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BRASIL-SUÉCIA Nummer 402 den 26 februari 2023, årgång 27
Redaktör: Lennart Kjörling
Om kultur, politik och sociala frågor, i Brasilien, Sverige, Afrika, ja hela världen
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Utvecklingen kring Amazonas är positiv men komplicerad. Eftersom Lula placerat personer som Marina Silva som miljöminister och även andra bra personer på viktiga poster ser det hoppfullt ut. Samtidigt är det starka krafter som utmanas, kuppförsöket i Brasilia den 8 hade stöd av dessa intressen.
Nu kommer två personer till Stockholm från den organisation som stöder gummitappare och andra grupper som lever av vad skogen ger som frukter, bär och annat Juan Carlos Carrasco Rueda och
Julio Barbosa. Fredag den 3 kommer de att träffa olika organisationer i Stockholm men preliminärt kommer de att stanna kvar till lördagen den 4 mars då det kan bli en chans att träffa dem hos mig kl 12.00. Berätta gärna om du är intresserad så du kan få klart besked.
Här kommer en redogörelse för läget just nu:
The conservation of the Amazon Rainforest is an urgent global issue. Brazil, which had shown impressive reduction in Amazon deforestation – of more than 80% in the period between 2004 and 2012 – has seen the course of this advance reversed in recent years. Since 2019, deforestation has seen a significant increase, and today we can see an accumulated loss of forest area of around 21%. This situation means that the Amazonia is very close to a point of no return. Moreover, in recent years, not only has the constant pressure on the Amazon biome intensified, but also the threats and attacks on its traditional peoples and communities.
It is necessary to demonstrate that state institutions in Brazil are again aligned with a policy of zero tolerance to deforestation and environmental crimes. For this, it is necessary to resume proven effective actions, associated to the command and control capacity. The transparency of the governmental data must go hand in hand with the increase of the environmental monitoring and inspection.
We need to revoke norms that cause socio-environmental setbacks and mark the territories of traditional peoples and communities. It is necessary to guarantee the constitutional rights that have been won, by protecting territories and respecting the self-determination of indigenous peoples, quilombolas, traditional communities and family farmers. Currently, the demarcation of their lands has ceased, and there are contrary incentives towards the expansion of land grabbing. Protected areas are an effective instrument to preserve the integrity of ecosystems and associated environmental services, in addition to ensuring the rights and culture of the Amazonian populations.
To remedy this, it is essential to get back to conservation work, and put climate policy at the centre of power. The bottom line is that none of these tasks will advance for long if we do not have a strong and effective citizens' movement to represent and protect the interests of rainforest dwellers. We need a strong lobbying apparatus, and we need resources for that.
Community-based protected areas (Extractive Reserves, Sustainable Development Reserves, National Forests and Extractive Settlement Projects) have had the lowest rate of deforestation in recent years compared to other public protected areas, and Amazonia will not be protected without the action of traditional inhabitants.
To save the Amazon, it is therefore essential to strengthen the leadership and organisations of traditional peoples and communities, represented in particular by the CNS. In order to preserve the forest, its defenders, the traditional peoples and communities, must be guaranteed their constitutional rights, with protection of their territories and respect for their self-determination. The forest is the Amazon's most important infrastructure.
Currently, more than 80,000 families live on 25 million hectares in 153 conservation units. There are 66 Federal Extractive Reserves (Resex), 47 State Resexs, 19 Sustainable Development Reserves (RDS), 21 National Forests (Flonas) and more than 50 thousand families living in 9 million hectares of Extractive Settlement Projects (PAE).
The legalisation of the social rights of extractive peoples to the territories where they have lived for generations has the direct and immediate effect of protecting and conserving the natural resources that exist there. It also represents the democratisation of access to land and the stability of future generations in the forest.
In the 1990s, new areas were created and the institutional management model was designed by the communities, based on shared management between the communities and the state, governed by the Collective Real Right of Use Concession Contract – CCDRU, which structures territorial governance, political autonomy and the participation of community organisations in collective decisions for tthe well-being of the extractivist communities.
Strategic areas are protected by communities that provide an ecosystem service to Brazilian society and the planet, and receive very little in return.
There is an urgent need to strengthen community-based protected areas, because during the last years of the Bolsonaro government, almost all forest conservation work was systematically dismantled, not only within the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change – MMA and the Chico Mendes Institute – ICMBio, but also in the areas of family farming. At the same time, there has been systematic support for the invasion of outsiders into protected areas (the most blatant examples and the most serious consequences of which we are now witnessing, as in the case of the Yanomami).
As a result, the process of regularising the land titles of the Resexs and other sustainable use conservation units has been slow, compensation processes have not been completed, and land use concessions have not been signed. The families live on the margins of the law and without state protection, vulnerable to all kinds of pressures: deforestation, fires, invasions of public land, illegal sales of land and timber, and threats from extractivist leaders.
These more than 30 million hectares of tropical forests – in Extractive Reserves, Sustainable Development Reserves, National Forests and Extractive Settlement Projects – continue to exist only because we, the inhabitants, ensure that they do, despite efforts to destroy them. They were created in the first place because there was an urgent need; these forests were threatened by loggers and other invaders, and only the local people could save them. These protected areas of sustainable use are buffer zones against encroachment into the heart of the Amazon rainforest, or they are the last remaining forests in their region.
But the resexs, flonas and PAEs are not fulfilling the potential of the objectives for which they were created, and are frustrating the expectations of their inhabitants. In order to guarantee the permanence of new generations in these areas and the existence of the forest they protect, social (health, education and technology) and productive infrastructures are needed. There is no doubt that today's adults will be the last inhabitants of the Resexs if this reality does not change. These huge forests will be lost to land grabbing and land speculation.**
The current political conjuncture in Brazil is very positive in that technicians and politicians who historically began their activities with the CNS, or who have worked with the CNS throughout its political struggle, have been appointed to important positions in the current Lula government, with whom we have a good level of communication and joint work.
The new Minister of Environment and Climate Change is the legendary Marina Silva, who began her militancy in the social movements together with Chico Mendes in the rubber plantations of Xapurí-Acre. Edel Moraes, vice-president of the CNS for two terms, has been appointed undersecretary of the National Secretariat for Traditional
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