Home > Eating the Amazon: The fight to curb corporate destruction
Agriculture - Fishery - Animals Environment South/Latin America
Huge soya farms financed by Cargill, the largest
privately owned company in the world, are the
rainforest’s new worst enemy
By Daniel Howden
The scars are unmistakably man made. Hard-edged squares
and rectangles,hundreds of acres across, hacked and
burned out of the Amazon rainforest. The dark green of
the canopy is lacerated with thin red lines - the
illegal dirt roads that stitch together these giant
clearings.
Seen from the air, this fearful symmetry marks out the
battle lines of an invasion that has seen the humble
soya bean emerge as the greatest threat to the world’s
most important rainforest.
On the ground, what was once a thriving ecosystem
supporting at least 300 tree species for every hectare,
is now a wasteland. Dead roots and dry grass crunch
underfoot and the breeze throws up dust from eroded
soil.
Three hours’ drive outside the city of Santarem in Para
state, along dirt trails struck by illegal loggers, you
arrive in a vast monoculture inside the Tapajos
National Park. Soya fields laden with the dry brown
seed pods stretch in every direction.
This is Father Edilberto Sena’s parish. The fiery local
priest has emerged as a fierce critic of the land-
grabbers, loggers, ranchers and agrobusiness
multinationals pushing further and further into the
rainforest.
The Amazon basin is home to one in 10 of the world’s
mammals and 15 per cent of the world’s land-based plant
species. It holds more than half of the world’s fresh
water and its vast forests act as the largest carbon
sink on the planet, providing a vital check on the
greenhouse effect.
Brazil has overtaken the United States as the world’s
leading exporter of soya. The protein-rich bean has
become a profitable link in the processed food chain
and 80 per cent of world production is fed to
livestock. Brazilian soya beans are feeding Europe’s
growing hunger for cheap meat substitutes, and have
overtaken logging and cattle ranching as the main
engine of deforestation.
Three years ago, the agrobusiness giant Cargill, the
largest privately owned company in the world, opened a
soya port in Santarem. And Father Edilberto has set
himself on a collision course with the Minnesota
multinational that he says represents the worst of
rapacious capitalism. Father Edilberto has used the
church-funded Radio Rurale de Santarem as a means of
fighting back against the incursions of the illegal
loggers, ranchers and soya farmers, who in turn supply
the grain giants.
"We are small and we are fighting multinationals like
Cargill - people who are using soya as a commodity. I’m
sure there are at least 200,000 listening. Our
objective is to educate the people, provide critical
and objective news."
It is less than 18 months since another rainforest
campaigner and champion of Brazil’s rural poor, Sister
Dorothy Stang, was murdered in broad daylight further
east in Para state, in the city of Anapu. After death
threats, the US-born, naturalised Brazilian nun was
assassinated by gunmen allied to illegal ranchers.
"I don’t need a uniform," says the outspoken priest,
who eschews the Catholic garb for a green polo shirt
and an indigenous necklace. "My uniform is my face and
my mouth. People know I’m a priest."
Lately he has started to receive the same kind of
threats that preceded the murder of Sister Dorothy.
"Two months ago, some crazy, nuts guy posted on the
internet that the best thing they could do with Father
Edilberto Sena was to kill me.
"When I heard about this, the first moment I had a
coldness in my spine."
The priest’s frequent broadsides against the vested
interests eating into the Amazon have made him powerful
enemies, and the diocese has come under heavy pressure,
he claims, to muzzle him. "The elite, they got mad at
us and told the bishop to close us down."
For now, it seems the Bishop’s support is holding and
Radio Rurale is still on air, but Father Edilberto
launched an impassioned appeal for help to
international church leaders visiting the area as part
of a major environmental conference organised by the
Greek-based NGO, Religion, Science and the Environment.
The symposium is the latest initiative by Ecumenical
Patriarch Bartholomew, the Eastern Orthodox pope who
has been preaching against the sin of environmental
destruction for more than a decade.
"The Church needs to take sides," says Father
Edilberto. "With what we are facing we need all the
allies we can find."
Santarem, a riverside city hundreds of miles upstream
into the Amazon, has found itself at the centre of the
soya boom. Last year, Brazil produced more than 50
million tons of soya across nearly 23 million hectares,
an area about the size of the United Kingdom. Soya
production remains relatively contained within the
Amazon biome, but the decision to locate a major soya
port this deep into the basin is inviting a
catastrophe, according to conservation groups.
In the past three years, nearly 70,000 square
kilometres of the Amazon rainforest have been
destroyed. The smoke from burning trees pushed Brazil
into the top four of global greenhouse gas producers in
2004. Despite commitments from the government of
President Lula da Silva, the destruction of the Amazon
rainforest continues.
Almost three-quarters of it occurs illegally. Brazil’s
award-winning Environment Minister, Marina da Silva,
speaking at the RSE symposium, was keen to point to
progress being made in slowing the rate of
deforestation. According to government figures based on
a satellite survey, there was a 32 per cent decrease in
the rate of deforestation last year.
With satellite monitoring stations now in place and
providing an annual overview of the Amazon basin to the
general public, the deforestation is no longer taking
place unknown to the authorities. But that may not be
enough, she admitted.
"We need to create the feeling that we are being
watched all the time and that those who are doing
something wrong will be caught and punished. In some
countries it is already too late. It’s not too late
here. We can still save it," Ms da Silva said.
But the cycle of deforestation where state-owned
reserves are infiltrated by loggers and ranchers
looking for "free land" now has a third and more lethal
phase, where the cleared land is sold to soya producers
who intensively farm the soil until it can no longer
bring a harvest. The cutters then move to new areas and
the process is repeated. Within as little as three
years, rich and fertile rainforest supporting
incredible biodiversity can be reduced to a desert.
Cargill’s giant silos now dominate the shore in
Santarem, on a site which used to be a beach used by
local fishermen. The food multinational has been
accused by Greenpeace of illegally setting up this
conveyor belt facility which delivers exclusively to
the European market, and caters for more than one-third
of the UK’s imports of soya.
The family-owned behemoth, with a turnover of more than
$7bn (£3.8bn) and offices in a replica French chateau
in Minnesota, is the undisputed ruler of the global
grain trade. As the company website says: "We buy,
trade, transport, blend, mill, crush, process, refine,
season, distribute and deliver around the clock and
around the globe."
It also owns British-based Sun Valley foods, which
processes a million chickens a week into fresh and
frozen, supermarket wrapped products. Its major clients
are McDonald’s and the Morrisons chain.
Later this summer the Brazilian high court is due to
rule on whether Cargill’s facility should be shut down.
Already, two lower courts have ruled against Cargill on
the grounds that the company did not complete the
necessary environmental impact study before opening the
facility. But orders to temporarily suspend operations
have been overturned by a barrage of appeals to higher
courts.
Cargill, in an official statement, has rebutted these
claims, saying that the court battle is all over a
technicality. "Cargill followed all the permitting
requirements of the applicable government agencies for
the construction and operation of the Santarem
facility," the company said in a statement. Cargill
continues to insist that the legal action relates only
to the specific kind of impact study it should have
conducted. Cargill also maintains that its practices
are transparent and that it is "committed to
sustainable development which creates income to support
thriving communities and enables environmental
management over time".
Meanwhile, the conveyor belt keeps moving, the tankers
keep coming, and the grain keeps making its way to the
fast-food counters and supermarket shelves of Europe.
Cargill has not limited itself to sourcing, processing
and shipping. It also provides the financing needed to
keep the expansion of soya going. Brazilian banks will
not lend to farmers with no title to their lands, so
Cargill steps into the breach, providing loans for
everything from bulldozers and chainsaws to seeds and
harvesters.
Cayetano Scannavino Filao has been working with
indigenous people inside the Tapajos for nearly two
decades. "When I came here from Sao Paolo 20 years ago,
all of this was forest. It is enough to make you cry,"
he said. He helps to run a local NGO, Health and
Happiness, which works with the remote and impoverished
communities that have found themselves in the way of
big agrobusiness. The region is home to 220,000 people
from 180 different indigenous groups, many of whom live
deep in the forest and are dependent on the rainforest
and the river for everything from food and tools to
medicines and shelter.
"Today we have a conflict situation," he laments.
"Since the opening of the port, deforestation in this
area has increased by 511 per cent. I’m not against
soya, I’m against soya in the Amazon biome. We used to
fight the loggers, but the loggers, they eat the Amazon
in small bites; the soya is eating the Amazon in big
bites."
Tarcisio Feitosa da Silva, who works for an environment
agency in the remote Acre region of the Amazon, has
seen with his own eyes how big those bites can be. In
many cases, the illegal invaders don’t even bother with
logging. In the worst cases, earth-movers are sent in
to bulldoze priceless primary forest into giant pits
where the logs are then burnt.
"They bulldoze the trees into big holes in the ground
and they burn what’s left," Mr da Silva said. The great
trunks, he says, can take more than a fortnight to
burn, and keep smouldering for months after. It was in
the context of this kind of assault that the federal
government acted to stop the extinction of the Brazil
nut tree, a national icon and a profitable and
sustainable source of revenue for the people of the
Amazon.
The result of the consequent ban on cutting the tree is
testament to the irrational and violent threat facing a
rainforest vital to the survival of the planet. The
Brazil nut trees now stand like sentinels towering over
the sea of soya. Preserved while all around them their
ecology is destroyed, they are destined to die of
loneliness.
Stripped of supporting vegetation their fate is to
perish from exposure to a tropical sun that only their
highest branches were ever meant to see. Those that
endure will be charred black in August, when the
farmers torch the crops ready to plant next season’s
crop of soya.
The scars are unmistakably man made. Hard-edged squares
and rectangles,hundreds of acres across, hacked and
burned out of the Amazon rainforest. The dark green of
the canopy is lacerated with thin red lines - the
illegal dirt roads that stitch together these giant
clearings.
Seen from the air, this fearful symmetry marks out the
battle lines of an invasion that has seen the humble
soya bean emerge as the greatest threat to the world’s
most important rainforest.
On the ground, what was once a thriving ecosystem
supporting at least 300 tree species for every hectare,
is now a wasteland. Dead roots and dry grass crunch
underfoot and the breeze throws up dust from eroded
soil.
Three hours’ drive outside the city of Santarem in Para
state, along dirt trails struck by illegal loggers, you
arrive in a vast monoculture inside the Tapajos
National Park. Soya fields laden with the dry brown
seed pods stretch in every direction.
This is Father Edilberto Sena’s parish. The fiery local
priest has emerged as a fierce critic of the land-
grabbers, loggers, ranchers and agrobusiness
multinationals pushing further and further into the
rainforest.
The Amazon basin is home to one in 10 of the world’s
mammals and 15 per cent of the world’s land-based plant
species. It holds more than half of the world’s fresh
water and its vast forests act as the largest carbon
sink on the planet, providing a vital check on the
greenhouse effect.
Brazil has overtaken the United States as the world’s
leading exporter of soya. The protein-rich bean has
become a profitable link in the processed food chain
and 80 per cent of world production is fed to
livestock. Brazilian soya beans are feeding Europe’s
growing hunger for cheap meat substitutes, and have
overtaken logging and cattle ranching as the main
engine of deforestation.
Three years ago, the agrobusiness giant Cargill, the
largest privately owned company in the world, opened a
soya port in Santarem. And Father Edilberto has set
himself on a collision course with the Minnesota
multinational that he says represents the worst of
rapacious capitalism. Father Edilberto has used the
church-funded Radio Rurale de Santarem as a means of
fighting back against the incursions of the illegal
loggers, ranchers and soya farmers, who in turn supply
the grain giants.
"We are small and we are fighting multinationals like
Cargill - people who are using soya as a commodity. I’m
sure there are at least 200,000 listening. Our
objective is to educate the people, provide critical
and objective news."
It is less than 18 months since another rainforest
campaigner and champion of Brazil’s rural poor, Sister
Dorothy Stang, was murdered in broad daylight further
east in Para state, in the city of Anapu. After death
threats, the US-born, naturalised Brazilian nun was
assassinated by gunmen allied to illegal ranchers.
"I don’t need a uniform," says the outspoken priest,
who eschews the Catholic garb for a green polo shirt
and an indigenous necklace. "My uniform is my face and
my mouth. People know I’m a priest."
Lately he has started to receive the same kind of
threats that preceded the murder of Sister Dorothy.
"Two months ago, some crazy, nuts guy posted on the
internet that the best thing they could do with Father
Edilberto Sena was to kill me.
"When I heard about this, the first moment I had a
coldness in my spine."
The priest’s frequent broadsides against the vested
interests eating into the Amazon have made him powerful
enemies, and the diocese has come under heavy pressure,
he claims, to muzzle him. "The elite, they got mad at
us and told the bishop to close us down."
For now, it seems the Bishop’s support is holding and
Radio Rurale is still on air, but Father Edilberto
launched an impassioned appeal for help to
international church leaders visiting the area as part
of a major environmental conference organised by the
Greek-based NGO, Religion, Science and the Environment.
The symposium is the latest initiative by Ecumenical
Patriarch Bartholomew, the Eastern Orthodox pope who
has been preaching against the sin of environmental
destruction for more than a decade.
"The Church needs to take sides," says Father
Edilberto. "With what we are facing we need all the
allies we can find."
Santarem, a riverside city hundreds of miles upstream
into the Amazon, has found itself at the centre of the
soya boom. Last year, Brazil produced more than 50
million tons of soya across nearly 23 million hectares,
an area about the size of the United Kingdom. Soya
production remains relatively contained within the
Amazon biome, but the decision to locate a major soya
port this deep into the basin is inviting a
catastrophe, according to conservation groups.
In the past three years, nearly 70,000 square
kilometres of the Amazon rainforest have been
destroyed. The smoke from burning trees pushed Brazil
into the top four of global greenhouse gas producers in
2004. Despite commitments from the government of
President Lula da Silva, the destruction of the Amazon
rainforest continues.
Almost three-quarters of it occurs illegally. Brazil’s
award-winning Environment Minister, Marina da Silva,
speaking at the RSE symposium, was keen to point to
progress being made in slowing the rate of
deforestation. According to government figures based on
a satellite survey, there was a 32 per cent decrease in
the rate of deforestation last year.
With satellite monitoring stations now in place and
providing an annual overview of the Amazon basin to the
general public, the deforestation is no longer taking
place unknown to the authorities. But that may not be
enough, she admitted.
"We need to create the feeling that we are being
watched all the time and that those who are doing
something wrong will be caught and punished. In some
countries it is already too late. It’s not too late
here. We can still save it," Ms da Silva said.
But the cycle of deforestation where state-owned
reserves are infiltrated by loggers and ranchers
looking for "free land" now has a third and more lethal
phase, where the cleared land is sold to soya producers
who intensively farm the soil until it can no longer
bring a harvest. The cutters then move to new areas and
the process is repeated. Within as little as three
years, rich and fertile rainforest supporting
incredible biodiversity can be reduced to a desert.
Cargill’s giant silos now dominate the shore in
Santarem, on a site which used to be a beach used by
local fishermen. The food multinational has been
accused by Greenpeace of illegally setting up this
conveyor belt facility which delivers exclusively to
the European market, and caters for more than one-third
of the UK’s imports of soya.
The family-owned behemoth, with a turnover of more than
$7bn (£3.8bn) and offices in a replica French chateau
in Minnesota, is the undisputed ruler of the global
grain trade. As the company website says: "We buy,
trade, transport, blend, mill, crush, process, refine,
season, distribute and deliver around the clock and
around the globe."
It also owns British-based Sun Valley foods, which
processes a million chickens a week into fresh and
frozen, supermarket wrapped products. Its major clients
are McDonald’s and the Morrisons chain.
Later this summer the Brazilian high court is due to
rule on whether Cargill’s facility should be shut down.
Already, two lower courts have ruled against Cargill on
the grounds that the company did not complete the
necessary environmental impact study before opening the
facility. But orders to temporarily suspend operations
have been overturned by a barrage of appeals to higher
courts.
Cargill, in an official statement, has rebutted these
claims, saying that the court battle is all over a
technicality. "Cargill followed all the permitting
requirements of the applicable government agencies for
the construction and operation of the Santarem
facility," the company said in a statement. Cargill
continues to insist that the legal action relates only
to the specific kind of impact study it should have
conducted. Cargill also maintains that its practices
are transparent and that it is "committed to
sustainable development which creates income to support
thriving communities and enables environmental
management over time".
Meanwhile, the conveyor belt keeps moving, the tankers
keep coming, and the grain keeps making its way to the
fast-food counters and supermarket shelves of Europe.
Cargill has not limited itself to sourcing, processing
and shipping. It also provides the financing needed to
keep the expansion of soya going. Brazilian banks will
not lend to farmers with no title to their lands, so
Cargill steps into the breach, providing loans for
everything from bulldozers and chainsaws to seeds and
harvesters.
Cayetano Scannavino Filao has been working with
indigenous people inside the Tapajos for nearly two
decades. "When I came here from Sao Paolo 20 years ago,
all of this was forest. It is enough to make you cry,"
he said. He helps to run a local NGO, Health and
Happiness, which works with the remote and impoverished
communities that have found themselves in the way of
big agrobusiness. The region is home to 220,000 people
from 180 different indigenous groups, many of whom live
deep in the forest and are dependent on the rainforest
and the river for everything from food and tools to
medicines and shelter.
"Today we have a conflict situation," he laments.
"Since the opening of the port, deforestation in this
area has increased by 511 per cent. I’m not against
soya, I’m against soya in the Amazon biome. We used to
fight the loggers, but the loggers, they eat the Amazon
in small bites; the soya is eating the Amazon in big
bites."
Tarcisio Feitosa da Silva, who works for an environment
agency in the remote Acre region of the Amazon, has
seen with his own eyes how big those bites can be. In
many cases, the illegal invaders don’t even bother with
logging. In the worst cases, earth-movers are sent in
to bulldoze priceless primary forest into giant pits
where the logs are then burnt.
"They bulldoze the trees into big holes in the ground
and they burn what’s left," Mr da Silva said. The great
trunks, he says, can take more than a fortnight to
burn, and keep smouldering for months after. It was in
the context of this kind of assault that the federal
government acted to stop the extinction of the Brazil
nut tree, a national icon and a profitable and
sustainable source of revenue for the people of the
Amazon.
The result of the consequent ban on cutting the tree is
testament to the irrational and violent threat facing a
rainforest vital to the survival of the planet. The
Brazil nut trees now stand like sentinels towering over
the sea of soya. Preserved while all around them their
ecology is destroyed, they are destined to die of
loneliness.
Stripped of supporting vegetation their fate is to
perish from exposure to a tropical sun that only their
highest branches were ever meant to see. Those that
endure will be charred black in August, when the
farmers torch the crops ready to plant next season’s
crop of soya.
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1181617.ece