The rainforest protection in the Amazon

The Amazon was far too far away to interest anyone. It was only the rubber that the global system was interested in; after a brief rush before World War I, however, it was competed out by rubber from Malaysia and later by synthetic.

During the sixties and seventies, however, there were two factors that caused new interest and new exploitation. On the one hand, the military regime opened up for unrestrained capital imports, encouraged by sharply reduced wages, including deforestation in the Amazon. On the one hand, small farmers were driven away from their land by commercial food exporters and needed new land, and the government thought that the empty land in the Amazon was a good fit. Everything was organized in a huge project financed with World Bank money, Polonoroeste.

So the Amazon began to disappear. Two groups took up the fight against this: Indians and seringueiros, i.e people who sold raw rubber to buyers; these two had always been at war with each other but now agreed against the external threat. Seringueiros had just begun to organize himself, unionized by liberation theological priests, and took the initiative.

They received outside help from the international environmental movement, which had long sought get at the World Bank for countless other environmentally destructive projects, as well as international human rights organizations who were outraged that the World Bank projects evicted people to live in misery. They began lobbying conservative US senators who did not like international aid to cut support to the World Bank. And it turned out that that coalition quickly found each other. The World Bank withdrew in the early 1990s.

Indians and rubber tappers, for their part, contacted Western European, mainly German, municipalities that organized themselves in the Climate Association with the goal of not buying timber from the Amazon and themselves working for reduced carbon dioxide emissions.

The result, together with the Narmada resistance and the European motorway resistance, was that the rulers were forced to acknowledge the environmental crisis. Unfortunately, they also managed to co-opt much of the Nordic countries’ environmental movement into meaningless NGO initiatives, which is why the environmental theme was largely disarmed, and the looting could continue at an unabated pace.

Reading
Bruce Rich: Mortgaging the earth, Earthscan 1994