Voices in the green desert

In March 2006 women entered the tree nursery at the Aracruz Celulosa pulp mill in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and destroyed a million eucalyptus seedlings and its laboratory. This was a protest against the serious social and environmental impact caused by the expansion of the “green desert” – the vast eucalyptus monocultures that are spreading across southern Brazil.

On 8 March 2006, some 2,000 women from Via Campesina entered the tree nursery at the Aracruz Celulosa pulp mill in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and destroyed, according to the company, a million eucalyptus seedlings and its laboratory. According to Via Campesina, this International Women’s Day action was a protest against the serious social and environmental impact caused by the expansion of the “green desert,” as they call the vast expanses of eucalyptus monocultures that are expanding over several parts of the planet and that now invade southern Brazil.

The local press and some of the national newspapers launched a vicious campaign accusing the women of vandalism and immorality, of opposing progress and of promoting foreign intervention (due to the presumed presence of overseas members of the international Via Campesina peasants’ movement). One reporter from the huge media conglomerate ‘O Globo’ went so far as to create his own (false) “news”, calling the police to a Via Campesina press conference to turn in some of the alleged participants in the actions, whom he had actually just met moments before at the press conference. The State police, even so, did a brutal sweep of the offices of the Movimento de Mulheres Campesinas, the Brazilian peasant women’s movement.

The media that relentlessly attacked the Via Campesina’s action do not notice the vandalism of Aracruz, the world’s biggest producer of bleached eucalyptus pulp, with its own history of devastation and destruction of land, biodiversity and watersheds in the north of Brazil. Nor that the company provoked the displacement of thousands of inhabitants of black quilombos (runaway rebellious slave communities) and indigenous communities. Nor did the media mention that Aracruz bought its plantation land under the dictatorship from land grabbers who had taken over the ancestral lands of Tupinikim and Guarany indigenous peoples, or that the huge profits Aracruz makes from destroying the environment, peasants and communities are subsidised by publicly backed loans from the World Bank and Brazil’s own National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES).

Much less did the media recall that, only weeks before the women acted in Rio Grande do Sul, in January 2006, the same Aracruz corporation, with the support of the Federal Police sent in by the Lula government, had bulldozed Tupinikim and Guarani indigenous villages in the state of Espírito Santo, leaving many victims injured and a hundred families homeless, apparently just to give a ‘practical’ response to the suit filed against it by those local indigenous communities.

Plantations of eucalyptus and other fast-growing trees are just another World Bank policy in developing countries, promoted and subsidised with public funds to benefit a few global transnational corporations. These huge monocultures rapidly degrade the soil, water and biodiversity, as the eucalyptus grows to commercial cutting size in approximately seven years. Generally a plantation can be replanted and cut three times before the soil is exhausted to the point of becoming a useless, barren desert of stumps. The plantations demand therefore more and more land and increasing amounts of chemical fertilisers and pesticides to fight the pests that thrive on uniform ecosystems. Eucalyptus trees also generate toxic substances to repel other species, a “natural” way of defending their own growth.

Quilombo and indigenous communities in Espírito Santo report that they have been driven not only off the plantations but also off neighbouring lands as well. Rivers and creeks dry up, the water and soil are polluted, native food plants and animals are exterminated and they cannot grow their own crops because of chemicals in the environment.

As the World Rainforest Movement has said, an industrial plantation is like an industrial army of trees that wipe out life all around them.

The “logical” extensions of such plantations are pulp mills, which in turn bring new and dangerous environmental impacts. Neither process creates many jobs, and the work is high-risk, heavy, unhealthy and poorly paid. The major market for this process is industrial paper production. This is not, however, paper for cultural or educational purposes, but rather for advertising and packaging in the huge supermarket chains that have replaced local markets. Only 15% of the paper produced in such pulp mills and plantations is used directly by final consumers. All in all, an average US resident consumes 27 times more paper – directly or indirectly – than does a consumer in southern countries.

So much useless paper, violence and media noise intend to hide the real and proven acts of vandalism. Meanwhile, 37 women and men from Via Campesina are being prosecuted for the action against the Aracruz tree nursery, and may be imprisoned for breaking the silence of the green desert. Many social movements are organising a petition in solidarity with the defendants, which we reproduce here.