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Sixty Greenpeace activists prevented Saturday, April 29, commodities giant Cargill from unloading a shipment of Amazon soya in Amsterdam port, to protest against the destruction of huge tracts of the Amazon rainforest to grow soya to feed farm animals in Europe.
The activists are from: The Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, UK, Germany, Chile, Italy and Hungary. Several activists chained themselves to the conveyor belt and the suction pump Cargill uses to unload the soya, while others started to paint 'Forest Crime' on the company's silos. Greenpeace forests campaign coordinator, Gavin Edwards, said: "Cargill is trashing the Amazon so we can eat cheap meat. The scale of the destruction is incredible - approximately 19,000 hectares of the rainforest, almost the size of Amsterdam, would have to be destroyed to grow the amount of soya on this ship alone." Cargill, which leads the global trade in Amazon soya, has according to Greenpeace illegally built a port in the heart of the Amazon rainforest to export its soya. The company, together with Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Bunge, controls 60% of soya production in Brazil and more than three-quarters of Europe's soya crushing industry that supplies soya meal and oil to the animal feed market. Greenpeace has documented that the company has dealt with farms that have illegally grabbed and deforested areas of public and indigenous Amazon land. Some have even used slave labor. "This crime stretches from Cargill's illegal operations in the Amazon rainforest to food companies, supermarkets and fast food chains across Europe. Cargill must stop destroying the Amazon to grow soya and must sever its links to slavery and human rights abuses." This last shipment is the second to have arrived in Amsterdam since Greenpeace first blew the whistle on the company earlier this month. The Amazon soya comes from the Brazilian states of Rondônia and Pará. In 2005, 787,000 tons of soya were exported from Santarém: 52% went to the Netherlands; 31% to the UK; 6.5% to Spain; 6% to France. A recent report in scientific journal Nature warned that 40% of the Amazon will be lost by 2050 if current trends in agricultural expansion continue, threatening biodiversity and seriously contributing to climate change. Soya monocultures also rely heavily on toxic chemicals, and some Amazon soya is genetically engineered. Greenpeace - www.greenpeace.org
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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.
So the EU can only import less Brazilian agriculture.
Exactly what Lula and Amorim want at the WTO !