The Battle for the Amazon
The eastern part of Brazil is the frontline in the battle for the Amazon: the forest frontier is pushed back ever further by cattle ranching and soya plantations; land grabbing is rife; illegal logging is commonplace and violent disputes occur weekly.
Cattle
Bruce on the cattle ranch in Altamira.
Bruce mucked in at a cattle ranch near Altamira, wrestling cows, inoculating calves, and having a brave (some might say foolish) . Cattle farming is big business in the Amazon - there are three times more cattle in the legal Amazon than there are people (64 million in 2003), and ranching is on the increase. It's a profitable enterprise because land prices are so low: pasture in the Amazon was five times lower than land around Sao Paolo in 2000. Most cattle produced are eaten elsewhere in Brazil, not locally in the Amazon, and Brazil is the world's top exporter, shipping over $3 billion worth of beef in 2006 and supplying nearly every country, including the UK.
Cattle-ranching is a major factor in the Most ranches are highly mechanised, and employ on average one person per 400 acres. Ranching may increase further in the future with the World Bank considering a loan of $90 million to increase beef capacity in Para - the Brazilian state of the eastern Amazon.
The Battle
At the moment, there's a battle for the Amazon, and it's bloody. In January 2007 there were 772 known victims of land wars in the state of Para and it's estimated that 1237 rural workers died in disputes or negligence in Brazil from 1985 -2001. Environmental campaigners have also been killed, in February of 2005 the nun Sister Dorothy Stang was assassinated. Originally from the US, Sister Stang was a Brazilian citizen and had lived in the Amazon for 37 years. She opposed land grabbers and illegal loggers who take land by force, but these led to her death.
A shantytown outside Altamira provides temporary houses for families evicted from their homes.
Land ownership is often unclear and is fraught with corruption, violence and fraud. Families and sometimes whole communities are forced off their land at the hands of pistoleiros (armed gangs). Bruce and the team filmed on the outskirts of Altamira, in a shantytown that has become the temporary home of families who have been evicted from their homes with the threat of a violence. For more information on the landless of Brazil, see:
Settling on previously unoccupied land is also a frequent practice. In Brazil, land grabbers are known as grileiros, from the Portuguese word for cricket, which is due to the custom of making phony ownership documents look older by placing them in a drawer full of crickets. When Brazil's agrarian reform agency renewed some ownership records in recent years they discovered over 62,000 fraudulent claims.
Fraudulently owned land is often felled and turned from rainforest into farms. The area is logged and sometimes land is cleared using the people forced into labour through debt bondage, a form of slavery. See:
Bruce and the crew accompanied an anti-slavery raid where they found disturbing evidence of this practice.
IBAMA
The Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Natural Renewable Resources was created in 1989. It is affiliated to the Ministry for the Environment and its job is to enforce environmental law. Bruce and the crew accompanied IBAMA on two days of raids to uncover environmental crimes, and discovered a vast amount of illegal logging.
Logs are transported by the lorryload
Enforcement of the environmental law is difficult but essential. In the last five months of 2007 2,010 square miles of forest were lost and President Lula decreed a total ban on deforestation in the 36 worst hit municipalities, telling landowners they must prove they are complying with the law that requires 80% of their land must be kept as natural vegetation. Hundreds of federal agents have been deployed to help enforce these measures. It's not an easy job. Logging is endemic across Brazil, and in three weeks in February 2008 over 200 trucks worth of illegal timber were seized by IBAMA.
IBAMA employees suffer death threats for their work but have also been involved in numerous accusations of corruption. In the weeks after Dorothy Stang's death, waves of troops made over 300 arrests of contraband logging trucks but these showed 100 IBAMA officials involved in hardwood conspiracies.
Illegal activity in the Amazon is common but not popular. In an opinion poll in Brazil, 88% of interviewees wanted greater protection for forests, and 93% believed that environmental protection would not limit national development (Institute Socioambiental 2000).
