Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“My guess is that it will become much like North America or Europe,” he said.
“Really?” I asked. “The Amazon will look like France?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Over a period of time, a hundred years, two hundred,
I don't think we can expect to see anything more than preserves…Everything around that
will go.” The Amazon rainforest would remain as a mere archipelago, islands of protected
forest scattered across the river basin.
“It seems to be the way of the world now, doesn't it?” Alexander said. He smiled gently.
“More and more people, more roads, more development, less forest. That seems to be the
trend.”
Cargill, Greenpeace, and the Nature Conservancy all agreed that the soy moratorium was
a success. But it had left some business unfinished. For one thing, there was the ques-
tion of the Cargill terminal's dubious legality. And what about the small farmers who,
having sold out, found themselves profoundly impoverished? Both of these concerns had
been fundamental to activists' case against the soy industry. Greenpeace had produced a
short film—titled
In the Name of Progress: How Soya Is Destroying the Amazon Rain-
forest
—that highlighted those two issues in stark, accusatory terms. But once the morator-
ium was signed, they were dropped.
This, more than anything else, explains the rift between an international NGO like
Greenpeace and an impudent local activist like Father Sena. In his view, Greenpeace and
the Nature Conservancy had secured a weak agreement. The decrease in deforestation, he
thought, was due to the global economic slowdown, not the moratorium. And even if the
moratorium was stopping soy farmers from cutting down forest themselves, what about the
small farmers they displaced? They were much harder to track. Meanwhile, nothing was
being done to mitigate the damage that had already been done—and the Cargill terminal
was still allowed to exist.
“Greenpeace forgot about us,” Sena said. “They used our movement.” They had made
heroes of themselves, declared victory, and moved on.
When Adam later tracked down Andre Muggiati, a forest campaigner at Greenpeace
Amazon, he nearly admitted as much. “Edilberto is still a good friend,” he said of Sena.
But he said that, for Sena, “the only solution for the problems would be to put Cargill out,
to send all the soy farmers back to the south. That is not reasonable. We always knew that
at some point we would have to sit at the table with Cargill to get an agreement. If you ask
the impossible, you never get to a solution.” Activism could only do so much. “Capitalism
