Land Use Policy 90 (2020) 104258

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Land Use Policy

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landusepol

The forests in the indigenous lands in Brazil in peril T

a,⁎ b c
Mendelson Lima , Joine Cariele Evangelista do Vale , Gerlane de Medeiros Costa ,
Reginaldo Carvalho dos Santosb, Washington Luiz Félix Correia Filhod, Givanildo Goise,
José Francisco de Oliveira-Juniord, Paulo Eduardo Teodorof, Fernando Saragosa Rossib,
Carlos Antonio da Silva Juniorg
a
State University of Mato Grosso, Alta Floresta, MT, Brazil
b
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biodiversidade e Agroecossistemas Amazônicos, State University of Mato Grosso, Alta Floresta, MT, Brazil
c
Programa de Ciências Ambientais, State University of Mato Grosso, Cáceres, MT, Brazil
d
Instituto de Ciências Atmosféricas, Federal University of Alagoas, Maceió, AL, Brazil
e
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Tecnologia Ambiental, Federal University of Fluminense, Volta Redonda, RJ, Brazil
f
Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Chapadão do Sul, MS, Brazil
g
State University of Mato Grosso, Sinop, MT, Brazil

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: The Indigenous Lands in Brazil today resemble a steam locomotive, where the government and the indigenous
Amazon add wood to the boiler and the conservationists push the brakes. Arranged on the rails and along the way of this
Biodiversity locomotive are more than 100 million hectares of the largest tropical forest on the planet. In this article we
Climate change evaluate the advance of soybean cultivation and fire foci in indigenous lands using remote sensing and discuss
Brazilian constitution
the possible effects of a liberation of the economic exploitation in these territories intended by the Brazilian
Soybean
government and requested by the indigenous people themselves. We present that even with the prohibition of
economic exploitation on indigenous lands, there are large concentrations of fires in those territories which
undermine public policies in Brazil, both in maintaining biodiversity as the assumed climate agreements.

Indigenous Lands (ILs) in Brazil are strategic for maintaining bio-
diversity and providing ecosystem services, such as carbon storage and
hydrological cycle. ILs comprise of 721 areas and occupy 13.8% of the
Brazilian territory (1,174,263 km2). Most of them are in the Legal
Amazon, with 115.3 million hectares (Mha) distributed in 424 areas
representing 23% of the Amazonian territory and 98.25% of the ex-
tension of all ILs in the country (ISA, 2019). These ILs, which are
equivalent to the area of France, Germany, and United Kingdom com-
bined, still have great complementary value for the conservation of
biodiversity because they are located between the main river barriers
(Pressey et al., 1993), act as buffer zones before colonization fronts in
agricultural frontier areas, form corridors in a reserve network land-
scape (Peres, 1994), and are equally or more effective than strictly
protected areas in the prevention of deforestation and forest fires
(Nepstad et al., 2006).
Despite the great importance of ILs, some conservationists question
the role of indigenous people in protecting biodiversity (Peres, 2011),
while others argue that the price paid for biodiversity is offset by
maintaining the integrity of their territories (Zimmerman et al., 2001).
A good example of the latter concept is IL Kayapó in the south of the
state of Pará, where the indigenous managed to set up a surveillance
structure on their borders with resources obtained by illegal miners and
trade in mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) in their reserves
(Schwartzman and Zimmerman, 2005).
Allied with the articulation of the Brazilian government in the
National Congress with projects which jeopardize the demarcation of
new ILs and the repeal of already demarcated areas (Abessa et al., 2019;
Begotti and Peres, 2019), two ingredients were added in 2019 to in-
crease the pressure on ILs and fuel the discussions between those who
see or not indigenous people as "noble savage", the real protectors of
forests—the intention of the Brazilian government to totally emanci-
pate the indigenous, repeated several times by President Jair Messias
Bolsonaro (2019–2022), giving them the right of total decision on their
lands, and the request of the indigenous themselves in the liberation of
the economic exploitation in their territories (Globo Rural, 2019). We
evaluated this last issue, which involved the areas of soybean cultiva-
tion in the ILs in the state of Mato Grosso. This will be a foretaste of
what would be the effectiveness of the Brazilian government in its

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: mendelson@unemat.br (M. Lima).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104258
Received 5 June 2019; Received in revised form 13 September 2019; Accepted 29 September 2019
Available online 11 October 2019
0264-8377/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
M. Lima, et al.
intention to leave the destiny of ILs in the hands of its inhabitants. We
also identified fire foci using environmental satellite information from
2000 to 2017 in Mato Grosso's ILs (see Supporting Information).
We identified four ethnicities with soybean plantations in the 2016/
2017 harvest, totaling a planting area of 10,636.72 ha. In the following
crop year, 2017/2018, the area planted with soybeans, jumped to
20,804.37 ha, an expressive increase of 95.6% now in six ethnicities.
These plantations do not have legal support under Brazilian laws
and have been the reason for the request of the indigenous people in the
liberation of the economic exploitation. ILs are considered as Union
property, and the 1988 Constitution, in article 231, guarantees the right
of indigenous people to usufruct the lands traditionally occupied.
However, the constitution allocates these areas for the survival of in-
digenous people and maintenance of their cultures but prohibits anyone
outside indigenous communities from hunting, fishing, or collecting
fruits, as well as farming or extractive activities. As indigenous people
are not recognized as owners of their lands, they cannot use these lands
as a guarantee in obtaining bank financing to support the expensive
agricultural plantations. To circumvent the legislation, indigenous
people establish partnerships or leases with non-indigenous producers,
who may have access to credit, inputs, and commercialization of crops.
Thus, these soybean plantations are illegal today.
The presence of illegal activities with indigenous involvement is not
new and has been a constant in ILs. They are represented by mining,
timber extraction, and ultimately, the presence of soybeans. All these
unlawful activities are aimed at obtaining financial resources for the
needs of the communities involved in these actions. Another way to
obtain resources is through various activities developed with the help of
non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Unfortunately, none of them
present long-term financial sustainability to cover the needs of the in-
digenous people. Any activity that is developed without being a part of
the culture of that community will be successful or only those who have
continuous follow-up, with great technical and financial support from
NGOs, will remain. One example is beekeeping; 1.8 tons of organic
honey was produced in 2003 in the Xingu Indigenous Park
(Schwartzman and Zimmerman, 2005). This represents a tiny produc-
tion of more than 5 thousand inhabitants of the park and in front of a
capitalist perspective. Today this project, which had strong support
from an NGO, has been abandoned. Similarly, many other projects have
been abandoned. If, on the one hand, it is difficult to involve commu-
nities in economic activities that were never part of their cultures, on
the other hand, they do not present cultural restrictions against the
extraction of their resources (Schwartzman and Zimmerman, 2005).
The Cinta-Larga are famous for the exploration of diamonds and wood
in their territory in the state of Rondônia. Although today they closed
their borders to the illegal mahogany trade, the Kayapó in Pará mar-
keted $33 million worth of valuable wood only in 1988 (Peres, 1994).
Ferries that extract gold are part of the landscape in the rivers that flow
through the ILs in the north of the state of Mato Grosso. In informal
conversations with indigenous students from the State University of
Mato Grosso in 2007 and 2008, it was reported to the senior author of
this article by representatives of 23 ethnic groups in the state of Mato
Grosso that only 12 of them acknowledged that they had never sold
wood from their reserves.
The frontiers of the ILs are already open for the extraction of their
resources, but it is discrete and of small proportions against the large
dimensions of ILs. The worrying fact is the possibility of the complete
and legal opening of these territories to the capital for the exploitation
of their wealth after the realization of the intention of the Brazilian
government to fully empower the indigenous. This intention has strong
support among Brazilian politicians who have a broad parliamentary
front that defends the interests of agribusiness, which in turn supports
the development of economic activities in the ILs. If this is done, re-
sources will be exploited, with rare exceptions, by non-indigenous
people in the form of leases or partnerships and without the concern of
long-term environmental sustainability. In other words, natural
2
Land Use Policy 90 (2020) 104258
resources could be exploited until their exhaustion by third parties,
without the indigenous themselves having developed efficient and
sustainable economic activities within a capitalist market economy.
This opening is mainly supported by the young indigenous population.
The fronts of colonization, the opening of roads, and the construction of
cities and universities removed the ILs out of isolation and stimulated
the exit of these younger indigenous people to cities in search of edu-
cation. These young people, future leaders in their communities, are
undergoing a process of Westernization of their cultures and desire
access to the consumer goods of our society. This is also the aspiration
of today's indigenous leaders, who are always looking for improvements
to their communities in the form of boats, outboards, trucks, and energy
and communication, among many other things. The opening of its
borders, as intended by the indigenous peoples, to exploitation by the
capital represents an independence of the paternalism and assistenti-
alism tied up today to the Brazilian government and NGOs.
This is a face of this clash, which undoubtedly will bring benefits to
the indigenous. The other side of this concerns the future of biodiversity
present in these territories and the effects of deforestation on climate
change. Immediately, the role of ILs, which are recognized by the
Brazilian government and the United Nations as conservation areas,
should be rethought. The opening of ILs to the capital will have a ne-
gative global impact and may jeopardize the provision of essential re-
sources for the protection of the Amazon. The Brazilian government can
only present its Conservation Units, which also amount to 23% of the
Amazonian territory (IMAZON, 2019), as protected areas for govern-
ments and partner institutions that contribute financially to the main-
tenance of the forest. This is to say that we will move from a protection
of almost half the forest to just under a quarter of it. Logging is another
cornering factor. The opening of a road network to reach the rich stocks
of wood in the ILs will provide access to areas previously inaccessible to
hunters and fire. Even though they were not open to economic ex-
ploration, we identified 375,807 fire foci in the ILs in Mato Grosso
between 2000 and 2017. Of the 59 locations evaluated, there was a
significant trend in the increase of fire foci in 33. Fire is undoubtedly a
cause of concern for the rich Amazonian biodiversity in years of ex-
treme climatic events that favor the severity of drought, consequently
increasing the flammability of the forests that will be debilitated by the
opening of roads and the selective logging of trees. ILs in the Amazon
represents a huge carbon stock of approximately 13 billion tons (Walker
et al., 2014) and access to more than 100 Mha of indigenous forests has
the potential to severely compromise Brazil's climate agreements and its
goal of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG).
This clash between those who want the opening of the indigenous
areas to the capital and the conservationists who do not want it is
tenuously balanced. In our view, the differential in this balance could
be through effective actions of conservationists and NGOs in the search
of direct resources for the indigenous and the abandonment of small
innocuous actions such as beekeeping, fish farming, or raising chickens.
The great challenge lies in designing long-term investment strategies
that compensate the indigenous peoples for the ecosystem services
provided by their territories, directly linking the benefits of develop-
ment to conservation (Schwartzman and Zimmerman, 2005) and con-
ditioning the receipt of these resources for the maintenance of forests.
Perhaps this is the best option that will ensure the permanence and
enjoyment of these vast forests for future generations. There is still
time, but urgent action is required, for the "noble savage" is in a hurry to
have access to the consumer goods of Western society, even at the ex-
pense of their rich natural resources.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary material related to this article can be found, in the
online version, at doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.
104258.
M. Lima, et al.
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