Eating the Amazon

by Daniel Howden
The Independent
July 17, 2006

The scars are unmistakably man made. Hard-edged squares and rectangles,hundreds of acres across, hacked and burned out of the Amazon rainforest. The dark green of the canopy is lacerated with thin red lines - the illegal dirt roads that stitch together these giant clearings.

Seen from the air, this fearful symmetry marks out the battle lines of an invasion that has seen the humble soya bean emerge as the greatest threat to the world's most important rainforest.

On the ground, what was once a thriving ecosystem supporting at least 300 tree species for every hectare, is now a wasteland. Dead roots and dry grass crunch underfoot and the breeze throws up dust from eroded soil.

Three hours' drive outside the city of Santarem in Para state, along dirt trails struck by illegal loggers, you arrive in a vast monoculture inside the Tapajos National Park. Soya fields laden with the dry brown seed pods stretch in every direction.

This is Father Edilberto Sena's parish. The fiery local priest has emerged as a fierce critic of the land-grabbers, loggers, ranchers and agrobusiness multinationals pushing further and further into the rainforest.

The Amazon basin is home to one in 10 of the world's mammals and 15 per cent of the world's land-based plant species. It holds more than half of the world's fresh water and its vast forests act as the largest carbon sink on the planet, providing a vital check on the greenhouse effect.

Brazil has overtaken the United States as the world's leading exporter of soya. The protein-rich bean has become a profitable link in the processed food chain and 80 per cent of world production is fed to livestock. Brazilian soya beans are feeding Europe's growing hunger for cheap meat substitutes, and have overtaken logging and cattle ranching as the main engine of deforestation.

Three years ago, the agrobusiness giant Cargill, the largest privately owned company in the world, opened a soya port in Santarem. And Father Edilberto has set himself on a collision course with the Minnesota multinational that he says represents the worst of rapacious capitalism. Father Edilberto has used the church-funded Radio Rurale de Santarem as a means of fighting back against the incursions of the illegal loggers, ranchers and soya farmers, who in turn supply the grain giants.

"We are small and we are fighting multinationals like Cargill - people who are using soya as a commodity. I'm sure there are at least 200,000 listening. Our objective is to educate the people, provide critical and objective news."

It is less than 18 months since another rainforest campaigner and champion of Brazil's rural poor, Sister Dorothy Stang, was murdered in broad daylight further east in Para state, in the city of Anapu. After death threats, the US-born, naturalised Brazilian nun was assassinated by gunmen allied to illegal ranchers.

"I don't need a uniform," says the outspoken priest, who eschews the Catholic garb for a green polo shirt and an indigenous necklace. "My uniform is my face and my mouth. People know I'm a priest."

Lately he has started to receive the same kind of threats that preceded the murder of Sister Dorothy. "Two months ago, some crazy, nuts guy posted on the internet that the best thing they could do with Father Edilberto Sena was to kill me.

"When I heard about this, the first moment I had a coldness in my spine."

The priest's frequent broadsides against the vested interests eating into the Amazon have made him powerful enemies, and the diocese has come under heavy pressure, he claims, to muzzle him. "The elite, they got mad at us and told the bishop to close us down."

For now, it seems the Bishop's support is holding and Radio Rurale is still on air, but Father Edilberto launched an impassioned appeal for help to international church leaders visiting the area as part of a major environmental conference organised by the Greek-based NGO, Religion, Science and the Environment. The symposium is the latest initiative by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the Eastern Orthodox pope who has been preaching against the sin of environmental destruction for more than a decade.

"The Church needs to take sides," says Father Edilberto. "With what we are facing we need all the allies we can find."

Santarem, a riverside city hundreds of miles upstream into the Amazon, has found itself at the centre of the soya boom. Last year, Brazil produced more than 50 million tons of soya across nearly 23 million hectares, an area about the size of the United Kingdom. Soya production remains relatively contained within the Amazon biome, but the decision to locate a major soya port this deep into the basin is inviting a catastrophe, according to conservation groups.

In the past three years, nearly 70,000 square kilometres of the Amazon rainforest have been destroyed. The smoke from burning trees pushed Brazil into the top four of global greenhouse gas producers in 2004. Despite commitments from the government of President Lula da Silva, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest continues.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

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