by Pepe Escobar : Posted with permission
China is South America’s top trading partner. Together, China’s policy banks – the China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank of China – are the top source of development finance for the whole of Latin America.
Over the past few decades, the Brazilian government, leading national companies and multinational corporations have configured what Fernando Mires, already in 1990, defined as the “Amazon mode of production”: a terribly predatory, technological-intensive mode of production and destruction, including subjugation of indigenous populations in slave-based working conditions, with everything geared for export to global markets.
The Amazon is spread out over 6.5 million square kilometers covering two-fifths of Latin America – half of Peru, a third of Colombia, a great deal of Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guyana and Suriname, and most of all, 3.5 million square kilometers in Brazil.
The original population diversity was staggering. Before the arrival of the Europeans in Brazil in 1500, there were no less than 1,400 tribes, 60% of them in the Amazon. Ethnologists marveled that nowhere else in the world compared to the linguistic diversity in tropical South America.
The Tupi-guarani tribe even constituted a sort of “empire”, occupying a huge territory from the Andes to the Pampas in southern Brazil. A sort of “proto-state” traded with the Andes and the Caribbean. This all laid to rest the Western-peddled myth of a “savage”, un-civilized Amazon.
Now let’s fast-forward to the current Western outcry over the Jair Bolsonaro government’s destruction of the Amazon.
Brazil, still under the second presidential term of Dilma Rousseff – later impeached under spurious charges – was a signatory of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change. Article 5 of the agreement rules that parties “should take action” to preserve endangered forests. Brasilia pledged to protect the Amazon by restoring 12 million hectares of forests by 2030.
And yet under Bolsonaro, “should take action” metastasized into “reverse previous action.” The new mantra is “Amazon development.” In fact, a turbo-charged and even more predatory 2.0 version of the “Amazon mode of production,” much to the horror of Western environmentalists, who fear an imminent transformation of the Amazon into a dry savanna, with dire consequences for the whole planet.
Staggering natural wealth
The Brazilian Army is fond of noting that the Amazon’s natural wealth has been evaluated at a staggering $23 trillion. This is a 2017 figure announced by General Eduardo Villas Boas, who added: “Brazil is a highly endowed individual imprisoned in the body of a teenager. The Amazon is practically abandoned, there’s no national project and density of thinking.”
In fact, there is a national (military) project to “develop” the Amazon at breakneck pace, while preventing, by all means, the “Balkanization of the Amazon” and the action of Western NGOs.
In April this year, one of Bolsonaro’s sons posted a video of Dad engaged in a “surprising” conversation with four indigenous people in Brasilia.
A deforested area in the middle of the Amazon jungle found in Para state, Brazil in 2014. Greenpeace said trucks carried illegally felled trees to sawmills at night, which were later exported. Photo: AFP / Raphael Alves
Top anthropologist Piero Leirner – a specialist on the Brazilian military and their activities in the Amazon – explains the context. The Bolsonaro government carefully picked four natives involved in the business of soybeans and mining. They spoke for themselves. Immediately after, an official indigenous people association released a letter disowning them. “That was classic Divide and Conquer,” Leirner argued. “Nobody paid attention to the letter. For most of Brazil, the case was closed in terms of ‘social communication’ – solidifying the government’s narrative of NGOs fighting for the internationalization of the Amazon.”
Mining giants in Brazil would rather have indigenous peoples as spokespersons instead of the military. In fact, it’s a maze of interlocking interests – as in captains and colonels in business with mining entrepreneurs acting in protected indigenous areas.
What happened during these past few years is that most indigenous peoples ended up figuring out they cannot win – whatever the scenario. As Leirner explained: “Belo Monte [the world’s third-largest dam] unveiled the real game: in the end, the dam practically works to the benefit of mining companies, and opened space for Belo Sun, which will excavate the whole of Xingu in search of gold.”
So that’s the perverse project inbuilt in the “development of the Amazon” – to turn indigenous peoples into a sub-proletarian workforce in mining operations.
And then there’s the crucial – for the industrialized West – niobium angle (a metal known for its hardness). Roughly 78% of Brazilian niobium reserves are located in the southeast, not in the Amazon, which accounts at best for 18%. The abundance of niobium in Brazil will last all the way to 2200 – even taking into consideration non-stop, exponential Chinese GDP growth. But the Amazon is not about niobium. It’s about gold – to be duly shipped to the West.
Rolling down the river
Bolsonaro is keen to bring roads, bridges and hydroelectric plants to the most remote areas of the Amazon. Under the “sovereignty” mantra, he has promised to impose the hand of the state in the strategic Triple-A area – Amazon, Andes, Atlantic Ocean – thus countering the alleged intent of Western NGOs of creating an independent strip for environmental preservation.
So, how does China fit into the Amazon puzzle? A recent report addresses some of the hard questions.
Since last year, Beijing officially started to consider the whole of Latin America as a “natural extension” of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as well as an “indispensable partner.” That was spelled out by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the 2018 China-Community of Latin American and Caribbean States Ministerial Forum.
All of BRI’s guidelines now apply – and that includes the Amazon: policy cooperation, infrastructure development, investment and trade facilitation, financial integration, and cultural and social exchange.
China’s internal green drive – restricting coal production, supporting solar panel factories, remaking Hainan island into an eco-development zone – will have to be translated into its projects in the Amazon. That means Chinese companies will need to pay extremely close attention to local communities, especially indigenous people. And that also means that the Chinese will be under intense scrutiny by Western NGOs.
Brazil may have ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, known as ILO 169, which enshrines the rights of indigenous communities to be consulted by the state on decisions that directly affect them.
Yet with less than seven months of Bolsonaro in power, all that is in effect null and void.
Indigenous people call for demarcation of lands in Sao Paulo in January 2019. People around the world have voiced concern over the policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Photo: AFP / Cris Faga / NurPhoto
There’s slim hope that an exhaustive set of guidelines for large projects in the Amazon established by the Center of Sustainability Studies at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo, linked to the World Bank, may be respected by the government. But no one is holding their breath.
Key projects with Chinese involvement include the Amazon waterway in Peru, which featured prior consultations with over 400 indigenous villages, according to the government in Lima.
But most of all there’s the $2.8 billion, under construction 2,500 km-long Belo Monte Transmission Line, with an installed capacity of 11.2 gigawatts. China’s State Grid is part of the consortium, with financing coming from the Brazilian National Development Bank. The first and second transmission lines directly affect the Amazon ecosystem and run near 10 conservation areas and an array of ethnic groups.
The “China in the Amazon” report correctly notes that “Chinese companies are not well attuned to the importance of direct engagement with local non-governmental stakeholders, and have faced repeated costs, work stoppages, and delays as a result. Chinese deference to host-country policies should extend to the commitments by host countries to international treaties and law, such as ILO 169 and its standard of free, prior, and informed consent for indigenous peoples. Indigenous organizations and civil society organizations in the Amazon region have a long and strong trajectory of actively participating in government decisions relating to the use of indigenous territories and natural resources.”
The report suggests establishing a “multidisciplinary working group comprised of NGOs, local indigenous groups, academics, and scientists to review existing principles and standards” for sustainable infrastructure projects.
The chances of this being adopted by the Bolsonaro administration and endorsed by the Brazilian military are less than zero. The Big Picture in Brazil under Bolsonaro spells out neocolonial dependence, over-exploitation of workers, not to mention indigenous peoples, and the complete expropriation of Brazilian natural wealth.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro delivers a speech at Davos in January. His policies are seen as a major threat to forests in the Amazon. Photo: Fabrice Coffrini / AFP
Only a pawn in their game
China may be Brazil’s top trade partner. But Beijing must tread carefully – and strictly enforce BRI guidelines when it comes to projects especially involving the Amazon.
There’s no way the UN Security Council, with climate change in mind, would ever sanction Brazil for the destruction of the Amazon. France and Britain would be for it. But Russia and China – both BRICS members – would certainly abstain, and the US under Trump would vote against it.
Brazil is now a privileged pawn in the most important geopolitical game of the 21st century: the clash between the US and the Russia-China strategic partnership.
The last thing Beijing needs in terms of global public relations is to be branded as an accomplice in the destruction of the Amazon.
“The last thing Beijing needs in terms of global public relations is to be branded as an accomplice in the destruction of the Amazon.”
I completely agree. Thanks for the article.
They’ll be branded thus whether guilty or not, by the lying, racist, presstitutes of the Western MSM disinformation machine.
China’s role is evil in Africa as well.
I take it that you are being sarcastic, Ann.
I see from your other comment below, Ann, that you really hate China,(do not insult fellow posters,MOD). You’d love it here in Austfailia, where HATRED, raw and fulminating, of China, and the Chinese, unless they are groveling compradore stooges, themselves is the new religion of our elites.
Just the last few days have seen an Austfailian naval senior officer declare that China will ‘occupy’ Pacific Islands after sea-level rise renders them uninhabitable. Ten out of ten for deranged racist inventiveness. Then one of our typically fine ‘sportsmen’, a swimmer, viciously snubbed the Chinese swimmer Sun Yang at the World Championship, to universal local acclaim. Then a group of compradore Hong Kong students attacked a ‘Confucius Institute’ at a Queensland (our Alabama) university, and when Chinese students defended the place, they were viciously attacked by the hate media for doing so. And today, in follow-up, the ABC has some Sinophobe on the radio DEMANDING that Confucius Institutes be closed down, a long US policy, (echoed in some ‘spooky synchronicity’ by nine newspapers demanding the same thing) and, insanely, but revelatory, that so too should be ‘Chinese students’. Of course, without fee-paying Chinese students our university system would collapse and the intellectual and research standards fall dramatically, but such is the depth of Sinophobic racist hatred now normalised, and vigorously peddled by the MSM sewer.
The midday ABC news had an anti-China hate spew from Cambodia, and last night an ’embedded’ presstitute with the forces now preparing for war on China in ‘exercises’ in Queensland, along with a gallery of US and local Sinophobes, spewing garbage about the ‘Chinese threat’. Needless to say China has never ‘threatened’ us, nor overthrown two elected Labor Federal Governments, those of Whitlam and Rudd, as the USA has done.
And in a very revealing editorial that shows just how much the Zionazi elite hate and fear China, the New York Times has editorialised that the USA should get Russia onside in an alliance to destroy the Yellow Peril of China. After expending billions in bribery and suborning Western elites and gaining control of the West’s politics, MSM and finance, the Zionazis face a threat of a civilization that they will never infiltrate, corrupt and control. There goes the ‘One World Government’ ruled from Jerusalem dream.
The Amazon has been called the lungs of the planet, as such one would assume that it is a very important area for sustaining human life here. However we all know little stands in the way of greed, if there are large profits to be made then the Amazon will be cleared. Somehow though I am a little skeptical of the altruistic nature being ascribed to China as a country that places the environment before profit, hopefully I am completely wrong.
China has been working for decades, since 1949 really, often with foreign experts, to create an ‘ecological civilization’ that will be sustainable and display the prime Chinese virtue-harmony. They have had great success in remediating desertification, massively installing renewable energy, reforestation and habitat protection.
Of course, they have also massively failed in producing huge pollution during their rapid industrialisation, forced on them by insanely vicious and racist Western aggression. But all their recent Government plans emphasise the need to repair that damage, and I dare say they will. Meanwhile in the West, the ruling puppet regimes are either ferociously anti-Green and environmentally destructive eg Austfailia, the USA, Brazil, Colombia etc, or half-hearted and hypocritical in their actions.
A look at the development of the palm oil industry in Indonesia shows what can happen when rain forests meet developers. It is a case study of how to do development wrong as the land, animals and local peoples have all suffered for the profits of a few corporations.
Bolsonaro is the exact wrong guy to be in charge of Brazil at this juncture. However, China still may be able to have a positive influence as it controls the purse strings for its projects.
With or without China, however, the Brazilian rainforest will continue to be developed. China can hardly do worse than has already been done.
“”With or without China, however, the Brazilian rainforest will continue to be destroyed.”
There, fixed it for ya!
Food for thought:
“Improving eco-efficiency within a capitalist growth-oriented system will not save the environment.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/hipster-vegan-green-tech-economy-sustainable-190605105120654.html
“Growth-based economies are at the heart of environmental disasters we face today”
“In other words, the more efficient we are, the cheaper consumption gets, and in an economy predicated on endless growth, the more we consume and waste. The environment will always be at the losing end of this logic.”
“Material or energy dematerialisation is simply not enough. It must be accompanied by an economy built on care and responsibility, rather than profit, growth and self-interest if it is to have any long-term impact. This is a small but absolutely crucial step towards attaining the authentic desires for sustainability that many of us are so dearly committed to and which we so urgently need.”
China is a horrible factor in the destruction of Africa. The Rhino horn trade – the Pangolin scales trade and the illegal forest clearing – plus illegal mining and illegal Abalone harvesting. Its a horrible horrible partner in crime for the greatness of Africa.
Racist nonsense. The greatest harm done to Africa was committed by Western countries under imperialism and colonialism, and then by the economic hit-men of the ‘Washington Consensus’ ie the IMF, World Bank, WTO etc, with their vicious ‘structural adjustment plans’, debt traps and exploitative terms of trade. The Chinese, in complete contrast, have invested heavily in infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, roads, railways, telephony, electronic banking etc, and with huge loans and grants and education for tens of thousands of African students in China. In Africa all polls of public opinion find greater friendliness towards China than the Western racists, who, apart from anything else, defended apartheid South Africa for forty years.