The palm oil program marks a new focus for Brazil, which currently produces about 110,000 metric tons of crude palm oil per year, a fraction of the amount produced by market leaders Indonesia (16.9 million metric tons in 2008) and Malaysia (15.8 m tons), according to the FAO.
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"All of the reasons I fought against it 20 years ago are still there. It will destroy an entire river system and destroy the lives and culture of the people who live there and have lived there for thousands of years," said Sting, who was in Venezuela for a concert.
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Belo Monte Dam is by no means an inevitability, despite what the Brazilian government and the companies promoting the dam would like you to believe. Legal actions, protests and occupations by indigenous groups, and a growing international campaign could derail the project.
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Brazil's president says it would be "insane" to scrap an enormous hydroelectric dam in the Amazon region because other ways of generating power would cause more pollution.
Photo courtesy of Eraldo Peres/AP
Work on a huge, controversial dam in Brazil's Amazon is to begin by September at the latest, despite furious opposition from indigenous and environmental groups, Energy Minister Marcio Zimmerman said Friday.
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The dam would devastate an extensive area of the Amazon rainforest and threaten the survival of thousands of indigenous and traditional peoples who depend on the Xingu River for their livelihoods. Construction could begin this year.
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A country that wants to be the fifth-biggest economy on the planet within the next decade... needs to think five years ahead, and that is why we are doing this," Lula told reporters.
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Damage to the environment is also a major issue. The Xingu river basin has about four times as many species of fish as the whole of Europe, but the work will kill millions of animals and threaten extinction for some species, said Hermes Medeiros, a local ecologist on the review board.
Photo courtesy of Donizete Tomé/O Eco
Last week Brazil's National Space Agency INPE reported a 51 percent drop in Amazon deforestation in the six months ended February 2010 compared with the year earlier period. But the seemingly happy news for environmentalists may be premature.
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Actress Sigourney Weaver, who starred in "Avatar" and traveled with Cameron to Brazil, welcomed the dam delay. But she warned of a long fight ahead.
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"It's a small victory for us, but I don't expect the battle is over," Cameron told The Associated Press by telephone from the small Amazon city of Altamira, where he was lending support to project opponents.
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You have a great opportunity, as a world leader, to take decisive action in the immediate short-term to demonstrate Brazil's commitment to these vital issues. I am referring to the Belo Monte Dam project, which will undergo bidding on April 20. I believe strongly that this project should not go forward, and I appeal to you on the basis of logic and compassion, to intercede to prevent its progress.
Photo courtesy of Andre Penner/AP
Mr. Cameron said that he was writing a letter to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva urging him to reconsider the dam and that he would press for a meeting with the president. “They need to listen to these people here,” he said.
Photo courtesy of Atossa Soltani/Amazon Watch
Brazil's government will itself build the massive Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon region if no private firms bid for the project, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Thursday.
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Delivered to the United Nations last Thursday, April 1st, a document claims that flaws in the environmental licensing process for the controversial Belo Monte Dam in Brazil were overlooked due to political pressure from the Lula administration.
Photo courtesy of Thiago Teixeira/REUTERS
Brazil has unrolled an ambitious plan to preserve vast areas of the Amazon rainforest by tapping its rubber trees to make sustainable condoms.
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In Manaus, Cameron said that the environmental and social impacts of the plant need to be prioritized by the Brazilian government. "I beg to President Lula to reconsider," said Cameron.
Please note: This article is in Portuguese.
Photo courtesy of Kathy Willens/AP
As you are aware, the Belo Monte dam will inundate some 500 square km of land, and divert nearly the entire flow of the Xingu through two artificial canals to the dam's powerhouse. This alone will leave Indigenous and traditional communities along a 130 km stretch of the Volta Grande without water, fish, or a means of river transport.
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Beginning in the 1960s, politicians in Brazil pushed to populate the rain forest and to clear tracts for cattle, soybeans and timber. Across the Amazon, homesteaders were promised title to their plots if they cut down trees to make the land "productive."
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