The Americas Society / Council of the Americas will have in September, in New York City, events with the Presidents of - Brazil (H.E. Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva - September 22, 2008), Paraguay (H.E. Fernando Lugo - September 23, 2008), Colombia (H.E. Álvaro Uribe Vélez), and Argentina (H.E. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner - September 25, 2008).

It is only natural that Americas Society and the Council follow very closely the US elections - this because of the fact that definite need for improving the US position among the States of the Western Hemisphere is in order, and many are worried about business an d security issues - specially in the light of efforts to bring back Cuba into the Organization of American States.

The following is an article from the Society’s website, and we look forward onto reporting on the meetings with the Presidents.

Vice Presidential Choices, Latin America Policy, and the Hispanic Vote.
Carlos Macias and Carin Zissis, The Americas Society / Council of the Americas.
September 2, 2008

While the U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain secure their nominations and announce running mates, questions arise over what the vice presidential candidates could contribute in terms of winning the Hispanic vote and U.S. policy toward the Western Hemisphere. Obama’s choice of longtime Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) as a vice presidential candidate could bolster the Democratic ticket because of his strong foreign policy credentials. Meanwhile, little is known about where Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin—embroiled in controversy over her teenage daughter’s pregnancy—stands on subjects such as immigration, trade, or U.S. policy toward Cuba.

Winning the Latino voting bloc has emerged as crucial for both camps, with the Democratic and Republican campaigns hiring special advisors to court Hispanic voters. According to a survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, Latino voters prefer Obama over McCain by a 2 to 1 ratio. Dallas Democratic State Representative Rafael Anchía said support for former candidate Hillary Clinton showed that Latinos did not need a Hispanic politician on the ticket to make a choice, responding to a question in a Dallas Morning News article as to whether Obama should have selected New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson as a running mate.

Some within the Democratic party fear that Latinos who supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries won’t vote for Obama in November. A National Journal article says that even though Latinos appear to lean toward the Democratic ticket, they lack a deep connection with Obama. Meanwhile, Alaska Governor Palin’s strong opposition to abortion could help with conservative Catholic Latino voters, suggested one expert to the Sacramento Bee.

Yet Palin’s position on the issue of immigration—an important matter to the Latino electorate—remains unclear. On the other hand, Obama and Biden stand aligned. Both emphasize the importance of securing American borders while supporting a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants. Additionally, they voted in support of the “Secure Fence Act of 2006,” which approved construction of a 700 mile-long fence along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Palin faces criticism for her lack of foreign policy experience and she has not been vocal on regional matters, including U.S. policy toward Cuba. Meanwhile, the island’s political transition has already sparked debate between Obama and McCain. Biden, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has demonstrated support for the U.S. embargo against Cuba. He voted in favor of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which opened the door to suing foreign companies that benefit from confiscated American property in Cuba. Following the resignation of longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the Delaware senator proposed easing restrictions on travel and remittances from the United States, establishing direct mail, and supporting the creation of small businesses in the island without relaxing the embargo.

On the subject of trade, Biden has proven wary of Free Trade Agreements (FTA). He voted against FTAs signed with Oman, Singapore, Chile, and Central America. Biden also rejected the U.S.-Peru FTA in December 2007, saying, “[T]he Bush Administration has not proven that it will effectively enforce labor and environmental provisions.” When running for the 2008 Democratic nomination, Biden voiced support for revision of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, echoing Obama’s pledge to renegotiate the pact’s terms. However, Biden supported the extension of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, which provides preferential trade with Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru for some 5,600 products as part of efforts to eradicate drug trafficking.

Meanwhile, Palin has voiced support for international trade as Alaska’s governor, saying, “We are helping our economy and economies around the world through trade.” Although Palin has not been vocal on specific trade pacts in the Americas, Mexico and Chile stand among Alaska’s top ten export markets.

A new column by the Washington Post’s Marcela Sanchez takes a closer look at what an Obama-Biden victory could mean for U.S. policy toward Latin America and ponders whether it could help restore Washington’s standing in the region.

Send questions and comments for the editor to:  ascoa.online at as-coa.org.

To find better links to this article please go to:

 http://www.americas-society.org/article….

See more in: United States, North America, U.S. Policy, Democracy & Elections

In Tokyo’s Asakusa district, Saturday August 30, 2008, 4,700 people, organized in 20 Samba schools, turned their district into Little Brazil. They were dressed accordingly, danced the samba, and used decorated cars. This is a tradition started in 1981 - The Asakusa Samba Carnival - when Taito Ward invited over the winning group of that year’s Rio Carnival in Brazil.

Akira Iizuka, a member of samba organization G.R.E.S. Saude in Yokohama, said his group participates in other events, but this is the biggest.

“The Asakusa Samba Carnival is where people can perform a real Brazilian-style carnival,” said Iizuka, who was taking part in his eighth Asakusa festival.

The carnival featured contests for two leagues with a total of 20 teams.

The teams paraded from Umamichi Dori to the end of Kaminarimon Dori in front of thousands of people.

The dancers prepared their own costumes and themes.

While many women wore showy colorful bikinis with big feathers on their head and back, costumes varied widely between the different teams. Members of one team dressed as chefs.

Tequila sunset: The ethanol boom.

Mexico without tequila? It seems a far-fetched notion but the country’s farmers are shunning the famous agave plant because of poor prices and switching to profitable crops. By Guy Adams

Wednesday, 27 August 2008

 GETTY IMAGES
Farmers load blue agave plants on a truck for the production of tequila in Arandas, Mexico. But the falling prices for the crop, and the soaring prices for corn and beans, have put tequila at risk

Savour that frozen margarita in your hand, for soon you might not be able to afford it. Mexico’s tequila industry is about to become the latest victim of America’s growing thirst for ethanol.

Soaring demand for biofuel has sent global commodity prices through the roof, prompting farmers of blue agave, the cactus-like plant from which the country’s national spirit is made, to move into more lucrative cash crops such as wheat and corn.

Picturesque plantations of agave – with its long spiky leaves and a heart like a pineapple – are being replaced with orderly rows of corn, a crop now selling for a record 18 cents per pound, as US consumers from across the border seek respite from the soaring oil prices that have pushed the price of petrol over $4 (£2) a gallon and turn to ethanol.

Global food price rises have also seen the cost of another rival crop, beans, rise by 60 per cent in the past six months to 59 cents per pound. By comparison, agave, which in 2002 was worth more than 80 cents a pound, is now retailing for less than two cents. As a result, many farmers of agave – pronounced “a-hav-ay” – are taking the difficult decision to let their over-ripe plants turn brown in the desert sun, claiming it is no longer economically viable for them to bother with the annual harvest.

“Corn is where the money is now,” one large-scale farmer, Miguel Ramirez, told USA Today. “I’m going to get out of agave completely.” Martin Sanchez, director of agriculture for Mexico’s Tequila Regulatory Council, added: “We don’t have numbers but we know it is happening: people are abandoning their fields of agave and flipping over to other crops.”

Although tequila has been one of the global drinks trade’s biggest success stories of recent years, industry experts are now concerned the move to lucrative rival crops could lead to an agave shortage, limiting the supply of the spirit, and driving up the cost of the shots and cocktails enjoyed by Western consumers.

Officials say producers planted between 25 and 35 per cent less of the crop last year, and expect a similar decrease in production for 2008. Because the plant takes more than six years to reach full maturity, it will be impossible to cope with any shortage when the full effects are eventually felt.

The tequila industry is prone to cycles of boom and bust. In the late 1990s, disease and a series of cold winters killed off many agave plantations, causing an international shortage that more than doubled the cost of a typical bottle. Since then, demand for the robust drink has soared, thanks for a boom in the market for premium products, which can retail for several hundred dollars a bottle. But the supply end of the chain may be about to give out.

“Because of the slow growth rate of agave, it is especially sensitive to the boom-and-bust agricultural cycle, only played out in a slightly longer cycle” said Larry Walker, the US correspondent of Drinks International.

A Mexican farm hand Raudel Lopez Sandoval agrees. “You tend an agave for six years, and then the price drops on you or you get hit with a freeze or something. It’s a lot of investment to lose,” he told USA Today. “Beans grow fast.”

The highest quality agave is grown at altitudes of between 1,500 and 2,000 metres, in the regions around the town of Tequila, near to Guadalajara. After harvesting, its pulp is fermented with yeast before being double distilled and aged in oak casks.

Although tequila is legally required to contain at least 51 per cent agave, even cheap brands have recently moved to 100 per cent levels, thanks to the current glut on the market. Experts say any increase in price is most likely to have an impact on the budget market.

“This would principally affect low quality tequila, which will be altered so that it contains a lower percentage of agave,” said Chris Mercer of the drinks industry website www.just-drinks.com. “If people get more money for other crops, they will stop growing agave and the price will rise. It’s basic economics.”

Tequila isn’t the only drink being hurt by the ethanol boom. In Germany, brewers recently complained that farmers were moving out of the barley market, making it more costly to produce their traditional premium beers.

From the agave plant to the bottle: how tequila is made

The raw ingredient

Contrary to popular belief, blue agave, the raw plant at the beginning of the tequila-making process, is not a cactus but a lily. The indigenous plant grows in the highlands of central Mexico and has been cultivated in the region for 9,000 years. Budding tequila home-brewers must be willing to travel the distance, as agave is not, to date, something that can be scooped up at the supermarket or even the deli and – by law – it must be harvested only in the Mexican states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, Mlchoacan, Nayarit or Tamaulipas.

Preparation

Remove the pina, the large pineapple-shaped heart on the agave, which can weigh between 40lb and 70lb. Allow 15lb of pina per litre of 100 per cent tequila.

Cook

The pina is steam-cooked at high temperatures, in stone ovens heated up to a maximum of 95 degrees Celsius for up to 36 hours. That not only allows the fibres to soften without the agave turning to sugar, but also improves the flavour.

Wash

The ethic behind the wash is very much “waste not want not” as it is carried out to prevent the unwanted fibres from stealing any of the desired juices by re-absorption. What emerges is a delectably named juice known as honey water.

Mill and strain

This extracts the juices which are then mixed with water in a big fermentation tank and yeast is thrown in.

Ferment

The mixture is left to ferment for between one and 12 days in a treated tank. The fermentation process produces a liquid which is then fermented twice more. The second distillation process produces three components: the “head” which is discarded, the “end” which is recycled and the ‘heart’ which becomes the tequila.

Age

Tequila cannot legally assume its name without aging in an oak barrel when it becomes either blanco, plata, oro, reposado or anejos (white, silver, gold, rested or aged). However, colour does not necessarily reflect quality.

Bottle

For legal reasons, the labelling is key to the process, with every label having to be printed with either “hecho en Mexico” or NOM (Norma Official Mexicana), the producer’s four-digit registration number and the tequila’s age.

Miranda Bryant

Climate conference makes progress on key dispute.

By (AP) Published: 2008-08-23, ACCRA, Ghana.
Delegates at a key U.N. climate conference made headway Friday on a plan to encourage developing countries to regulate carbon emissions by focusing on their largest industries.

The emerging plan sidesteps objections from countries like India and China, which refuse to accept national targets for the overall emission of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

How to get developing countries to commit to reducing pollution levels has deeply divided countries seeking to craft a new climate change agreement to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

The meeting of 1,600 delegates and environmentalists from 160 countries was the third conference this year working on the accord, due to be adopted in Copenhagen in December 2009.

The Accra meeting also was discussing ways to integrate the conservation of the world’s ever-shrinking forests into the Copenhagen agreement, as well as studying ways to raise and distribute the tens of billions of dollars needed annually to help poor countries deal with the consequences of climate change.

Under the Kyoto pact, only 37 industrial countries committed to meet specific targets. Together, they were required to cut emissions by an average 5 percent from 1990 levels by 2012. The United States refused to participate in the Kyoto regime because it excluded China and other large newly powerful economies from any obligation.

Korea, which is not one of the 37, surprised delegates by announcing that next year it will adopt a target for reducing its carbon emissions by 2020, but declined to give specifics. Earlier this year, South Africa also said it would embrace self-imposed targets, peaking its emissions by 2025.

Under the “sectoral approach” now taking shape, developing countries would set pollution targets for specific industries, like cement, steel or aluminum. Unlike the 37 industrial countries, they likely would not be punished for missing their goals.

“Something quiet but quite dramatic is happening,” said David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “People are now talking about the same idea in the same language.”

India voiced reservations, but did not reject the concept. As for China, Doniger said the plan fit neatly with Beijing’s intention to increase the efficiency of its key industries, which produce the bulk of its carbon emissions.

Details of any agreement on the new approach would be complex and difficult to reach, and it is only one of many disputed components of a post-2012 pact.

But consensus appeared to coalesce around the notion that industrial countries will remain legally bound to meet a national cap on their carbon emissions, while developing countries would have flexibility in deciding which industries would be controlled and at what levels.

A critical element calls for advanced countries to provide the technology and funding to help other countries curb emissions in heavily polluting industries.

***

“There is now a basis for discussion,” said Katrin Gutmann, policy coordinator of the WWF Global Climate Initiative. “Before, we worried there would just be more clashes,”

But financing remains unresolved and it was unclear how governments would move forward, she said.

Japan, which advanced the proposal earlier this year to a chorus of criticism, said it was pleased with the response in Accra after it dropped several components that aroused objections.

Developing countries had feared the Japanese proposal was a backdoor device to impose binding targets that would limit their economic development.

“That is a great advancement compared with the beginning of this year,” Japanese delegate Jun Arima told the conference.

——————

From:  sniffenj at un.org
Subject: Cutting Fossil Fuel Subsidies Can Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Says UNEP Report
Date: August 26, 2008 10:21:12 AM EDT

UNEP NEWS RELEASE

Cutting Fossil Fuel Subsidies Can Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Says UN
Environment Programme Report.

Meanwhile, New Assessment of Clean Development Mechanism Shows
Climate-Friendly Energy Projects Achieving Lift-Off in Sub Saharan Africa.

ACCRA/NAIROBI, 26 August 2008 — Scrapping fossil fuel subsidies could play
an important role in cutting greenhouse gases while giving a small but not
insignificant boost to the global economy, a new report by the UN
Environment Programme (UNEP) says.

The report challenges the widely held view that such subsidies assist the
poor, arguing that many of these price support systems benefit the
wealthier sections of society rather than those on low incomes.

They are also diverting national funds from more creative forms of pro-poor
polices and initiatives that are likely to have a far greater impact on the
lives and livelihoods of the worse-off sectors of society.

Globally, around $300 billion or 0.7 per cent of global GDP is being spent
on energy subsidies annually.

The lion’s share is being used to artificially lower or reduce the real
price of fuels like oil, coal and gas or electricity generated from such
fossil fuels.

Cancelling these subsidies might reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much
as 6 per cent a year while contributing 0.1 per cent to global GDP.

***

The report acknowledges that some subsidies or mechanisms, whether in the
form of tax breaks, financial incentives or other market instruments, can
generate social, economic and environmental benefits.

A case in point are feed-in tariffs that have kick-started a renewable
energy revolution in countries such as Germany and Spain.

The report also accepts that there may be cases where some subsidies can,
if well- devised and time-limited, meet important social and environmental
goals — for example, ones to encourage a switch from dirty,
health-hazardous or environmentally harmful fuels such a charcoal.

The report also cites the case of Chile where well-devised subsidies have
increased rural electrification from around 50 per cent to over 90 per cent
of the population over 12 years.

But the report argues that many seemingly well-intentioned subsidies rarely
make economic sense and rarely address poverty. The report, therefore,
challenges the widely-held myth that scrapping fossil fuel supports would
hit the poor.

The report cites liquid petroleum gas (LPG) subsidies in India where $1.7
billion was spent in the first half of the current financial year on trying
to get the fuel into poor households. “LPG subsidies are mainly benefiting
higher-income households. … Despite the ineffectiveness of the subsidy the
programme is being extended until 2010”, says the study.

Indeed the report concludes that in many developing countries the real
beneficiaries of such subsidies are neither the poor nor the environment
but well-off households; equipment manufacturers and the producers of the
fuels.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director,
said: “In the final analysis many fossil fuel subsidies are introduced for
political reasons but are simply propping up and perpetuating
inefficiencies in the global economy—they are thus part of the market
failure that is climate change.”

“There are now less than 500 days before the crucial UN Climate Change
Convention meeting in Copenhagen in late 2009. Governments should urgently
review their energy subsidies and begin phasing out the harmful ones that
contribute to the wasteful use of finite resources and delay the
introduction of renewables or more efficient forms of generation while
creating disincentives and barriers to public transport up to energy saving
appliances”, he added.

***

The new UNEP report– Reforming Energy Subsidies: Opportunities to
Contribute to the Climate Change Agenda—was released today at a meeting in
Accra, Ghana of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Here Governments have gathered to continue negotiations under the Bali Road
Map towards a conclusive and far-reaching new climate deal by Copenhagen
2009.

***

CDM Takes Off in Sub-Saharan Africa:
Today UNEP also presented new findings on the penetration of the Clean
Development Mechanism (CDM) in sub-Saharan Africa.

The CDM, part of the Convention’s Kyoto Protocol agreed in 1997, allows
developed nations to offset some of their greenhouse gas emissions by
funding cleaner energy projects in developing countries that generate
carbon credits known as certified emission reductions.

These can range from wind and biomass energy projects to ones that tap
methane from rubbish tips and schemes that encourage the use of less
polluting fuels or power plants.

There has been concern that the benefits of the CDM, a contrasting example
of a policy tool aimed at wider social, economic and environmental benefits
when compared with fossil fuel subsidies, have been by-passing countries in
Africa.

The main countries benefiting to date have been the rapidly developing
economies such as China, Brazil, and India.

The new figures, compiled by the UNEP Risoe Centre on Energy, Climate and
Sustainable Development in Denmark, indicate that this is changing with the
first CDM projects emerging over the past 18 months in six countries– the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique,
Mali and Senegal.

These include an oil well, gas flare reduction project in the DRC and a
river hydroelectric project in Madagascar.

In Kenya new projects include a 35MW extension of geothermal, hot rocks,
generation and a sugar cane waste-into-energy project with Mumias Sugar
Company.

Mr. Steiner added: “Whereas fossil fuel subsidies are an example of a
blunt policy instrument, perpetuating old and inefficient economic models,
the CDM is an example of a more intelligent, market-based mechanism that is
fostering the transition to a modern Green Economy.”

He said the uptake in Africa was due, in part, to the impact of the UN’s
Nairobi Framework initiative launched in 2006.

Here UNEP, along with partners including the UN Development Programme
(UNDP), have been working to build the human and regulatory capacity of
poorer countries to access carbon financing.

Other measures have included awareness-raising among banks and industry
players on the continent to new green finance opportunities.

The UNEP Risoe Centre has been monitoring global trends in CDM investment
and the impacts of these activities for some time.

“Excluding South Africa, there were only six CDM projects in five
sub-Saharan countries in 2006. Now there are 49 projects in 12 countries,
South Africa included”, says Lars Appelquist, a researcher at the Centre.

This still remains low compared to a global tally of close to 3,500 CDM
projects, but does mark a departure from the very low levels of the past.

“As new policy drivers and planned capacity development activities bear
fruit, the market will likely exhibit exponential growth like other
regions”, says Glenn Hodes, CDM Programme Manager at UNEP Risoe. Indeed,
assuming Governments agree on a deep and decisive new climate agreement in
2009, Africa overall could see roughly 230 projects by 2012, according to
Hodes’ and Appelquist’s calculations.

These could cumulatively generate over 65 million certified emission
reductions, worth close to $1 billion at a conservative carbon credit price
of $15.

“Compared to CDM prodigies like India, Africa is poised to be the late
bloomer”, says Hodes.

—————————-

Notes to Editors:

“Reforming Energy Subsidies: Opportunities to Contribute to the Climate
Change Agenda” was commissioned by UNEP’s Division of Technology, Industry
and Economics. The principal author is Trevor Morgan of Menecon Consulting
and now with the International Energy Agency (IEA).

It says that Russia has the largest subsidies in dollar terms amounting to
around $40 billion a year and mainly spent on making natural gas cheaper.

Iran comes second with around $37 billion; six countries, spending in
excess of $10 billion on subsidies, come next. These are China, Saudi
Arabia, India, Indonesia, Ukraine and Egypt.

The report can be downloaded at www.unep.org

The new data and estimated take up of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)
projects in Africa can also be downloaded at www.unep.org

For more information, please contact: Nick Nuttall, Spokesperson/Head of
Media, UNEP Nairobi, on Tel: +254-20-762-3084, Mobile: +254-733-632755 or
+41-79-596-5737, E-mail:  nick.nuttall at unep.org;
Or Anne-France White, Associate Information Officer, UNEP Nairobi, at Tel:
+254-20-762-3088, Mobile: +254-72-8600-494, or E-mail:
 anne-france.white at unep.org

=========

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The Supreme Court In Brazil Setting an Important Precedent for Indigenous Lands.
Friday 22 August 2008, by Marta Caravantes, Inter Press Service.

 http://www.truthout.org/article/setting-…

Boa Vista, Roraima, Brazil - An imminent decision by Brazil’s Supreme Court on the demarcation of the Raposa Serra do Sol indigenous reservation in the Amazon jungle region has the country’s native communities on edge, because of the precedent it will set.

Raposa Serra do Sol is in the Amazon jungle state of Roraima at the northwestern tip of Brazil, a land of water and abundance.

The 1.7 million hectare reserve was officially demarcated by the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2005, after judicial appeals and debates that dragged on for nearly two decades. The decision was based on the principles laid down in the 1988 constitution.

    The Supreme Court is set to decide next week whether or not to uphold the demarcation of the reservation as a single, unbroken territory.

    The reservation is home to more than 19,000 members of the Macuxí, Wapixana, Taurepang, Patamona and Ingarikó indigenous communities.

But since 1992, invasions of indigenous land by large-scale rice producers have become frequent, and in just 13 years, rice plantations in the area covered by the reservation grew sevenfold, to 14,000 hectares.

In March, the Lula administration sent in the federal police to evict a group of rice farmers who have refused to leave the land they are farming. The landowners responded with violence, and 10 indigenous people were injured.

“They began to shoot at us, they threw bombs and we started to leave. I was hurt on one of my legs, my back and my head,” says a young Macuxi Indian.

Santinha Da Silva was also there that day, with her three children. “I’m not going to say I’m not afraid,” she says. “I am scared, but I’m going to confront them. If they want to kill me, then they can do that, as long as they leave the land to my children.”

Two weeks after the start of the police operation, the Supreme Court not only called it off, but also accepted a legal challenge which, in the case of a favourable decision, would allow the rice farmers to continue occupying portions of the indigenous territory, setting a dangerous precedent.

    “Not only Raposa Serra do Sol would be at risk, but all indigenous reservations in the country,” says Rosane Lacerda, a law professor at the University of Brasilia.

  No rice farmer has paid the fines owed for environmental damages, and none are in jail for the attacks on the local indigenous residents.

“Several of them went to prison, but they were only in for a short time, since they have money and political influence, with which they are able to turn these cases into interminable legal disputes,” says Paulo Santille, head of the identification and delimitation of indigenous lands department in the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI), the federal agency in charge of indigenous affairs.

James Anaya, the recently appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, is currently visiting Raposa Serra do Sol to assess the situation there.

    Lacerda says it is not far-fetched to talk about “a declared war on indigenous people by groups that have economic interests on their lands.”

    For five centuries, the indigenous people of Raposa Serra do Sol have suffered invasion after invasion of their land, first by the Portuguese colonialists and later by ranchers, “garimpeiros” (gold panners) and large landholders.

    All of these groups employed the local Indians as labourers. Ranchers sometimes even branded their indigenous workers, like cattle.

Orlando Pérez Da Silva, “tuxaua” (chief) of the village of Uiramutá, exemplifies that tragic history with his own life. “The non-Indians arrived and invaded our land. They started to hire us on their haciendas. But when an Indian would ask for his wages, he would get a beating and would be thrown out,” he recalls.

Da Silva spent six years as a slave: “We were enslaved. To buy a hammock we had to work for an entire month.”

One of the organisations helping to coordinate the struggles of indigenous people, the Commission of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon, is presided over by a member of the Sateré-Maué community, Gecinaldo Barbosa, who says the problem goes beyond Brazil’s borders.

“Amazonia is in Brazil, but the problem is a global one, of concern to anyone who defends life,” he argues.

The pressure of agribusiness and large-scale agriculture on indigenous lands has intensified as a result of the “biofuels revolution” and the need to produce feed for the world’s livestock, says Barbosa.

Beto Ricardo, coordinator of the non-governmental Socioenvironmental Institute of Brazil (ISA), says the Lula administration is an economic development-oriented government immersed in a “certain climate of economic euphoria.”

“The pressure on indigenous people is multifold,” says Ricardo. “It doesn’t only come from agribusiness, but also from public works like roads, hydroelectric plants or dikes.”

For Nilva Barauna, superintendent of the Brazilian Institute of the Environment (IBAMA) in Roraima, Raposa Serra do Sol is “the last agricultural frontier, on which agribusiness has its sights.”

    “We will see a major modification of the landscape here, of water resources and the fauna and flora as a result of the rice plantations. The agrotoxics used by the landowners are polluting the rivers and hurting the aquatic fauna,” says Barauna.

    Gercimar Moraes Malheiro, a Macuxi Indian and the coordinator in Boa Vista - the capital of Roraima - of the Project for the Protection of Indigenous Populations and Land in Amazonia, also complained about the environmental damages: “All the poison, all the residues from the processing of rice, are dumped into the rivers.”

    Despite the violence of landowners against local indigenous people and IBAMA’s reports on the environmental impact of rice farming, the immense majority of non-indigenous residents of Roraima want the rice farmers to stay, arguing that they bring jobs and money.

    Many people interviewed in Boa Vista expressed fears that the price of rice would shoot up or that an economic crisis would be triggered if the rice farmers were expelled.

But the superintendent of IBAMA says the rice farms actually offer little to the local residents, because “most of the work is mechanised,” the plantations don’t create jobs and don’t pay taxes, and the benefits are concentrated in just a few hands.

According to Ricardo, the head of ISA, “indigenous lands will not survive unless there is an ecological and economic realignment of the country and of Amazonia.”

As a metaphor for what is happening, he says “Brazil is the only country named after an (almost) extinct tree” - the Brazilwood (Caesalpinia echinata) tree, whose wood provided a highly prized red dye. The species is now on the verge of extinction.

There are 604 indigenous reservations in Brazil, which are home to 215 distinct native groups totalling around 600,000 people.

In the indigenous world view, there are no borders, or bureaucracy or a concept of private, individual ownership of land. Indigenous people in Brazil are fighting to defend their own model of development at a time when nature “is rebelling against the world,” as native leaders said.

    The original inhabitants of Raposa Serra do Sol have developed a self-sufficient economy. They grow rice, beans, plantains and cassava, raise 35,000 head of cattle, and combine “white man’s medicine” with their traditional remedies, based on local plants with curative properties.

    “As indigenous people, we are going to defend nature because that is our conception of life, that cosmogonic view of the world, for the future of humanity,” says Barbosa.

    Pueblos Hermanos, a non-governmental organisation from Spain, and the Madrid-based audiovisual company Compañía de Información y Proyectos Originales (CIPÓ) have launched an awareness-raising campaign on the vulnerability of indigenous people in Raposa Serra do Sol.

The initiative has included messages of support sent to the local indigenous communities and letters to the Brazilian Supreme Court urging the expulsion of the rice farmers, sent from the web site of Pueblos Hermanos, http://www.puebloshermanos.org.es. And in September, the two groups will present a documentary filmed in Raposa Serra do Sol.

——-

The author is head of content and communications at CIPÓ.