Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and free initiative are legal in Brazil,” he said. “You can't come to Cargill and say, 'Go
away.' You cannot go to the soy farmers and say, 'Return the land to the peasants.'”
Who could disagree with Muggiati? But however sensible, his words could have come
out of Cargill's own mouth, and so hint at some uncomfortable parallels between the ag-
ribusiness giant and the environmental NGOs that opposed it. Both sides had operated with
a degree of realpolitik about the possibility for justice in the wake of the soy boom. Both
had maneuvered through legal gray areas to advance their cause. Of course, Greenpeace
had no hand in overturning the way of life that had sustained the small farmers of Pará. But
it did use them as poster children in its campaign, only to discard them once a realistic polit-
ical goal had been reached. And the goal it achieved—if indeed it was truly achieved—was
to protect the forest, not to address the social ills that had gone along with the soy boom.
It's also difficult not to find some irony in a guy from Greenpeace invoking realism and the
rule of law—when a good deal of that organization's public activism depends on idealism
and on the targeted flouting of the law.
Father Sena—militant priest, spitfire idealist, girl-watcher—ended up on the outside.
When negotiations for the soy moratorium began, Sena's Amazon Defense Front had been
part of them. But the ADF wanted too much: a ten-year moratorium, extending two years
retroactively, instead of the more realistic, yearly-renewable arrangement that was ulti-
mately agreed upon. Sena told us that he had walked away. “We said, 'Forget it. You
can cheat people from the United States, but you cannot cheat us.'” That left Pará's soy
moratorium to be designed by Cargill (of Minnesota) and the Nature Conservancy (of Vir-
ginia) and Greenpeace (founded in Vancouver) and a grab bag of other NGOs and agribusi-
ness giants, most of them from the northern hemisphere.
The soy moratorium may prove a great success story in the end. It may even herald a
way forward for the control of deforestation. But it lacks exactly what the Ambé's sus-
tainable logging project hopes to establish: local players who have a stake in the forest's
preservation. In the case of Ambé, the very people benefiting from the forest's exploitation
have a profound incentive to do it sustainably. But the soy moratorium's several constituen-
cies are different. One—Cargill and its competitors—is at best indifferent to the rainforest.
Another—the soy farmers—would cut it down if they could get away with it. Yet anoth-
er—the mostly foreign-based NGOs—can only hope to build their moral imperatives into
the machinery of agribusiness and development, through political maneuvering and legal
cajoling.
Finally, there's whoever is still left in and around the forest—the people who, for
whatever reason, didn't sell and haven't cleared all their land. And who's to say how long
it will be worth their while to hold on to it?
