Around 20-30 members of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake were read their rights by Sûreté du Québec officers late last night, warning of arrests today if people did not allow logging to proceed.
Yesterday, families from the Barriere Lake Algonquin First Nation who are impacted by the Resolute logging operation issued a letter to Quebec’s Ministry of Natural Resources voicing their opposition to the Ministry’s unilateral decision to clear-cut their territory. The impacted families also proposed to the Quebec government several resolutions to work together towards peaceful co-existence in the region.
Resolute Forest Products, formerly known as Abitibi Bowater, began cutting last Tuesday on land of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake without proper community consultation or consent. The logging is taking place near Poigan Bay, Quebec, on land that includes sacred grounds and important moose habitat, according to community spokesperson Norman Matchewan.
In a letter sent to Premier Charest on July 4, elder Gabriel Wawatie states: “As one of the main harvesters, I was not properly consulted nor provided a written consent to this logging within our territory.”
In a recent provincial court case, the same forestry company attempted to sue a youth leader of Barriere Lake, Norman Matchewan. Vincent Larin, from the Maniwaki Ministry of Natural Resources office, issued two cutting permits for the same logging site in Barriere Lake territory that also included sacred sites. The forestry company lost their court case when the foreman contradicted his original statement and was caught lying on the stand.
A fierce row has broken out over a controversial plan to drive a road through pristine Amazon rainforest, imperilling the future of some of the world’s last uncontacted tribes.
The 125-mile (200km) road would pass through the Alto Purús national park in Peru, connecting a remote area to the outside world but opening up the most biologically and culturally important area of the upper Amazon to logging, mining and drug trafficking. Opponents of the plan fear it will threaten the existence of uncontacted tribes such as the Mashco-Piro. The first detailed photographs of members of the tribe made headlines around the world earlier this year after they were spotted on a riverbank.
The majority indigenous population of the region appears to be largely united in its opposition to the road, which would run parallel to the Brazilian border, connecting the towns of Puerto Esperanza and Iñapari. Conservationists warn it would cause irreparable harm to the environment and the area’s people.
But the road has the support of many mixed-race settlers – or mestizos – who make up roughly one fifth of the region’s population. With the Alto Purús currently accessible only by plane, they believe that the road would improve their quality of life, bringing lower prices for fuel and food and creating profitable development opportunities.
The campaign to build the road has been led by an Italian missionary, Miguel Piovesan, who claims that indigenous people are being kept isolated and denied the chances for development available to the rest of the population. He first proposed the road in 2004, around the time the Peruvian government announced that the Alto Purús was to become the country’s largest national park.
Piovesan’s plan’s met with little initial enthusiasm, but his long and determined campaign, using his own radio station and parish website, has been so successful that the country’s Congress is now due to debate a bill to allow construction to start. Piovesan has been scathing about his opponents, particularly international organisations such as Survival International and the WWF, which he accuses of profiting from keeping the tribes in isolation.
“These international organisations gain money because they present themselves as the saviours of the Indians, this is what it’s all about. So if the Indians evolve, they [the NGOs] lose their business,” he said on a recent radio show. Last week he told the Observer that the reality was that the indigenous people were being kept in a condition of “captivity and slavery incompatible with the true ecology”.
But Piovesan’s opponents suspect that he is more interested in gaining access to potential converts for his church. Reports from Peru say that he has denied the existence of the uncontacted tribes. The main indigenous organisation in Puerto Esperanza, Feconapu, has demanded that the Vatican remove the priest, accusing him of insulting and humiliating the native population.
One indigenous leader, Julio Cusurichi, warned that building the road would amount to “ethnocide” of the uncontacted tribes. According to the last census, in 2007, there are only about 3,500 people living in the region, including eight known tribes and an unknown number of uncontacted Indians living in the Madre de Díos territorial reserve. The 6.7m-acre national park is also home to wildlife including jaguar, scarlet macaw and giant river otter.
The Upper Amazon Conservancy, which works with the indigenous population, has been one of the most vocal critics of the road. Its director, Chris Fagan, accused the road’s supporters of short-sighted greed and said the majority of the population were vehemently opposed.
“They depend on the forest and rivers for daily sustenance. They see the highway as just the latest example of mestizo greed and exploitation – of rubber, their religion, animal skins, mahogany, and now a highway accessing their homelands,” he said. “It will ruin one of the wildest and culturally important places on Earth. Will reason or greed prevail?”
Indigenous peoples affected by the controversial Belo Monte dam complex now under construction along the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon have occupied a coffer dam that cuts across channels of the river since last Thursday June 21. Warriors from the Xikrin and Juruna indigenous groups arrived from the Bacajá River and Big Bend of the Xingu River in order to occupy one of Belo Monte’s main dams and work camps, expressing dissatisfaction with the blatant disregard of their rights and the dam building consortium’s non-compliance with socio-environmental mitigation measures. The groups independently organized the action and are demanding the presence of the Norte Energia (NESA) dam-building consortium and the Brazilian government.
The occupiers come from a region of the Xingu downstream of Belo Monte that will suffer from a permanent drought provoked by the diversion of 80% of the river’s flow into an artificial dam to feed the dam’s powerhouse.
The indigenous peoples are outraged that promised actions by government-led Norte Energia – many of which constitute legal obligations of environmental licenses issued for the Belo Monte complex – have not been implemented. According to protest leaders, a program designed to mitigate and compensate impacts of the mega-dam project on indigenous peoples and their territories known as the PBA (Plano Básico Ambiental) has not been presented in local villages as promised.
The protestors also claim that a promised system to ensure small boat navigation in the vicinity of the coffer dams has not been implemented by NESA leaving them isolated from Altamira, a market for goods and the main source of healthcare and other essential services. The interruption of boat transportation along the Xingu is expected to force indigenous peoples to open up access roads to their villages, provoking further pressures from illegal loggers, land speculators, cattle ranchers and squatters.
According to the Xicrin and other indigenous leaders, the coffer dams at Pimental have already compromised water quality downriver on the Xingu due to siltation and stagnation, making it undrinkable and unsuitable for bathing. Norte Energia promised to install wells and potable water distribution systems in indigenous villages, but no such works have been carried out. The protestors at Pimental also point to the lack of legal recognition and demarcation of several indigenous territories in the area of influence of Belo Monte, such as Terra Wangã, Paquiçamba, Juruena do km 17 and Cachoeira Seca, all legal prerequisites for dam construction.
The protestors camping out at the Pimental coffer dam on the Xingu are calling for immediate suspension of the installation license for Belo Monte.
Text written by men assembled in the Bacajá village in the Trincheira-Bacajá indigenous territory declared:
Stop this and let our river run. Let our boats navigate the river. Stop this and let the river run so that our children can drink and bathe in its waters. If they build this dam the river will become ruined, its waters will no longer be good. The river will be dry; how will we be able to navigate and travel?
Let the river run so that our people can continue to hunt in the jungle so that our children and grandchildren can eat, so that the river runs freely and we can fish in the early morning to nourish our children.
Our studies were poorly completed and now you speak of a dam. We do not like this. The Basic Environmental Plan [to mitigate social and environmental impacts] has not even begun to be implemented and they are already building the dam. We do not like this. We want this Belo Monte dam to stop once and for all! (Translation by anthropologist Clarice Cohn.)
Despite growing evidence that biofuel production is causing food insecurity around the world, the new European Union policy blueprint on renewable energy ignores the social effects of biofuels. Last week, Guatemalan victims of the food crisis came to Brussels to make European policy makers aware of the problem.
In a bid to reduce the of amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the European Union decided three years ago to increase biofuel use in transport. With the 2009 directive on renewable energy, the Union set a mandatory target of a ten percent share of agrofuels in transport petrol and diesel consumption by 2020.
But even before the directive had been approved, NGOs around the world had already pointed out a series of problems with agrofuels.
The British NGO ActionAid calculated that reaching Europe’s target would require converting up to 69,000 square kilometres of natural ecosystems into cropland, an area larger than Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Furthermore, because of the conversion of forests, grasslands and peat lands into crop fields for biofuel, total net greenhouse gas emissions would amount to 56 million tonnes of extra CO2 per year, the equivalent of an extra 12 to 26 million cars on Europe’s roads by 2020.
ActionAid estimated that the extra biofuels entering the EU market would be, on average, 81 to 167 percent worse for the climate than fossil fuels.
NGOs also found that the EU’s planned increase in biofuel use would push oilseed, maize and sugar prices up. According to a study by the Austrian International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the 10 percent target would put an extra 140 million people at risk of hunger, with the poor urban populations, subsistence farmers and the landless in developing countries particularly vulnerable. Finally, the Rome-based International Land Coalition recently stated that the demand for biofuels is driving more than 50 percent of large-scale land acquisitions globally.
Earlier this month the European Commission published its post-2020 communication on renewable energy. Despite the relentless campaigning of several international NGOs to cancel out the 2020 target, the new communication remains completely silent on the effects of biofuels on food security in developing nations, leaving a similar target for 2030 open.
“The European Commission wants to decide on the 2030 policy without having considered the impacts of the 2020 policy first,” Marc-Olivier Herman, Oxfam’s EU biofuels expert, told IPS. “The new communication specifies hard criteria to measure environmental impact, but stays mute on the social impact of biofuels. The word ‘food’ is not even mentioned in the document, let alone food security.”
According to Herman, the Commission is moving too fast because of industry demands. “Investors in biofuel want security,” he added.
“Ever since the first target was set in 2009, the biofuel industry has been growing rapidly. This industry now wants to know what will happen after 2020. And it is an industry with lots of lobby power here in Brussels.”
In the meantime, the social effects of the growing demand for biofuels are aggravating. For instance, a large percentage of Guatemala’s indigenous population is facing a new hunger crisis because of land grabbing, forced evictions and water diversion to create large-scale monoculture plantations of palm oil trees and sugar cane for biofuel.
In one such case in March last year, Guatemalan police and soldiers evicted more than 3000 indigenous people from their homes in Guatemala’s Polochic valley to make room for a large-scale plantation. Banned from their land, these 700 families are now facing severe malnutrition and high child mortality as a consequence of diarrhoea or fever.
Threatened by the construction of a huge hydroelectric dam in the Amazon rainforest, Indigenous Peoples of the Xingu River Basin fight together to prevent by any means what they consider to the makings of a terrible catastrophe with global consequences.
Belo Monte, An Announcement Of War is an independent, crowd-funded, feature-length documentary about the largest ongoing construction project in Brazil and the permanent struggle to stop it. The entire film has been uploaded to the internet for anyone who wishes to view it.
Over five hundred Indigenous Peoples from Brazil and throughout the world gathered at Kari-Oca II, an encampment seated at the foot of a mountain near Rio Centro, to sign a declaration demanding respect for Indigenous Peoples’ role in maintaining a stable world environment, and condemning the dominant economic approach toward ecology, development, human rights and the rights of Mother Earth.
“We see the goals of UNCSD Rio+20, the “Green Economy”, and its premise that the world can only ‘save’ nature by commodifying its life-giving and life-sustaining capacities as a continuation of the colonialism that Indigenous Peoples and our Mother Earth have faced and resisted for 520 years”, the declaration states.
Hundreds of Indigenous representatives plan to march from Kari-Oca on Wednesday, June 20, to deliver the declaration to world leaders at the opening of the Rio+20 Summit.
“This document is a wind that will enter the doors of Rio+20 to open the minds of the politicians, to show them that we are not merely the Indigenous Peoples that live in their countries, we are sons and daughters of the Mother Earth”, said Marcos Terrena, an indigenous leader from Brazil, and one of the founders of Kari Oca.
“We are not ‘interested parties,’ we are essential parties”, said Terrena. “We are committed to the life of the earth and future generations. This declaration sends a message to the politicians that the economy has to change, to embrace social, cultural and spiritual values, not just economic value.”
The Kari Oca II encampment, a cultural and spiritual center located in a ramshackle neighborhood not far from the site of the UN negotitations, is a historic follow-up to the Kari Oca I, which gathered at the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The Kari-Oca conference, and the mobilization of Indigenous Peoples around the first UN Earth Summit, marked a significant step forward for an international movement for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and the important role that Indigenous Peoples play in conservation and sustainable development.
But, according to leaders at Kari-Oca II, the agreements made twenty years ago have been largely ignored by world leaders, to the world’s peril.
“The Kari-Oca II declaration is not just a paper. It is a sacred document that encompasses our struggles worldwide. It makes clear that we will walk the path of our ancestors,” said Windel Bolinget, of the Igorot people in the Philippines.
The signing ceremony took place in the early evening outdoors amidst smoke, drums, and dancing, with hundreds of celebrants in ritual dress, and in a spirit both solemn and jubilant. The document was blessed in ceremony by spiritual elders before signing.
Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, from North America said, “Goose bumps ran up my body as I observed hundreds of brothers and sisters from around the world standing in silence acknowledging the spiritual significance of this historical moment.”
“This is far more than a political declaration,” Goldtooth said.
“We are happy tonight because our sacred word is written and agreed to by peoples from all over the world,” said Mario Santi of Ecuador.
“The importance of this declaration is in the sacred recognition that we cannot sell the rights of our Mother Earth, and we cannot accept false solutions that manipulate nature for profit,” said Berenice Sanchez, Nahua from Mexico.
