currently exploring for lithium deposits just north of the Oregon border, near Fort McDermitt. Another proposed lithium mine located at Rhyolite Ridge, further south in Nevada, has attracted major opposition due to an endangered wildflower on the site.
A controversial project to build a rail line for transporting soybeans and other commodities through Indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon may get its environmental license as soon as April.
Prosecutors in the state of Pará, where the line will terminate at the Miritituba river port, have filed a court request for a suspension of the project until prior consultation with the affected Indigenous communities have been carried out.
The request seeks to challenge the project on its economic viability, with prosecutors arguing that without detailed data on costs and compensation measures, there is no way of knowing how the project will impact on public coffers.
This is the first time that prosecutors have highlighted a project’s viability to seek its suspension.
A controversial freight railway line that would cut through Indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon looks set to be approved for construction by the federal government as soon as April, despite a lawsuit pending against it by local prosecutors.
The EF-170 railroad, known as the Ferrogrão, or “Grainway,” is a priority project of the federal government and will run 933 kilometers (580 miles) from the municipality of Sinop, in Mato Grosso state, to Miritituba in Pará state. The call for a tender is expected to be released within the first quarter of 2021, and the project is expected to be granted its environmental license in April.
All the freight traffic between the two cities currently flows through the BR-163 highway, bringing produce from Mato Grosso north to the river terminal in Pará. At present, though, more than 70% of Mato Grosso’s harvest is trucked southeast to the Atlantic ports of Santos and Paranaguá for export. With the railroad, the government aims to avoid this arduous step of the journey, instead sending commodities like soybean and corn to the transshipment terminal in Miritituba and onto ships sailing out to the Atlantic via the Tapajós, Tocantins and Amazon rivers. Aside from grains, the government also plans to transport soybean oil, fertilizers, sugar, ethanol, and petroleum products.
While the railroad is considered vital for grain shipping, the way the federal government is pushing ahead with the project has raised concerns.
In particular, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) in Pará has challenged the government’s failure to seek the free, prior and informed consent of the Indigenous peoples through whose lands the railway would pass. In October, the MPF and five civil society organizations filed a request with the Federal Court of Accounts, the government accountability office, for the precautionary suspension of the privatization process and for the call for tender to be stopped.
Public prosecutor Felipe Moura Palha said the fact that the federal government has violated the Indigenous communities’ right to participate in discussions about the project risks imposing significant economic losses in the future. “This is the first time that the MPF has called on the Court of Accounts to analyze a large project in the Amazon with an eye on economics,” he said.
The MPF says the lack of data on the real environmental impacts of the project means the cost of compensation could be greater than imagined and possibly lead to losses from the public coffers. “We maintain that prior consultation, analysis and the effect on Indigenous communities in the economic viability analysis for the project is essential,” Palha said.
In response to the request filed by the MPF, the court notified the National Land Transportation Agency (ANTT), the federal regulator for railway and highway infrastructure, and Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, to carry out consultations with Indigenous peoples along the route of the planned rail line. But even then, the federal government has played foul, according to the MPF: prosecutors allege that the government’s Special Secretariat of the Partnerships and Investments Program (SE-PPI) tried to improperly entice an Indigenous Munduruku leader to act on behalf of the tribe.
The Munduruku people, with a population of about 13,700 occupying territories along the Tapajós River, have their own political organizations. According to the MPF, the government sought out a single person to be “the speaker granted representation to articulate the interests of his people.” On Dec. 14, the MPF recommended that the prior consultation process also include the project’s impacts on the Indigenous peoples in the state of Mato Grosso who would be directly or indirectly affected by the Grainway. The recommendation was aimed at Funai and IBAMA, the federal environmental protection agency.
Indigenous people ignored
Melillo Dinis is a lawyer with the Instituto Kabu, representing 12 communities of the Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó people, including some 12,000 Kayapós. He said the Indigenous people have yet to form an opinion about the Grainway because the project has not yet even been presented to them. Dinis said there are currenty three issues under debate: the right to prior consultation and fulfillment of Indigenous protocol, neither of which were acknowledged by the government of President Jair Bolsonaro; the need for thorough social and environmental evaluation of the degradation, deforestation and growing tensions over territory in the region; and the fact that representatives of governmental agencies affirmed that Indigenous rights would be respected but did not carry out their promises.
“The context that has been presented to us until now is completely disrespectful of Indigenous peoples,” he said. “They have been living here for around 10,000 years. We will fight until the end.”
Dinis noted that the project has been dragged out over previous administrations; the Grainway was proposed in 2016, under the watch of then-president Dilma Rousseff, who was later that year impeached and replaced by Michel Temer. Temer was succeeded by Bolsonaro.
“Before, they would listen to us but wouldn’t pay any attention,” Dinis said of the Rousseff and Temer administrations. “This administration won’t even listen to us. So the outcome is the same.”
Prosecutor Palha said there’s no way to stipulate a ceiling on spending on the project without knowing how much to allocate for environmental compensation.
“We are not opposed to development projects,” he said. “Our request is: carry out the prior consultation before claiming that the project is viable so it can be discussed.”
He cited the case of the Belo Monte dam in the state of Pará as an example. A significant decline in the flow rate of the Xingu River now threatens the viability of the dam, raising the prospect of new power plants, likely fired by fossil fuels, needing to be built.
“We want to avoid this situation with the Grainway, having a project already installed that hasn’t been properly planned,” Palha said. “This is why the Court of Accounts is carrying out an unprecedented economics analysis.”
Controversy over the Grainway began in 2016 when it was announced that studies would be carried out to make the project viable. In 2018, Mongabay reported that the Kayapó people had expressed their concern over the potential threats posed by the railway and had written a letter to the ANTT. In it, tribal chief Anhe Kayapó said:
“The Grainway cannot be built without reinforcing controls, protection and vigilance in the Conservation Units and Indigenous Lands [along its route].”
