Tribes fined for GMO soy crops

Reservations hurt

CONQUISTA DO OESTE, Brazil, June 10, (RTRS): The savannah scrubland where Chief Joao Ponce once hunted deer and wild boar in Brazil has given way to neat rows of soy and corn that a tractor sprays with herbicide. In the next field, silver grain silos shimmer in the hot sun.

Ponce is head of the Uirapuru indigenous community which has allowed local farmers to produce crops on one-third of its 44,500-acre (18,000-hectare) reservation in southwestern Mato Grosso state.

The onetenth or less share of the harvests has helped the Pareci natives to buy cars and smartphones, replace hammocks with beds and equip their thatched huts with widescreen TVs, freezers and broadband Internet antennas.

“We’re surrounded by farmers. We can’t live off hunting anymore. The animals are gone,” he said, sitting in a hammock in his thatched hut.

But the partnership with non-native farmers, fueled by an insatiable demand for Brazilian soy in China and other markets, is illegal and has alarmed environmentalists.

Modified

Brazil’s environmental regulator Ibama this week fined six native communities and a dozen farmers on reservation land for using genetically modified crops (GMO) and engaging in large-scale mechanized agriculture. Both are banned on reservation land.

The unprecedented fines totaling 129 million reais ($33 million) mark an unexpected escalation in a dispute between rival federal agencies, environmentalists, farmers and native advocacy groups over Indian tribes getting into commercial agriculture in Brazil’s rapidly expanding farm belt.

“We are not targeting the Indian. He has been besieged, co-opted. He’s a victim, and the environment of the reservations is being hurt by this pressure for land,” said René de Oliveira, the agency’s main enforcer.

He said the use of GMO soy was the worst crime because nobody knows the environmental impact such crops can have on the biodiversity of protected areas like reservations.

The crackdown could mean trouble for major grain trading firms such as ADM, Cargill and Bunge if they are caught buying soy grown on native land.

“The companies can be fined, because the Indians are not allowed to grow GMO crops and traders are not allowed to buy from reservations,” Oliveira said.

Cargill said in an emailed statement that it only bought products originating from properties in compliance with Brazilian law and verified their status before any commercial transaction. ADM did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bunge directed a request to soy processor association Abiove.

Illegally

Leitao

Five grain trading houses, including Cargill and Bunge, were recently fined 24.6 million reais for buying crops grown on illegally deforested land in the Amazon.

Local farmers said it was very hard to trace the origin of grains because traders only need to ask for the seller’s tax ID and not the location or size of the plantation.

That has made it easier for tribes looking to cash in on an agribusiness boom, turning their coveted savannah into fertile farmland with the know-how of white farmers.

Ibama fined communities of the Pareci, Nambikwara and Manoki tribes and embargoed 40,000 acres of their land that were being used for large-scale GMO plantations in the municipalities of Campo Novo do Parecis and Conquista do Oeste, or “Conquest of the West,” near the border with Bolivia.

The tribes are pressing to change environmental and Indian laws so that they can keep their plantations and sell their harvests legally. The issue has put Ibama at odds with the Indian affairs agency Funai, which wants to allow the tribes to become farmers.

Fault lines have also opened within the tribes between traditionalists and opportunists at odds over how to manage ancestral lands and preserve native customs and culture.

“I totally support the Indian’s right to employ his free initiative to overcome poverty and not depend on handouts from the government,” said Nilson Leitao, a congressman from Mato Grosso and leaders of the farm states caucus.

The prospect of allowing commercial farming on reservations galls environmentalists and anthropologists who warn it will destroy native cultures and lead to exploitation of the Indians.