|
The Amazon Work Group (GTA) - a network consisting of more than 600 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), social movements, labor unions, and community associations from all over the Brazilian Amazon - plan to launch the We're Fed Up With Paper Units.
The campaign advocates the implementation of conservation units that have already been created but haven't "gotten off the drawing board." "At the 8th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, in Curitiba, in southern Brazil, we will begin a mobilization to provide the units with management plans and councils," the executive secretary of the network, Adilson Vieira, informed, referring to the Conference that starts this week. Pursuant to the National System of Conservation Units (SNUC) law passed in 2000, each of the units of sustainable use (which allows the presence of residents), as well as those of total protection (which doesn't), should have a management plan. The plan is a technical instrument defining the general purposes of the unit and its zoning, with rules for natural resource use in each part of the unit. Once a conservation unit is created, it has five years for its management plan to be approved. The SNUC furthermore determines that total protection units and national forests (one of the models of sustainable use units) should have an Advisory Council, responsible for approving and monitoring compliance with the management plan. The council should be made up of representatives of the government, civil society, and, in the case of national forests, the residents. Other sustainable use units (extraction reserves and sustainable development reserves) should also have a Deliberative Council, likewise including the participation of NGOs and residents' associations, with decision-making power. According to André Cruz, a technical specialist with the National Council of Traditional Populations (CNPT) at the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), none of the country's 44 federal extractive reserves has an officially constituted management plan or deliberative council. Data provided by the IBAMA public relations office indicate that as of January of this year, president Lula's Administration had created 20 conservation units (containing 8.56 million hectares). 12 of the units, with 8.43 million hectares, are located in the Amazon. Of the 20 units, eight are for total protection (4.44 million hectares), and 12, for sustainable use (4.12 million hectares). Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.