ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Amazonian Paranoia

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava* - Tierramérica

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 3 2005 (IPS) - Nine out of 10 Brazilians surveyed believe that a conspiracy is under way to internationalise the Amazon forests through foreign occupation or some type of international control, says Senator Jefferson Peres.

This conviction is as strong as it is unlikely, according to Peres, lawmaker of the nationalist Democratic Labour Party (PDT) from the northwestern state of Amazonas. He acknowledges that he has lost voter support for publicly disagreeing with the notion.

Fuelling the conspiracy theory was a message disseminated over the Internet beginning in 2000, which charged that school textbooks in the United States included maps of Brazil without the Amazon region, which was allegedly portrayed instead as an international forestry reserve.

Later an image of the supposed page from the school book appeared on the worldwide web as “proof”, with a map of South America and a text that described South America’s Amazonian countries as “irresponsible, cruel and authoritarian,” and of being “peoples without intelligence and primitive.”

But grave errors in the English text and in the data cited revealed the falsification. Diplomat Paulo Roberto de Almeida, then serving at the Brazilian embassy in Washington, drew up a report about the fraud, available (in Portuguese), at www.pralmeida.org.

There, the website www.brasil.iwarp.com is identified as the origin of the rumours. The site’s slogan, “Brasil, ame-o ou deixe-o” (Brazil, love it or leave it), utilised by the country’s former military dictatorship (1964-1985), suggests it belongs to an ultra-rightwing group.

But the repudiations and the evidence of falsification did not slow down the effects of the rumour. In June, the city council of Valinhos, located 88 km from the southern metropolis of Sao Paulo, approved a motion in protest against the alleged geography textbook.

Dismantling this intrigue is making extra work for Wesley Carrington, press officer for the U.S. embassy in Brasilia, who sent to the Valinhos council the documents that prove the fraud.

Carrington says he can understand the reactions, because there are similar experiences in his own country. Recognition of a site or monument as cultural heritage of humanity is reason for pride in any country, but in the United States many feel it is “the first step towards denationalisation,” he told Tierramérica.

A more recent wave of rumours, spread via the Internet and by the media, paint Amazonian indigenous territories as true foreign enclaves, off-limits to other Brazilians, but open to people from the United States, Europe and Japan.

According to a Jun. 11, 2004 report in the magazine “Isto é Dinero”, the indigenous people do not consider themselves Brazilians and ban planes from flying through their air space. However, it is difficult to believe that the indigenous groups – who are among some of the more impoverished sectors of the Brazilian population – have the resources to control their air space.

Indigenous and environmental groups have awakened suspicions among some members of the Brazilian military and ultranationalists that they are at the service of foreign powers, largely because in many cases they receive development funding from abroad.

Furthermore, a year ago denunciations emerged that foreign ships were stealing freshwater from the mouth of the Amazon River. They were oil tankers, which, after discharging their load, take in up to 250 million litres of ballast water to maintain balance for their return voyage to the Middle East.

The fears are intensified by comments like those made by Pascal Lamy, of France, the new director-general of the World Trade Organisation. In February he said that “collective international management” could be applied to the Amazon and other tropical forests if they were declared “global public goods”, though would remain national property.

There is no reason to fear that possibility or foreign occupation of the Amazon, according to Guarino Monteiro, a colonel in the Brazilian army and professor at the Superior School of War, a military think-tank.

In addition to the capabilities of the Brazilian armed forces, the militaries of the industrialised world “don’t know how to operate in a hostile environment,” as was seen in the U.S. invasions of Vietnam and Iraq, Monteiro said in a Tierramérica interview.

But the concern is economic occupation, which transfers abroad the decisions that affect the region. “The world’s natural resources are finite, and the Amazon is rich in minerals like niobium and tin,” which are very important for new technologies like those used in the aerospace field, he said.

That awakens the greed that is behind the international pressure to demarcate indigenous territories where there are important deposits of these minerals, suspects the colonel. “The ‘First World’ knows about all the wealth of the Amazon through satellite images,” Monteiro said.

For Aluízio Leal, professor of economic policy at the Federal University of Pará, the Amazon is already internationalised through economic control that today is of greater interest than political control.

The local economy is “linked umbilically and subject to the international market.” A large portion of its production is exported and controlled by transnational corporations, like iron mining at Carajás, a gigantic ore deposit, and aluminium mining, which consumes a great deal of energy from the hydroelectric dams in the Amazon, he said by way of example.

Military action in the Amazon by the United States could occur if the region’s governments withhold essential natural resources, especially energy resources, according to Leal. The pressure on Venezuela, a major supplier of petroleum to the United States and governed by the outspoken Hugo Chávez is an indication of that possibility, he said.

But for many, the Amazon’s biodiversity is the resource most threatened by foreign greed. The subsequent paranoia about biopiracy is obstructing scientific research with controls that make it difficult to access the forest’s biological materials, Charles Clement, expert in Amazonian fruits from INPA, the national Amazon research institute, told Tierramérica.

Biopiracy is the illegal use of genetic resources and the traditional knowledge associated with them. Yes, says Clement, there are “biopirates”, but they represent just “one out of every 100” researchers.

The notion has spread that the Amazon’s biodiversity equals profits in the form of new medications, foods and cosmetics, but identifying and developing a product takes many years – between 10 and 20 in the case of pharmaceuticals, he said.

With financing for just a few years, many projects are interrupted when the money runs out, and others do not even begin due to the imposition of new requirements, said the INPA expert.

Clement has been living in the Amazon for 28 years, and says he has never suffered discrimination for being from the United States.

Fellow U.S. citizen Thomas Lovejoy, a respected ecologist who is knowledgeable about the Amazon and is president of the Heinz Centre in Washington, says he has no complaints about constraints on his work either.

The fears being expressed today about the internationalisation of the Amazon and biopiracy “don’t have a basis in reality,” he told Tierramérica.

The Amazon’s biodiversity “is being robbed from the future generations of Brazilians, yes, but by its destruction,” the deforestation that is turning trees into carbon dioxide, Lovejoy said.

The destruction of trees, especially by fires, is one way of internationalising the problem, he said, because the carbon dioxide gas being released is contributing to global warming, affecting everyone around the world.

(* Mario Osava is an IPS correspondent. Originally published Sep. 24 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)