thecapent
thecapent t1_j5otgpd wrote
As if being "indigenous" makes them the purest of souls that cannot be corrupted.
Already happened several times, actually.
Just see Operation Nambikwara where 15 leaders collected fees to allow miners and loggers into their territory. Or the case of Chieftain Damião Paridzané from Xavante clan that received nearly a million per month from 'ruralists' and loggers to exploit his clan's land. The Operation Warari Koxi, where the Federal Police found several Yanomami natives working with illegal miners devastating the forest to illegally extract gold from their reservation. The chieftan Darlan Guajajara de Sousa who used his tribe as headquarters for drug traffic... and goes on and on.
These are politicians, being "indigenous" is just a part of their identity. Take that news with a grain of salt and for what it's worth: a publicity stunt.
For my part, what I want to see is the Federal Police going hard against illegal miners, drug dealers and illegal loggers operating in the Amazon region, and increasing spending in satellite and radar monitoring. Furthermore, the very hard conundrum of "how to give opportunities for natives to thrive without destroying their identity and land" needs real solutions.
thecapent t1_j828u2z wrote
Reply to comment by Fun-Management-7027 in [OC] Sugarcane was first introduced to Brazil in 1532. Half a millennium later, the country produces over 700M tonnes yearly (roughly the same amount as all of Asia, and 7x the amount produced by Africa) by latinometrics
Actually, not even soybeans are produced on Amazonian deforested areas in significant quantities (around 5% of the total yield I think).
Instead, the bulk of soybean production is done on the tropical savanna region of Brazil (the so called "Cerrado").
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtCmnj1XYAAaxyk.jpg
Also, the soil are quite bad in the areas covered by the Amazon forest (kind counter intuitive given the massive forest on top of it, but it is. The soil is too acid for soy and most comercial crops.)
You can see how the map of soybean production yields above correlates with the Cerrado area:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Ecoregion_NT0704.svg/755px-Ecoregion_NT0704.svg.png
The real villains of Amazonian deforestation are:
1 - Wood extraction
2 - Illegal mining (mostly surface gold mining, one of few areas in the world left where gold can be mined manually with low technical knowledge).
3 - Cattle raising, this single one being responsible for 65% of all mapped deforested area.