RIO DE JANEIRO —Shaking a traditional rattle, Brazil’s incoming head of Indigenous affairs recently walked through every corner of the agency’s headquarters — even its coffee room — as she invoked help from ancestors during a ritual cleansing.카지노사이트

The ritual carried extra meaning for Joenia Wapichana, Brazil’s first Indigenous woman to command the agency charged with protecting the Amazon rainforest and its people. Once she is sworn in next month under newly inaugurated President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Wapichana promises to clean house at an agency that critics say has allowed the Amazon’s resources to be exploited at the expense of the environment.

As Wapichana performed the ritual, Indigenous people and government officials enthusiastically chanted “Yoohoo! Funai is ours!’’ — a reference to the agency she will lead.

Environmentalists, Indigenous people and voters sympathetic to their causes were important to Lula’s narrow victory over former President Jair Bolsonaro. Now Lula is seeking to fulfill campaign pledges he made to them on a wide range of issues, from expanding Indigenous territories to halting a surge in illegal deforestation.

To carry out these goals, Lula is appointing well-known environmentalists and Indigenous people to key positions at Funai and other agencies that Bolsonaro had filled with allies of agribusiness and military officers.

In Lula’s previous two terms as president, he had a mixed record on environmental and Indigenous issues. And he is certain to face obstacles from pro-Bolsonaro state governors who still control swaths of the Amazon. But experts say Lula is taking the right first steps.

The federal officials Lula has already named to key posts “have the national and international prestige to reverse all the environmental destruction that we have suffered over these four years of the Bolsonaro government,” said George Porto Ferreira, an analyst at Ibama, Brazil’s environmental law-enforcement agency.

Bolsonaro’s supporters, meanwhile, fear that Lula’s promise of stronger environmental protections will hurt the economy by reducing the amount of land open for development and punish people for activities that had previously been allowed. Some supporters with ties to agribusiness have been accused of providing financial and logistical assistance to rioters who earlier this month stormed Brazil’s presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court.

When Bolsonaro was president, he defanged Funai and other agencies responsible for environmental oversight. This enabled deforestation to soar to its highest level since 2006, as developers and miners who took land from Indigenous people faced few consequences.

Between 2019 and 2022, the number of fines handed out for illegal activities in the Amazon declined by 38% compared with the previous four years, according to an analysis of Brazilian government data by the Climate Observatory, a network of environmental nonprofit groups.

One of the strongest signs yet of Lula’s intentions to reverse these trends was his decision to return Marina Silva to lead the country’s environmental ministry. Silva formerly held the job between 2003 and 2008, a period when deforestation declined by 53%. A former rubber-tapper from Acre state, Silva resigned after clashing with government and agribusiness leaders over environmental policies she deemed to be too lenient.바카라사이트

Silva strikes a strong contrast with Bolsonaro’s first environment minister, Ricardo Salles, who had never set foot in the Amazon when he took office in 2019 and resigned two years later following allegations that he had facilitated the export of illegally felled timber.

Other measures Lula has taken in support of the Amazon and its people include:

— Signing a decree that would rejuvenate the most significant international effort to preserve the rainforest — the Amazon Fund. The fund, which Bolsonaro had gutted, has received more than $1.2 billion, mostly from Norway, to help pay for sustainable development of the Amazon.

— Revoking a Bolsonaro decree that allowed mining in Indigenous and environmental protection areas.

— Creating a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, which will oversee everything from land boundaries to education. This ministry will be led by Sônia Guajajara, the country’s first Indigenous woman in such a high government post.

“It won’t be easy to overcome 504 years in only four years. But we are willing to use this moment to promote a take-back of Brazil’s spiritual force,” Guajajara said during her induction ceremony, which was delayed by the damage pro-Bolsonaro rioters caused to the presidential palace.

The Amazon rainforest, which covers an area twice the size of India, acts as a buffer against climate change by absorbing large amounts of carbon dioxide. But Bolsonaro viewed management of the Amazon as an internal affair, causing Brazil’s global reputation to take a hit. Lula is trying to undo that damage.

During the U.N.’s climate summit in Egypt in November, Lula pledged to end all deforestation by 2030 and announced his country’s intention to host the COP30 climate conference in 2025. Brazil had been scheduled to host the event in 2019, but Bolsonaro canceled it in 2018 right after he was elected.

While Lula has ambitious environmental goals, the fight to protect the Amazon faces complex hurdles. For example, getting cooperation from local officials won’t be easy.

Six out of nine Amazonian states are run by Bolsonaro allies. Those include Rondonia, where settlers of European descent control local power and have dismantled environmental legislation through the state assembly; and Acre, where a lack of economic opportunities is driving rubber-tappers who had long fought to preserve the rainforest to take up cattle grazing instead.

The Amazon has also been plagued for decades by illegal gold mining, which employs tens of thousands of people in Brazil and other countries, such as Peru and Venezuela. The illegal mining causes mercury contamination of rivers that Indigenous peoples rely on for fishing and drinking.

One area where Lula has more control is in designating Indigenous territories, which are the best-preserved regions in the Amazon.

Lula is under pressure to create 13 new Indigenous territories — a process that had stalled under Bolsonaro, who kept his promise not to grant “one more inch” of land to Indigenous peoples.온라인카지노

Indigenous leaders from rainforests from Brazil to Indonesia say a new European Union law preventing the import into the bloc of key commodities linked to deforestation is insufficient to protect forests and will do little to bolster indigenous rights.카지노사이트

The legislation, agreed upon last week, will force firms supplying palm oil, cattle, soy, coffee, cocoa, timber and rubber – as well as some derived products such as beef or furniture – to the EU market to prove their supply chains are not fuelling the destruction of forests.

Brazilian indigenous leader Dinamam Tuxa said the law would help stem rising rates of deforestation across most of the Amazon basin – which spans nine nations including Brazil – but stressed that he did not think it was broad enough in scope.

The legislation does not cover deforestation from biodiverse areas outside of rainforests, such as wetlands, semi-arid forests, and savannahs that are also major carbon sinks and help to stave off climate change, according to Tuxa.

“This law should have been more ambitious. It leaves behind other important biomes,” said Tuxa, head of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), an indigenous umbrella organisation.

For example, products from 600,000 square kilometres (231,600 square miles) of land in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna – the fastest growing frontier of agricultural expansion in the country – would not be subject to the law, said the Cerrados Institute, a non-profit.

An EU commission will consider no later than one year after the law comes into force whether to extend the regulations to include other wooded land, and within a period of two years if the law should also be broadened to include other ecosystems.

Deforestation is responsible for about 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to climate scientists, and it is on the agenda at this week’s UN COP15 summit in Canada, where countries are seeking a global pact to protect nature.

Indigenous leaders said they are concerned that national laws protecting indigenous rights and local deforestation monitoring systems are not strong enough on their own to ensure the new EU law will be effectively implemented on the ground.

In Brazil, government agencies that can help monitor, verify and trace company supply chains to ensure compliance with the EU law must be strengthened after years of being undermined and underfunded by outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro, Tuxa said.

“There are many [government] monitoring mechanisms already in place in Brazil but nothing is working,” he said.

Brazil’s main environmental federal government enforcement agency, Ibama, and the indigenous affairs agency, Funai, have been particularly affected, he said.

‘Come up short’
The European Parliament’s lead negotiator Christophe Hansen has hailed the new EU measure as “innovative regulation”, and green groups hope it will significantly help protect fast-vanishing forests around the world.

Hansen’s office was unable to respond to a request for comment by deadline to criticisms of the EU law from indigenous leaders.

But in a statement following the announcement of the new law Hansen said “the rights of indigenous people, our first allies in fighting deforestation, are effectively protected.”

The legislation requires companies to produce a due diligence statement showing their supply chains are not contributing to the destruction of forests before they sell certain goods into the EU. Those who do not comply risk fines.바카라사이트

Although firms have to show that the rights of indigenous people were respected in their operations in commodity-producing nations, campaigners have raised concerns that this only applies to countries where those rights are already protected by national law.

Levi Sucre, an indigenous Bribri leader from Costa Rica, said he welcomed the EU law and its potential to tackle Latin America’s “alarming deforestation rates,” driven largely by the expansion of the agricultural frontier and monoculture farming.

But the legislation was “fragile”, he said, noting he feared it would put little extra pressure on governments in commodity-producing countries to ensure they respect the rights of indigenous people.

Across many Latin American countries, the rights of indigenous people are enshrined in state constitutions and local laws but are still too often flouted and ignored, Sucre added.

“Our rights are violated. The (EU) law isn’t going to change much for us in terms of access to justice and guaranteeing our rights,” said Sucre, who heads the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests (AMPB).

“There are shared economic interests between governments and companies. Who will verify that our rights are respected? That’s the big question,” Sucre said.

Indigenous rainforest leaders in Indonesia – the world’s top producer of palm oil and a leading exporter of coffee, rubber and cocoa – said national laws to protect the environment and indigenous land rights are not being implemented in practice.

The Global Alliance of Territorial Communities (GATC) – an alliance representing tropical forest peoples from more than 14 countries – said its indigenous leaders and members were “disappointed” the EU had not sufficiently strengthened their rights in its new legislation.

“The EU have placed our fate in the hands of the very governments that have violated our rights, criminalised our leaders and allowed an invasion of our territories,” the group said in a statement.

This story was published with permission from Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women’s rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit https://www.context.news/온라인카지노