Category Archives: Amazon rainforest

Walmart selling beef from firm linked to Amazon deforestation

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Exclusive: US chains Walmart, Costco and Kroger selling Brazilian beef produced by JBS linked to destruction of Brazilian rainforest

Three of the biggest US grocery chains sell Brazilian beef produced by a controversial meat company linked to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, an investigation has revealed.

Food giants Walmart, Costco and Kroger – which together totalled net sales worth more than half a trillion dollars last year – are selling Brazilian beef products imported from JBS, the world’s largest meat company, which has been linked to deforestation.

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The Guardian view on Amazonian cave art: a story about the environment, too | Editorial

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Astonishing rock paintings discovered in Colombia hold a lesson for today’s rainforest

In the past week, remarkable images of ancient cave art have hit the headlines: rock paintings made in South America around 12,000 years ago. The art, created on rock faces in the Serranía de la Lindosa, on the northern edge of the Colombian Amazon, is a riot of ochre-coloured geometrical pattern, handprints, and images of animals and humans. Until recent excavations, the works of art had been unknown to the international community. Their exuberant creativity will soon be revealed to a broad audience in the UK thanks to the Channel 4 series Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon.

The people who made these works of art were, it is believed, among the earliest humans to occupy the region, after migrations across what is now the Bering Strait some 25,000 years ago. Preliminary study of the iconography of the art has led scholars to speculate that among the deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, serpents, turtles and porcupines, long-extinct megafauna are also represented: mastodons, American ice-age horses, giant sloths, camelids.

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Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro

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An area seven times larger than Greater London has been lost in what one activist called a ‘humiliating and shameful’ destruction

A vast expanse of Amazon rainforest seven times larger than Greater London was destroyed over the last year as deforestation surged to a 12-year high under Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.

Figures released by the Brazilian space institute, Inpe, on Monday showed at least 11,088 sq km of rainforest was razed between August 2019 and July this year – the highest figure since 2008.

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Green groups denounce Brazil’s ‘sham’ Amazon tour for foreign diplomats

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Campaigners say visit was ‘media propaganda’ as officials failed to stop at any devastated rainforest areas

Environmentalists have criticised a three-day tour of the Amazon that the Brazilian government staged for foreign ambassadors as a “sham” and “media propaganda” after it failed to stop at any environmentally devastated areas.

The tour ended on Friday and focused on better-protected areas of the northern Amazon. “The government prepared an itinerary that does not show the reality of the Amazon – the abandonment of indigenous peoples, the land grabbing, the illegal mining and the uncontrolled deforestation. It is a sham,” said Marcio Astrini, executive director of the Climate Observatory, an umbrella group of environmental NGOs.

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EU seeks Amazon protections pledge from Bolsonaro in push to ratify trade deal

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Brazilian president’s stance on deforestation remains stumbling block for South America agreement

Brussels is in talks with Brazil’s far-right nationalist president, Jair Bolsonaro, over commitments on the future of the Amazon as it seeks to persuade Emmanuel Macron and other EU leaders and parliaments to ratify the trade deal the bloc has negotiated with South America.

The ratification of the draft trade agreement between the EU and the “Mercosur” or Southern Common Market free-trade zone – which spans Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina – has been in doubt almost since it was announced last June.

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‘Total destruction’: why fires are tearing across South America

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Wildfires, mostly caused by land clearing for cattle grazing and soya production, have set four nations ablaze

Primatologist Martin Kowalewski is measuring the scale of the fires raging across Latin America not in satellite images, but in the number of caraya monkeys (black-and-gold howlers) that have succumbed to the flames.

“Of the 20 family groups that we used to trace in the wild, each group consisting of seven or eight monkeys, at least five groups were burned alive,” he tells the Guardian. Other animals have also perished at San Cayetano, a nature reserve in Argentina’s northeastern province of Corrientes. “Carpinchos (giant South American rodents), otters, two species of fox, guazú deer, yacaré caimans, turtles, snakes. Birds are better at escaping the fire, but that was before all the deforestation. Now they have nowhere to go because there is nowhere else. The forest is so fragmented that they have nowhere to nest.”

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Goldmining having big impact on indigenous Amazon communities

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Study calls for more rights for indigenous reserves as rising gold price attracts more miners

A new report has exposed the scale and impact of mining on indigenous reserves in Amazon countries as gold prices soared during the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 20% of indigenous lands are overlapped by mining concessions and illegal mining, it found, covering 450,000 sq km (174,000 sq miles) – and 31% of Amazon indigenous reserves are affected.

The report, released on Wednesday by the World Resources Institute, said indigenous people should be given more legal rights to manage and use their lands, and called for better environmental safeguards. As pressure mounts over the issue, a leading Brazilian thinktank has called for regulations tracing gold sold by financial institutions.

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Brazil’s Amazon rainforest suffers worst fires in a decade

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  • Satellites record 61% rise in hotspots over September 2019
  • Scientist warns: ‘It could get worse if the drought continues’

Fires in Brazil’s Amazon increased 13% in the first nine months of the year compared with a year ago, as the rainforest region experiences its worst rash of blazes in a decade, data from space research agency Inpe has shown.

Satellites in September recorded 32,017 hotspots in the world’s largest rainforest, a 61% rise from the same month in 2019.

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Expert on Amazon tribes killed by arrow from uncontacted group

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Rieli Franciscato struck in chest as he approached indigenous group he was seeking to shield

A Brazilian government official and expert on isolated Amazon tribes was killed by an arrow as he approached an indigenous group he was seeking to shield.

Rieli Franciscato, 56, spent his career in the government’s indigenous affairs agency, Funai, working to set up reservations to protect uncontacted tribes.

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Amazon ‘condemned to destruction’ as fires proliferate across Brazil

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The vast rainforest is experiencing a repeat of last year’s devastating blazes and critics say Bolsonaro bears ultimate responsibility

Jair Bolsonaro smiles down from a propaganda billboard at the entrance to this scruffy Amazon outpost, welcoming travelers to his “route to development”.

But 20 months into Bolsonaro’s presidency – and a year after a devastating outbreak of Amazon fires caused global outrage – the fires are back, and many fear Brazil’s leader is instead steering his country towards environmental ruin.

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Amazon tragedy repeats itself as Brazil rainforest goes up in smoke

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The vast rainforest is experiencing a repeat of last year’s devastating fires and critics say Bolsonaro bears ultimate responsibility

Jair Bolsonaro smiles down from a propaganda billboard at the entrance to this scruffy Amazon outpost, welcoming travelers to his “route to development”.

But 20 months into Bolsonaro’s presidency – and a year after a devastating outbreak of Amazon fires caused global outrage – the fires are back, and many fear Brazil’s leader is instead steering his country towards environmental ruin.

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Brazil experiences worst start to Amazon fire season for 10 years

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Over 10,000 blazes seen so far in August, with response of President Bolsonaro condemned as ineffective

The Amazon has seen the worst start to the fire season in a decade, with 10,136 fires spotted in the first 10 days of August, a 17% rise on last year.

Analysis of Brazilian government figures by Greenpeace showed fires increasing by 81% in federal reserves compared with the same period last year. Coming a year after soaring Amazon fires caused an international crisis, the new figures raised fears this year’s fire season could be even worse than last year’s.

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European banks urged to stop funding oil trade in Amazon

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Indigenous people in headwaters region say financing harms communities and ecosystems

Indigenous people living at the headwaters of the Amazon have called on European banks to stop financing oil development in the region, as it poses a threat to them and damages a fragile ecosystem, after a new report found $10bn in previously undisclosed funding for oil in the region.

The headwaters of the Amazon in Ecuador and Peru are home to more than 500,000 indigenous people, including some who choose to live in voluntary isolation. The area, covering about 30m hectares (74m acres), hosts a diverse rainforest ecosystem, but it is threatened by the expansion of oil drilling.

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‘The Amazon is the vagina of the world’: why women are key to saving Brazil’s forests

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Indigenous leader Célia Xakriabá and Vagina Monologues author V discuss Brazil’s biodiversity crisis and why this is the century of the indigenous woman

Célia Xakriabá is the voice of a new generation of female indigenous leaders who are leading the fight against the destruction of Brazil’s forests both in the Amazon and the lesser known Cerrado, a savannah that covers a fifth of the country. V, formerly Eve Ensler, is the award-winning author of the Vagina Monologues, an activist and founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls and the Earth. The two recently held a conversation in which V asked Xakriabá about what is happening to Brazil’s biodiversity and indigenous peoples, and why women are the key to change.

V: Many people, especially in the west, don’t really understand what’s happening to the Cerrado in Brazil. Can you tell us what’s happening to the forests?
C: It’s very tough at this moment. Every minute one person dies of Covid-19, but also every minute one tree is cut. And whenever a tree is cut, a part of us is cut, a part of us also dies, because the territory dies and with no territory there is no air, no good air for everyone in the world. People can’t breathe. So all this Covid contamination, it gets to the territory through the miners, the gold miners, the loggers and the rangers. And now that we are getting to August, we get even more worried about the fires, all the fires that burned the Amazon last year. It’s going to come back.

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Tesco urged to ditch meat company over alleged links to Amazon deforestation

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Responding to Greenpeace campaign to cut links to Brazilian meat giant JBS, supermarket calls on government to ensure all UK food is deforestation-free

Tesco has called on the UK government to order food companies to ensure all food sold in the UK is deforestation-free. The move comes in response to a new Greenpeace campaign calling on the supermarket to cut links to JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, over its alleged links to farms involved in Amazon deforestation.

The supermarket says the UK should introduce due diligence across supply chains to monitor for deforestation. Germany is also weighing up a due diligence law on supply chains, reportedly supported by Angela Merkel. And more than half of Britons would consider rejecting meat products linked to deforestation, a YouGov poll for Greenpeace has found.

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The Guardian view on wildlife in lockdown: feeling the pressure | Editorial

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If countries that use tourism to fund conservation are not supported, species and habitats will disappear

At London zoo, the giraffes, which are easily visible from the street, had regular visitors even during lockdown, and an illuminated NHS sign on their famous building. Like most other attractions that rely on tourists for income, zoos forced to shut owing to the coronavirus face a financially fraught future. But the risks to captive animals and their keepers are nothing to those faced by wild creatures and the people who guard them. Already under huge pressure from multiple sources, international conservation efforts have been thrown into fresh chaos.

The picture that is emerging of the global impact of Covid-19 on wildlife is complicated. Fishing hours were found by researchers to have fallen by 10% in March and April, for example, while South Africa reported a 53% drop in the number of rhinos killed by poachers, compared with the first six months of last year (from 316 in 2019, to 166). The sudden dramatic fall in air pollution and traffic (road, sea and air) brought rapid if short-lived benefits for many of the planet’s non-human inhabitants. In the UK, as in other countries, people who could afford to took the opportunity of the lockdown to spend more time in the countryside or their gardens. So far, it is a bumper year for British butterflies.

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Record 212 land and environment activists killed last year

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Global Witness campaigners warn of risk of further killings during Covid-19 lockdowns

A record number of people were killed last year for defending their land and environment, according to research that highlights the routine murder of activists who oppose extractive industries driving the climate crisis and the destruction of nature.

More than four defenders were killed every week in 2019, according to an annual death toll compiled by the independent watchdog Global Witness, amid growing evidence of opportunistic killings during the Covid-19 lockdown in which activists were left as “sitting ducks” in their own homes.

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Revealed: new evidence links Brazil meat giant JBS to Amazon deforestation

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Photographs by employee appear to show company trucks being used to transport cattle from allegedly prohibited cattle farm

New evidence appears to connect JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, to cattle supplied from a farm in the Brazilian Amazon which is under sanction for illegal deforestation.

This is the fifth time in a year that allegations have surfaced connecting the company to Amazon farmers linked with illegal deforestation.

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‘Either we change or we die’: the radical farming project in the Amazon

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A growing movement for sustainable agriculture in Brazil has taken on new urgency with the coronavirus pandemic

The cumaru trees could have been planted elsewhere in this Amazon reserve, where they had better chances of flourishing. Instead, they were planted in harsh, sandy soil in the dry savannah that breaks up the forest. Jack beans, guandu peas and other crops were planted in straw around them with cut savannah grass, for moisture and compost. “We call it the cradle,” says agronomist Alailson Rêgo. “It protects them.”

The hope is that if these Amazon-native trees – whose seeds can be used in cosmetics – thrive on this sandy soil and a nearby patch of deforested, burned land, they can regenerate abandoned pasture elsewhere. In the Amazon, more land is cleared for cattle than anything else. It’s easier enough to clear – chop down a few trees, light a few fires. But restoring the forest? Bringing back the life and the greenness? That is far, far harder.

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Meat giants selling to UK linked to Brazil farms in deforested Amazon reserve

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Greenpeace report shows cattle indirectly sold to JBS, Marfrig and Minerva came from protected Serro Ricardo Franco park

Three international meat companies have indirectly sourced cattle from farms that deforested a unique, protected Amazon reserve, a new report from Greenpeace has found – and two of them later sold meat from the area to the UK.

The revelations come as the Brazil-based companies involved, JBS, Marfrig and Minerva, are under increasing pressure to come clean about their Amazon supply chains. They are now known to have broken commitments made to Greenpeace and Brazilian federal prosecutors  more than a decade ago.

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