George Monbiot:
"Since 1985 the land of the Arara Indians who live in the Brazilian Amazon is
legally protected by the Brazilian government to prevent the Indians from
suffering the faith of so many others: extermination in the name of
development.
When Europeans first arrived in South America there were between 5-10
million Indians living in the Amazon. The white men brought massacres and new
diseases and now after 500 years the Brazilian Indians are down to 230.000.
Many of them live in the forest and until recently beyond the reach of
outsiders. Like many of the first peoples of the Amazon the Arara live by
hunting, gathering and fishing. Apart from the clothes the government has
given them, everything they possess comes from the land. The people consider
the forest to be part of them and themselves a part of the forest. If the
trees disappear the Arara go with them.
Until 1983 the Arara living in the western part of their forests managed to
avoid all contacts with the outside world. But in that year white people
landed on the banks of the river Iriri. They were working for a logging firm
and had come to find mahogany.
Mahogany is the wood which makes Britain one of the biggest importers of
Brazilian timber. It's what rich people in this country [Britain] have
traditionally used for their furniture, their doors, their banisters, their
fitted kitchen and bedrooms. But now it's in short supply. Most of the
remaining stocks of mahogany outside the Indian lands are now so thinly
distributed that timber companies are finding it's not commercially viable to
extract them. So some of the loggers have been moving to the reserves. My
research suggests that much mahogany being brought in Britain should in effect
be regarded as stolen goods.
The Brazilian constitution passed in 1988, forbids the exploitation of Indian
lands. But the big logging firms in the Amazon -some of whom been there for
many years- are immensely powerful. Civil servants complain that they have
more money and more influence in the region than most government departments.
As a result there is little anyone can do to keep the big companies and the
many small ones that have followed them out of the Indian reserves. Not
withstanding the fact that these lands have been inhabited by the Araras for
thousands of years, the logging firm Bannach Timber Company, got permission
from the government's land agency to built a 90 kilometers road from the
Trans-Amazon Highway to the banks of the river Iriri. There, right in the
middle of the Arara's land, the government's land agency allowed the company
to construct a sawmill.
Branching of the main road many smaller ones have been built running far into
the forest. The roads were used by about 1500 colonists moving in from other
parts of Brazil. As they clear the land for farming, the trees sustaining
the Araras began to disappear. While the colonists opened the fields, the
timber company - they are claiming it was only working on the other side of
the river - started cutting mahogany form the Arara Indians' land. The
company's heavy machinery toppled more trees than it cut, leaving behind a
mess, scarcely recognizable as the forest the Araras inhabited. The
Araras fled from the area Bannach moved into. They moved to the far west
of their territory and there in 1987 the Brazilian government contacted them
for the first time. They were settled in a permanent village in an attempt to
keep them out of contact with the timber cutters and colonists whose diseases
and forest destruction could finish them off.
In 1970 when the Trans-Amazon Highway was built and colonists began to move
into the northern part of their territory, the Arara numbered around 400.
Now after 2 decades of diseases and deforestation, there are only 130 of
them left. The timber cutting and the farming which followed the road by
that built mean that their survival as a people remains a matter of doubt.
It seems amazing that all this could obliterate such a society as solid and
as real as this, just because we want doors and banisters and lavatory seats
made out of mahogany.
In 1985 the territory of the Arara was declared an Indian reserve by the
Government's Indian Foundation: FUNAI. In 1991 FUNAI asked the states attorney
general to apply to the courts to have Bannach removed. Although at first
FUNAI succeeded, Bannach appeals successfully against the court order, on the
grounds that it occupied the land before it had been demarcated as an
indigenous reserve and that settlers have been allowed into the region by
INCRA the government's colonisation agency. 20 years earlier INCRA had
allocated the land the Arara inhabited for colonisation."
Jose Torez Patugua (sp?) the state prosecutor who drew up the legal
applications to have Bannach removed tells that the judge was impressed with
the social aspects caused by Bannach: there are Indian families of employees
living on the reservations who are dependent on the salaries paid by Bannach.
That's the reason why the judge didn't let Bannach remove.
George Monbiot:
"Brazil has an enormous timber industry which is immensely powerful. In March
this year timber cutters helped persuade the Brazilian president to sack Jose
Lutzemburger, his famous secretary of state for environment. Mr. Lutzemburger
was trying to stop illegal cutting throughout the Amazon.
Officials from FUNAI had found little evidence of any replanting in the
reserve or other attempts to repair the damage being inflicted on the
forests."
George Monbiot visited Bannach Timber Company:
"The sawmill for me symbolize so much what happens in Brazil where law works
for the strong and not for the weak and the constitution is often little more
than a theory of good government. All the wood in the sawing shed was
mahogany, the remains of the rainforest Bannach was cutting, on its way to
the U.S. and Britain."
Mr. A. Bannach is one of the managers of the Bannach Company. He said that the
part of the area where the company is cutting trees is not an Indian
reserve. "Bannach has nothing to do with other people's life. Bannach has
to mind its own business. Bannach takes only wood from that area which we
own. It's our property."
A person working for FUNAI says that Bannach claims they have been there
before the demarcation of the land but the Indians have been there for
thousands of years. The person stressed that Bannach is inside an Indian
reservation, that there is no doubt about it. "This wood leaves the reserve
free of charge; it's so to speak stolen. The correct term is theft."
One of Bannach logging roads is already within 20 kilometers of the Arara
Indians' new village.
A FUNAI official tells if Bannach goes on with building the road and cutting
trees the people have no place to go because much of the wood is already gone.
The life of a people will disappear. Not only the life of individuals but of
a whole people, who have their own history, culture, language, religion and
who have no chance to live on this planet, like many peoples have disappeared
in the Amazona.
George Monbiot:
"The Arara are not the only one threatened by mahogany cutting. There are
other timber cutters [than Bannach] in Brazil working exclusively in Indian
reservations. Most of those companies deny that their wood comes from Indian
reservations.
According to Brazilian researchers the mahogany is now scares in the places
were it can be cut legally. As a result much of the mahogany Brazilian exports
comes from Indian land. In some Indian reservations loggers hire killers to
murder people getting in their way.
Mahogany cutting is one of the greatest threats to the survival of the Amazon
Indians. It is above all the diseases the cutters and colonists introduce
which threatens to exterminate some of the people who's reserves has been
invaded. Many of the sick are brought to the Indian hospital in the town of
Altimera. There, far from their land where nobody speaks their language, the
people sit and wait to get better.
Since we filmed there I've heard that the Indian foundation ran out of money
and the people in the hospital are starving.
It's a hopeless situation, while many timber cutters are rich and powerful and
can make the political system work for them, the people who try to protect the
Indians have no money even for the most basic necessities.
52% of the Brazilian mahogany is exported to Britain. Mahogany cutting
involves a hugh amount of destruction because the trees in Brazil are thinly
scattered and the heavy machines crashing through the forest to reach them,
destroys 28 trees for every mahogany tree cut. Despite this many mahogany
cutters claim that their logging is environmental sustainable. They point to
the mahogany plantation they started but fail to make clear that these are
being planted far from where the cutting takes place.
The plantations which are much smaller than the areas the cutters have
destroyed won't be ready for 30-50 years. Worldwide only 1/8 of 1% of tropical
timber is sustainable produced."
Many of the British companies distributing Brazilian mahogany are members of
the Timber Trade Federation. In response to the consumer's worries about timber
cutting, this federation launched a public relations campaign called "Forest
Forever." It claims amongst other things that the timber man is not responsible
for forest abuse and destruction. The chairman of the federation denies there
is a widespread problem. The chairman says that the federation doesn't want
to deal with timber companies which cut trees in Indian reservations and if the
federation gets enough evidence a company does cut trees on the reservation it
will tell the company that the federation doesn't want to deal with them.
A person from a "do it yourself chain" said that after 1993 the shops
will only buy mahogany which is environmentally sustainable. At present
he doesn't know where the mahogany comes from.
Many factories print labels or glossy pamphlets claiming that their wood was
cut without harming the forest. Environmental groups describe these claims as
unfounded and misleading.
A person from an British environmental group [I think]:
"We need to have a global standard for good forest management and we need to
ensure that there is independent monitoring that will be acceptable to
environmental groups, to the timber trade, to Indian groups and to all those
who are involved with the timber trade. The consumer has to be satisfied that
when he sees a label on a piece of timber that the label actually means
something. If the label says the timber comes from a well managed forest, it
actually does come from a well managed forest. Most of the labels on timber
items are very spurious. They are based on very little accurate
information. In fact we did some research that showed that 83 companies
claiming environmental friendliness for their products only 3 could come up
with any information about the sources and of those 3 only 1 could give us
anything more precise than country origin."
George Monbiot:
"The British-based pressure group Survival International has done more than
any other here to defend indigenous people"
George Monbiot to a person from Survival International: "So, what can we do in
Britain to help the Indians to help themselves?"
A person from Survival International:
"Survival International has been running a successful letter writing
campaign. We had some success with the Yanomami. The president is finally
agreed to recognized Yanomami lands. And a lot of that was due to
international pressure. People in streets expressing their outrage of
the devastation of indigenous lands and their livelihoods. And of course in
the streets you have a choice, you do not have to buy hardwoods from
Brazil. You can buy other woods and be sure that they not are coming from
Indian reservations."
George Monbiot:
"So it's up to us. If we keep on buying mahogany the Amazon's Indians could
lose much of the forest keeping them alive. If we stop there is a good chance
that they'll survive. It's not us but the Indians of the Amazon who pay the
highest price for the furniture we buy, some of them are paying with their
lives."
--