Brazilian tribe keeps watch over forest with drones

BRASILIA: Visitors to the Uru-eu-wau-wau, an indigenous tribe living deep in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, must first request permission by email, which is printed out and hand-delivered to local leaders. Yet while just one of the tribe’s nine villages is connected to the outside world via precarious radio-based wifi, other technology is being deployed to protect their remote forests from invaders.

Nowadays, the hum of an aerial drone can be heard among the birdsong and distant roar of the Jamari River where the Uru-eu-wau-wau catch fish.

In a bid to detect land grabbers and illegal loggers, some of the tribe were trained last December to operate drones.

A month later, they put the drones to use and discovered an area of about 200 hectares (494 acres) being deforested in their reserve in Rondonia state, they told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“The technology today, for territorial monitoring, is very worthwhile,” said Bitate, a 19-year-old local leader who speaks Portuguese as well as the tribe’s native language, Tupi Kawahib.

“Without a drone, that deforestation - which was already advanced - would still be unknown to us.” The tribe depends on the forest for their food, as well as gathering wild produce to sell in cities.

A recent haul of eight tonnes of Brazil nuts took 10 people about 30 days to pick, and generated about 2,500 reais ($550) per person, more than double Brazil’s monthly minimum wage.

Since their first contact with the outside world in the early 1980s, the Uru-eu-wau-wau have slowly adopted modern technologies alongside their traditions.

Grid electricity now powers the four villages visited by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In one, Alto Jamari, a straw-roofed “maloca”, a wooden hut where the community hang hammocks to sleep, was adorned with a flat-screen television and a fridge.

Most Uru-eu-wau-wau still sleep in malocas, surrounded by grazing wild pigs and chickens, but a few now have beds in brick houses built by the state government on their lands.

The preservation of the Amazon rainforest is seen as vital to slow global warming, as trees absorb carbon dioxide - the main heat-trapping gas - from the air and store the carbon until they are cut down and burned, or rot.

But Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has pushed for development on indigenous lands, and last month presented a bill to Congress that would open up reserves for mining and commercial farming.

Last year, the Brazilian Amazon suffered its highest level of deforestation since 2008, according to INPE, the government agency tasked with monitoring the rainforest.