Gold miners bring fresh wave of suffering to Brazil’s Yanomami
YANOMAMI INDIGENOUS LAND, Brazil, (Reuters) - Brazil is losing the upper hand in its battle to save the Yanomami Indigenous people, who are dying from flu, malaria and malnutrition brought into their vast, isolated Amazon rainforest reservation by resurgent illegal miners.
A year after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared a humanitarian crisis among the Yanomami and vowed zero tolerance for illegal mining, environmental enforcers warn that Brazil is jeopardizing last year’s hard-won progress, when about 80% of roughly 20,000 wildcatters were ousted from the Portugal-sized reservation.
As the Brazilian military has rolled back its support for the government crackdown, the gold-seeking miners have come back, they say, making fresh incursions into Yanomami land.
According to Brazil’s health ministry, 308 Yanomami died of disease, malnutrition and violence last year, with 50% of the deaths being children under four. Deaths from malaria, which is introduced by the miners, doubled in 2023 from 2022.
The presence of armed miners has also scared the Yanomami from planting manioc, their staple along with river fish, and reduced the game they can hunt.
During a Reuters visit to the Yanomami territory in December and January, agents of environmental protection agency Ibama said they are now flying solo in the battle against the miners after crucial military support was scaled down.
The Brazilian military reduced operations in mid-2023 and stopped transporting fuel for Ibama’s helicopters to forward bases inside the reservation, limiting their range across the giant territory. The Air Force has not enforced a nofly zone, despite being ordered to do so by Lula in April, while the Navy is not doing enough to
OSLO, (Reuters) - Three permits given by the Norwegian government to develop new offshore oil and gas fields were found to be invalid yesterday because their environmental impact was not sufficiently assessed, in a ruling that could set a precedent for new fields.
Environmental campaign groups had asked the Oslo District Court to block the development of the three North Sea fields, citing a failure to consider the impact of the future use of all the extracted fossil fuels on the global climate through the greenhouse gases they will emit.
The lawsuit filed by Greenpeace and its partner Nature and Youth concerns Equinor’s EQNR.OL Breidablikk and Aker BP’s AKRBP.OL Yggdrasil and Tyrving fields, which hold combined reserves of some 875 million barrels of oil equivalent.
“The court’s conclusion is that the decisions on the plan for the development and operation of petroleum deposits for Breidablikk, Yggdrasil and Tyrving are invalid,” said the ruling by Judge Lena Skjold Rafoss.
It said future emissions should have been assessed as part of the approval process, in line with a Supreme Court decision in 2020.
“An impact assessment ensures that dissenting voices are heard and considered, and that the decisionmaking basis is verifiable and available to the public,” it added.
“This is important to safeguard democratic participation in decisions that may influence the environment.”
The ruling applied only to the three recently approved fields “and not to other activity on the Norwegian continental shelf”.
Norway’s Energy Minister, Terje Aasland, said the government disagreed with the verdict and would consider appealing, in an emailed statement to Reuters.
“This is a full and complete victory for the climate over Norway,” Greenpeace Norway head Frode Pleym told Reuters.
Output at Breidablikk can continue only until Dec. 31, 2024, the verdict said, adding that the developments of the two other fields had to be halted.
Breidablikk started production in October, four months ahead of schedule, while Tyrving and Yggdrasil are due to come on stream in 2025 and in 2027, respectively.
According to Equinor, Breidablikk was expected to plateau at 55,000-60,000 barrels per day in 2024-2026. There is no publicly available data for the current production level.
Norway’s top court in 2020 dismissed a case against Arctic drilling brought by the two NGOs, concluding that parliament and the government had broad authority to award new oil acreage, but at the same time tightening requirements for impact assessments.
In the new lawsuit, the state argued that the ministry’s decisions were valid as laws and regulations did not require Norway to assess the consequences of emissions from petroleum exports abroad.
State-controlled Equinor in a statement to Reuters said it was not a party in the case and that it expected Norwegian authorities to “pursue the matter further”.
Other field partners include Poland’s Orlen PKN.WA, Vaar Energi VAR.OL, majority-owned by Italy’s Eni ENI.MI, and ConocoPhillips COP.N.
Aker BP and ConocoPhillips did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Vaar Energi and Orlen declined to comment.
blockade rivers that are the miners’ main access for machinery and supplies, three Ibama officials said.
Brazil’s Army, Navy and Air Force did not reply to requests for comment.
The ineffective no-fly zone has led to growing numbers of unregistered pilots flying miners into Yanomami land, and then crossing the border to safety in Venezuela when intercepted by Ibama helicopters, said Ibama pilot Carlos Alberto Hoffmann. Venezuela’s government did not reply to a request for comment.
“The state is not effectively present today in Yanomami territory, and we are seeing the return of illegal mining,” said Hugo Loss, Ibama’s head of enforcement operations. Without more military support, he added, “we will lose all this year’s work.”
A Reuters photographer spent a week on Yanomami land, embedding with an elite Ibama unit as they swooped down by helicopter into mining camps to destroy dredging pumps, airplanes and other mining supplies. Miners fled at the sound of approaching helicopters, and the armed Ibama officers chased stragglers into the jungle to arrest them.
The photographer also visited the Auaris medical station near the Venezue-lan border, where naked Yanomami children, their bellies swollen by malnutrition, were nursed back to health.
“Most of the miners had gone, but they are coming back,” Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, whose activism helped create the government-protected Yanomami territory in 1992, told Reuters. “Illegal mining is so bad for us.”
Along with poisoning rivers and spreading disease, the return of the gold miners boosts criminal groups that traffic drugs and timber across the Amazon, undermining Lula’s pledge to restore law and order there and end deforestation by 2030.
Miners arrested and handcuffed by Ibama special forces said they were poor and needed an income from gold prospecting to feed their families. Most were removed from the reservation and freed, and police said they are now seeking the backers who financed the gold digs.