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SSRP Spotlight Series: Revisioning Territorial Rights in Brazil in the Face of Resource Extraction

By: Edwin Gilson

Last updated: Monday, 2 September 2024

A workshop held with the Quilombola Community of Queimadas, in Santo Antônio do Itambé, Minas Gerais, Brazil, as part of the SSRP project

This project was led by Dr Bonnie Holligan, Senior Lecturer in Law (School of Politics and Sociology) with Dr Alex Shankland (Institute of Development Studies) and Dr Anabel Marin (Institute of Development Studies). Alex told us about the project.

What’s your project about?

This is a follow-up to a Round 7 SSRP project which Professor Mika Peck led. We worked with the same network of communities in a part of Brazil, Minas Gerais, which has a history of environmental conflicts around mining. Minas Gerais means general mines. It’s the site of two of the world’s worst environmental disasters in the last decade, caused by the failure of tailings dams that were storing waste from mines.

The Northern part of Minas Gerais is a frontline for all kinds of reasons. In addition to existing mining of iron ore, there is now pressure from the green energy transition, and metals needed for that. There’s a big lithium rush at the moment, as well as the expansion of large scale projects for wind and solar energy. Many of these projects are sited in the territories of traditional communities; some are formally protected, but Brazil’s legal framework has gaps and blindspots, where capital gets in and destroys territories.

Tell us more about the area in which your project is based, and the challenges it faces.

Minas Gerais is the site of some exceptionally important and vulnerable territories. This isn’t the Amazon, it’s mostly covered by the Cerrado, which is the woody savannah biome that nobody pays attention to. Amazon deforestation fell by 50 percent in the first two years of Lula’s government, but Cerrado deforestation rose by almost the same amount. The Cerrado part of Minas Gerais is an expansion frontier for big agribusiness was well as mining. The Cerrado is also where a lot of soy and beef is produced, and the source of Brazil’s major rivers, so it’s a vital region.

Communities in this region mostly do not identify as indigenous, although they often have indigenous as well as African descent, and therefore have a weaker set of rights. These are marginalised communities who consider themselves ‘traditional’, in terms of the collective ways they manage and work with the land. They have ways of living sustainability with and on the land. But when the mining companies turn up and ask if the communities have proof they own the land, the answer is no.

How are you approaching this problem?

AS: We’re trying to find examples from elsewhere in the world where collective land rights are more strongly recognised in law. Bonnie (Holligan) brings reflections around land law and collective property, and Anabel (Marin) brings expertise on the energy transition and mining in Latin America. Our partners in Brazil, Bruna (Viana de Freitas) and Fabiana (Leme) do amazing work facilitating and supporting the network.

My role is to help bring it all together. I’ve worked in this region for a while and am passionately interested in the issue of traditional communities. The UN climate change framework talks about ‘indigenous peoples and local communities’, but nobody has ever defined what ‘local communities’ are and how their rights are protected. The previous SSRP project looked at rights of nature in Brazil, and we’re building on that by reimagining collective territorial rights with a legal framework.

We’re trying to push the envelope with the Brazilian government in terms of the rights of these communities, foregrounding how they are living with the land and conserving biodiversity, carbon and water resources. There is a strategic need to preserve the land rights of traditional people and the social as well as biological diversity that they represent, alongside indigenous rights. It’s important for everyone, but it’s a matter of life and death to people on the frontline in these communities.

Have you been able to influence the Brazilian government?

Brazil is complicated. It’s a big country, and very politically polarised. There is a difference between local, state and national levels. At the local level there has been progress, with Rights of Nature legislation being introduced in some municipalities.

At state level it is more difficult, as the mining lobby is extremely powerful in Minas Gerais. The Federal government formally recognises traditional peoples and some of their land rights, but has done little to strengthen the legal basis of these rights. In fact, until 2022 (when President Lula was elected for a third term) that was not the case – quite the opposite.

The current Lula administration is weaker than his previous governments because he is dependent on right wing parties in Congress who facilitate land grabbing and extractivism. There is a body called Ministério Público (‘Public Ministry’) whose job is to prosecute anybody who violates people’s Constitutional rights. They’re a valuable ally. But they don’t make policy, they just enforce the Brazilian Constitution.

In terms of international engagement it's currently a more favourable context than it has been for a while, because Lula is publicly committed to making progress on the environment. Brazil is hosting COP30 next year and G20 this year. Brazil wants to be seen to be leading on this. They’re rightly proud to have brought down deforestation in the Amazon – but in the Cerrado, the area we’re working in, it’s gone up by 40 percent.

Is there a tension between the economy, the environment, and local populations here?

The point is, with the current model you don’t get economic development for everyone, you get a few people making a lot of money, alongside climate change and conflict and displacement. Traditional peoples living in this area provide very significant environmental services at zero cost to the Brazilian taxpayer. If you kick them out, you’ll have water crises in urban centres and a lot less rainfall (because of environmental degradation). But because a small amount of people make a lot of money from mining and agribusiness, it continues.

The challenge is: do we call out Brazil for essentially selling these regions down the river, and risk devaluing what they have achieved on the Amazon, which is very significant? Parts of Lula’s government seem to be sincere in wanting to bring down deforestation in the Cerrado, but there’s something a bit convenient about bigging up the progress on the Amazon and discarding everything else. The world is watching, though, and the consumer countries are under increasing pressure not to import goods from places that are being degraded like this.

Brazil needs to up its game if it’s going to compete in a world where there is increasing demand for agricultural exports to be produced sustainably. They’re expanding the agriculture frontier to produce soy, where arguably global demand is met already, so there isn’t a rationale for that. As soon as Chinese demand dips, for instance, Brazilian agriculture takes a big hit.

They could easily produce more on the land they’ve already cleared, they don’t need to expand the frontier out to other areas – but it's the ever-expanding frontier logic, like the American West a century and a half ago. The soy frontier has been expanding since the 1970s, it has to stop somewhere. They’re running out of places they can deforest. If you simply drive on until there’s nothing left, the losses are massive.

What are the next steps?

It's a small project, and it’s coming to an end, but we’re hoping it will lead to more sustained engagement. One part of that is that at IDS we’ve been collaborating with a university in the region called UNIMONTES (the State University of Montes Claros) to help them organise a Colloquium of Traditional Peoples.

They already have massive participation from communities across the Cerrado, as well as academics, NGOs and progressive politicians, but now we want to expand the conversation by bringing people from savannah and rangeland regions where we work in Africa, who are also impacted by mining, land-grabbing and large-scale solar energy projects, to discuss some of the impacts of the energy transition and agribusiness expansion across the non-rainforest regions of the Global South. This is incredibly important for planetary resilience in general.

We’re trying to get these communities on the map and to help them form alliances. They have a common set of issues and want to be heard, so hopefully that’s what this Colloquium will do. It will be attended by a lot funders, who might possibly support future work. We also have a personal commitment to supporting the network. The communities are not going to stop fighting, but we will need ongoing financial support to help them.