World Environment Day: Protect our Common House with socio-environmental rights, land, water and territory!

To defend our Common House and Good Living we need to confront inequalities and guarantee the rights agenda of indigenous peoples and traditional communities who are rooted in their territories.  This assessment comes from people who have their ancestry in the land, and who know, hear and feel its pain.  World Environment Day is a time to highlight and strengthen our struggles.

Forty-nine years since the United Nations Stockholm Conference which debated environmental issues, the scenario around the world is complex, even more so in Brazil.  An uncontrolled pandemic, forest fires, which year after year destroy our Amazon, Cerrado and Pantanal; record land conflicts, according to data published by the Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da Terra: CPT) in Land Conflicts in Brazil – 2020 (in Portuguese); and in the middle of all this, and much more, the cattle herd is coming through, in the words of Brazil’s Environment Minister, Ricardo Salles, who is currently under investigation.

CESE recognizes that the unequal distribution of land and water is a central element in power relations in Brazil and, given all the diversity in the country’s rural and urban environments, has supported struggles in this field since its foundation.  In the month of June, we are reflecting on issues related to the environment, principally those that are the consequence of the environmental racism that persists in Brazil, and their impact on the Common House, in the countryside and in the city.

In the following text, we turn our eye to the serious and increasingly bold advance of agribusiness into the Common House over the last two years, but also bring you a message of hope.  In the end, our beliefs and spirituality also give us strength to go forward in the struggle.

Centuries-long resistance

The territories of indigenous peoples and traditional communities, the locus for life and the conservation of biodiversity, have been under constant attack and this is not by chance. These populations, who for centuries have coexisted with their environment, are the true guardians of the most preserved locations in the country.  And guarding a locus for life is not an easy task, it means confronting powerful actors, conflicts of all kinds – from verbal threats to massacres – and large-scale transnational economic and infrastructure projects that overlap with their territories.

Dona Isabel Rodrigues is a quilombola from the Barra da Aroeira Community located between the municipalities of Santa Tereza, Lagoa do Tocantins and Novo Acordo, approximately 100 km from Palmas, the capital of Tocantins.  In all, 120 families live in her community and their produce is abundant: rice, maize, manioc, beans, pumpkin, greens, fruit, chickens and pigs, the extraction of pequi, buriti, bacaba, barú, capim dourado and many other products.

But this entire diversity of life, in a region where agribusiness is spreading rapidly (as it is in so many other places in Brazil) is under attack and in conflict.  For 15 years, the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária: INCRA) has dragged its feet over the process to regulate the community’s territory, while invaders have moved in quickly.

“The felling destroys everything.  All this dirt, created by deforestation, everything ends up in the streams.  The streams run with pollution.  It has got to a point where we get ill because of all this destruction.  And it has destroyed more than 10 thousand feet of pequi, everything we had, it happened during the harvest, and the crop was intended for income generation,” Dona Isabel declares.

According to a survey on the MapBiomas platform, between January and December 2019, satellites from the National Institute for Space Research (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais: INPE) identified that more than 600 hectares in the community had been affected by deforestation, making Barra da Aroeira the most deforested quilombola territory that year.

This community’s case is one of those described in the Agri is Fire Dossier: land grabbing, deforestation and fires in the Amazon, Cerrado and Pantanal (in Portuguese), supported by CESE and HEKS EPER and published in April.  The document collates reports and analyses about countless forms of environmental devastation and land conflict.  Attacks on the rights of traditional populations are manifest in various ways.

Conflicts for land, water and territory

According to data from the Land Conflicts in Brazil 2020 publication (in Portuguese), conflicts for water have risen over the last decade, increasing more than seven times and becoming even more severe since 2018.  In 2011, there were 69 incidences of land conflict, which rose to 502 in 2019, the highest number recorded.  In 2011, 28,057 families were involved in such conflicts, while by 2019 this number had practically tripled, affecting 79,381 families.

Moisés Borges, member of the Movement of People Affected by Dams (Movimento de Atingidos por Barragens: MAB), denounces the way multinationals appropriate water from rivers, drying up water sources and destroying the vegetation in Correntina, a municipality located in the west of Bahia. “The Igarashi company has destroyed the Cerrado and begun to consume more than the city’s entire population.  We have made denouncements and reports to partners to change the situation. But, with State Government neglect, the population is in revolt. This revolt was a legitimate one of indignation.  And the government response was abuse from the Military Police,” he reports.

Violence against water sources, rivers, streams and springs goes beyond poisoning them with pesticides or the construction of large-scale infrastructure projects and includes destruction.  In the middle of a pandemic, in September last year, more than 1 hectare of mangroves was destroyed on Maré Island in Bahia.  “When we found out, the Institute for the Environment and Water Resources (Instituto do Meio Ambiente e Recursos Hídricos: INEMA) had licenced a project from the Bahia Terminais company,” declares Marizelha Lopes, community leader and member of the Movement of Artisanal Fishermen and Women (Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais: MPP) in Bahia.

The same CPT document points to exponential growth in the invasion of original territories between 2019 and 2020.  According to this data, the total number of families who were victims of invasions rose from 40,042 in 2019 to 81,225 in 2020 – an increase of 102.85%.  If we consider the increased number of indigenous families impacted between 2018 and 2020, the percentage is even more alarming – 295%.  Of the more than 80 thousand families who were victims of invasions in 2020, 58,327 are indigenous, 71.8%.  In 2019, this percentage was 66.5% (26,631) while in 2018 it was 50.1% (14,757).  Between 2019 and 2020, the deforestation of Indigenous Lands (ILs) reached a landmark 89,769.80 hectares.  The significant loss of vegetation in ILs in recent years is a serious indicator of invasions aimed at the illegal exploitation of natural resources and the appropriation of land.

In Pará, more precisely in the municipality of Itaituba, indigenous leader Alessandra Korap from the Munduruku people of Médio Tapajós and recent winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, (coloquei o link em ingles) asserts that her ethnic group has suffered from fires and land grabbing on public lands for a long time.

“Since 2019 we have suffered many attacks, one after another.  Here, for example, certain projects have been waiting to start for a long time and they’ll simply go ahead if we, indigenous people, quilombolas and riverside dwellers, don’t work more closely together as allies to defend our territories, the river and the Amazon in general” Korap notes.

Sônia Guajajara, an indigenous woman from Maranhão and Executive Coordinator of the  Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil: APIB), notes that for indigenous peoples and traditional communities what is at play is not only the struggle for rights, but also for life.  “For this reason we cannot collude with a policy that thinks of progress based on destruction.  We will not allow this, we will carry on in the struggle, fighting for life.  Because if we die in silence, we die twice: because we lose the right and the will to fight”.

(Re)existence and Giving Hope

Sônia Mota, CESE’s Executive Director, notes that the organization is inspired by the symbolism of creation narratives that point to the fundamental relationships a human being should cultivate – harmony, completeness and interdependence. “We are challenged to contribute to the construction of a sustainable environmental model, socially and economically fair and culturally diverse.”

She also emphasizes CESE’s commitment to promoting harmony in oikoumene. “Our commitment is to the care of the planet and all the beings that inhabit it, but in particular to indigenous people and those from other traditional communities; and to those who live in extreme vulnerability because of disproportionate human action on the environment.”

CESE supports initiatives from social movements and grassroots organizations in defence of the Common House.  The struggles of the guardians of the environment energize us and fuel our hopes for a less unequal world.  Inspiration and hope for continuity, so the struggles can remain firm through the work of women such as Dona Isabel Rodrigues from the Barra da Aroeira Community and Marizelha Lopes from Maré Island.

Their words and feelings complemented each other.  For Isabel, “sticks taken singly can be easily broken, but when there are three or four, it’s more difficult;” while for Marizelha, “it’s not possible to see the environment without us, because we are its guardians.”