BELÉM, Brazil: Plans for new railways, roads, dams and oil drilling in the Amazon are raising fears about further damage to the rainforest even as regional leaders hold a summit in Brazil seeking to end deforestation.
The eight Amazon nations agreed a list of joint policies and measures on Tuesday to boost regional cooperation to protect the forest at the two-day summit in the Brazilian city of Belem ending on Wednesday.
But they failed to agree a common target for ending deforestation, despite a push by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for an Amazon-wide deadline of 2030.
Indigenous peoples and environmental activists say a raft of major infrastructure projects is at odds with any timetable for ending deforestation in the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
“It is a bomb of environmental destruction in Indigenous territories,” Telma Monteiro, from the Association of Threatened Peoples, said of a planned railway in the Amazon to help grain exports. In June, Brazil’s Supreme Court allowed the government to proceed with studies and administrative processes for the R$ 25 billion ($5.1 billion) 933-km Ferrograo railway.
Researchers say the railway, due to transport grains from Brazil’s midwest agriculture powerhouses to an Amazon river port for export, could impact an area bigger than Denmark. The government says the railway would help protect the region overall by reducing heavy traffic on a road on a similar route, and cut use of fossil fuels in trucks.
Tarcisio Feitosa, a prominent environmental activist, said the railway crosses a region marked by “land tenure chaos”, making it especially vulnerable to land-grabbing, closely connected to deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon.
Sexual violence and exploitation, commonly associated with large infrastructure projects in Brazil’s Amazon, have not been addressed by the project’s studies, he added during the Amazon Dialogues, a civil society gathering before the summit.
—Thomson Reuters Foundation
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