[Pirateninfo] Gegenwehr im Amazonas

[pcl at jpberlin.de]

Was nachstehend als "Paranoia" bezeichnet wird, kann man auch als 
Indiz für einen erfolgreichen Widerstand deuten, der den 
Protagonisten von Bioprospektion zu schaffen macht, trotz der z.T. 
skurrilen Dinge, um die es in diesem Beitrag geht. Insofern ist der 
Beitrag von Interesse.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=30509
ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL:
Amazonian Paranoia
Mario Osava* 

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 3 (Tierramérica) - Nine out of 10 Brazilians 
surveyed believe that a conspiracy is under way to internationalise 
the Amazon forests through foreign occupation or some type of 
international control, says Senator Jefferson Peres. 

This conviction is as strong as it is unlikely, according to Peres, 
lawmaker of the nationalist Democratic Labour Party (PDT) from the 
northwestern state of Amazonas. He acknowledges that he has lost 
voter support for publicly disagreeing with the notion. 

Fuelling the conspiracy theory was a message disseminated over the 
Internet beginning in 2000, which charged that school textbooks in 
the United States included maps of Brazil without the Amazon region, 
which was allegedly portrayed instead as an international forestry 
reserve. 

Later an image of the supposed page from the school book appeared on 
the worldwide web as "proof", with a map of South America and a text 
that described South America's Amazonian countries as "irresponsible, 
cruel and authoritarian," and of being "peoples without intelligence 
and primitive." 

But grave errors in the English text and in the data cited revealed 
the falsification. Diplomat Paulo Roberto de Almeida, then serving at 
the Brazilian embassy in Washington, drew up a report about the 
fraud, available (in Portuguese), at www.pralmeida.org. 

There, the website www.brasil.iwarp.com is identified as the origin 
of the rumours. The site's slogan, "Brasil, ame-o ou deixe-o" 
(Brazil, love it or leave it), utilised by the country's former 
military dictatorship (1964-1985), suggests it belongs to an ultra-
rightwing group. 

Ironically, many Brazilian leftists contributed to spreading the 
alarm with an "anti-imperialist" cry, notes De Almeida. 

But the repudiations and the evidence of falsification did not slow 
down the effects of the rumour. In June, the city council of 
Valinhos, located 88 km from the southern metropolis of Sao Paulo, 
approved a motion in protest against the alleged geography textbook. 

Dismantling this intrigue is making extra work for Wesley Carrington, 
press officer for the U.S. embassy in Brasilia, who sent to the 
Valinhos council the documents that prove the fraud. 

Carrington says he can understand the reactions, because there are 
similar experiences in his own country. Recognition of a site or 
monument as cultural heritage of humanity is reason for pride in any 
country, but in the United States many feel it is "the first step 
towards denationalisation," he told Tierramérica. 

A more recent wave of rumours, spread via the Internet and by the 
media, paint Amazonian indigenous territories as true foreign 
enclaves, off-limits to other Brazilians, but open to people from the 
United States, Europe and Japan. 

According to a Jun. 11, 2004 report in the magazine "Isto é Dinero", 
the indigenous people do not consider themselves Brazilians and ban 
planes from flying through their air space. However, it is difficult 
to believe that the indigenous groups -- who are among some of the 
more impoverished sectors of the Brazilian population -- have the 
resources to control their air space. 

Indigenous and environmental groups have awakened suspicions among 
some members of the Brazilian military and ultranationalists that 
they are at the service of foreign powers, largely because in many 
cases they receive development funding from abroad. 

Furthermore, a year ago denunciations emerged that foreign ships were 
stealing freshwater from the mouth of the Amazon River. They were oil 
tankers, which, after discharging their load, take in up to 250 
million litres of ballast water to maintain balance for their return 
voyage to the Middle East. 

The fears are intensified by comments like those made by Pascal Lamy, 
of France, the new director-general of the World Trade Organisation. 
In February he said that "collective international management" could 
be applied to the Amazon and other tropical forests if they were 
declared "global public goods", though would remain national 
property. 

There is no reason to fear that possibility or foreign occupation of 
the Amazon, according to Guarino Monteiro, a colonel in the Brazilian 
army and professor at the Superior School of War, a military think-
tank. 

In addition to the capabilities of the Brazilian armed forces, the 
militaries of the industrialised world "don't know how to operate in 
a hostile environment," as was seen in the U.S. invasions of Vietnam 
and Iraq, Monteiro said in a Tierramérica interview. 

But the concern is economic occupation, which transfers abroad the 
decisions that affect the region. "The world's natural resources are 
finite, and the Amazon is rich in minerals like niobium and tin," 
which are very important for new technologies like those used in the 
aerospace field, he said. 

That awakens the greed that is behind the international pressure to 
demarcate indigenous territories where there are important deposits 
of these minerals, suspects the colonel. "The 'First World' knows 
about all the wealth of the Amazon through satellite images," 
Monteiro said. 

For Aluízio Leal, professor of economic policy at the Federal 
University of Pará, the Amazon is already internationalised through 
economic control that today is of greater interest than political 
control. 

The local economy is "linked umbilically and subject to the 
international market." A large portion of its production is exported 
and controlled by transnational corporations, like iron mining at 
Carajás, a gigantic ore deposit, and aluminium mining, which consumes 
a great deal of energy from the hydroelectric dams in the Amazon, he 
said by way of example. 

Military action in the Amazon by the United States could occur if the 
region's governments withhold essential natural resources, especially 
energy resources, according to Leal. The pressure on Venezuela, a 
major supplier of petroleum to the United States and governed by the 
outspoken Hugo Chávez is an indication of that possibility, he said. 

But for many, the Amazon's biodiversity is the resource most 
threatened by foreign greed. The subsequent paranoia about biopiracy 
is obstructing scientific research with controls that make it 
difficult to access the forest's biological materials, Charles 
Clement, expert in Amazonian fruits from INPA, the national Amazon 
research institute, told Tierramérica. 

Biopiracy is the illegal use of genetic resources and the traditional 
knowledge associated with them. Yes, says Clement, there are 
"biopirates", but they represent just "one out of every 100" 
researchers. 

The notion has spread that the Amazon's biodiversity equals profits 
in the form of new medications, foods and cosmetics, but identifying 
and developing a product takes many years -- between 10 and 20 in the 
case of pharmaceuticals, he said. 

With financing for just a few years, many projects are interrupted 
when the money runs out, and others do not even begin due to the 
imposition of new requirements, said the INPA expert. 

Clement has been living in the Amazon for 28 years, and says he has 
never suffered discrimination for being from the United States. 

Fellow U.S. citizen Thomas Lovejoy, a respected ecologist who is 
knowledgeable about the Amazon and is president of the Heinz Centre 
in Washington, says he has no complaints about constraints on his 
work either. 

The fears being expressed today about the internationalisation of the 
Amazon and biopiracy "don't have a basis in reality," he told 
Tierramérica. 

The Amazon's biodiversity "is being robbed from the future 
generations of Brazilians, yes, but by its destruction," the 
deforestation that is turning trees into carbon dioxide, Lovejoy 
said. 

The destruction of trees, especially by fires, is one way of 
internationalising the problem, he said, because the carbon dioxide 
gas being released is contributing to global warming, affecting 
everyone around the world. 

(* Mario Osava is an IPS correspondent. Originally published Sep. 24 
by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica 
network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS 
with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the 
United Nations Environment Programme.)