environment
I’m the chief of the Boa Esperança village. I will keep talking now about G8 and indigenous people. And I also want to say to our people that fight for its rights, for its dignity, that is seeking its right as a human being. We understand that the G8 wants to destroy the dignity, the richness… it wants to destroy the people, who are human beings just like them. They want to destroy that. They want the indigenous people, suffering people, to be in their hands but we don’t want that. We never thought of being in the hands of those powerful people. But only God is powerful. We don’t want to be no longer massacred by this economic power for we are capable of running, of making a different world. It’s not in those powerful hands to do that. They can only do it through money, not because they have built the life of a person. That economic group has only power to destroy. Not to get life to human beings. That’s why we think the G8 will only destroy the human being even more and also will confuse more the people that seek their right to be a human being. We do not agree with that economic group they are organizing, that G8 project. We don’t agree with that.
We don't want multinational companies to operate in West Papua because they came, took our land and destroyed our environment, our way of life. Their interested not in human beings, they're interested in our resources. So that's why there's the impacts of killing, that's why they are moving people to other villages. This is the impact of rich people in the world. I would say – leave us alone. That's very good. We want to run everything, we want control. But people came and said, “do this, do this.
I’m Brazilian. I live in the Espírito Santo state. Here in our state, we are tired of seeing our lands being invaded by eucalyptus plantations for cellulose production, which will be exported to first world countries. To Europe, to the United States, to the Nordic countries. We suffer all kind of consequences, of negative impacts of these great projects, these great enterprises. At the moment, I act with indigenous populations, Tupiniki and Guarani, in our state of Espírito Santo, Brazil. And we are living a historical moment, where for more than thirty years the communities have been struggling to get their lands back, which are now under a company’s power, a multinational megacompany, Aracruz Celulose. And we are now working with the Indians, organizing, so that they have their rights respected by this megacompany. So that their rights are recognized in our country and abroad. So that foreigners, strangers in our land, don’t come and take our properties, the land, life, the environment. The life of this population that has lived here since the arrival of the first Europeans. We are not going to settle while they are colonizing us. Colonizing the people, colonizing our land, colonizing the environment. We want our lands back, we want that the lives of our indigenous peoples be respected and given back.
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My name is Marilda. I'm an activist and geographer participating in a movement that struggles against this development model, monoculture, industrial, exporting. Brazil is a victim of this world policy in which G8 represents the countries leading this logic. And what I have to say is that the speeches that come out of G8 regarding measures against poverty, environmental measures related to climate, the issue of the carbon market… we here understand that as a big hypocrisy. Because what causes poverty, what causes environmental and socio-environmental damage is exactly this developmental model, the logic of production, the consuming logic of the capitalist society. What is ending poverty for the G8? If their actions are fundamentally aiming at appropriating land mainly from poor countries, adapting these territories in an transnational organization, with their governments saying “Yes!
G8 is going to adversely affect the forest dwellers as it is going to adversely or negatively affect the others sections of society. Because the basic issue is the control over the global natural resources. And most of the resources are limited now to the forest area. Therefore once the powerful nations put up a joint front to exploit the natural resources and the forest resources, so the people are out of the whole thing. So it is going to very, very negatively affect, not only the forest dwellers, but the forest resources as well. Because then resource depletion will take place very fast in Third World countries. The whole tendency is that First World countries, the G8 countries, want to preserve and protect their own natural resources. Whereas, they want to exploit, for their own industries and other purposes, the natural resources of the Third World countries. Whether they are forests or lands.
There's a huge impact of G8 capital basically coming into a country like India in the natural resource sector in the name of bilateral funding, DFID, JBIC and all those. And what they are basically doing is that they are first going into policy reforms. Then they're promoting privatisation of resources like water. And then they are penetrating into taking control over the varied and natural resource base on which millions of Indian communities are actually surviving for their livelihoods. And in that process, what they're doing, they're restricting access to those varied and natural resources that the communities are living for centuries.
Women suffer a lot because of these policies. Women have been playing a vital role in the production of food grain in India. But because of mechanised farming and cash crop production they are thrown out of this system. The most vulnerable situation which has been created is of migration. And because of migration women suffer. They get sexually harassed, exploited...The living conditions in urban areas are very poor, especially for women. Their living pattern changes. The life is more insecure as compared to their native places. And all this is definitely going to affect our society at a larger level.
Yeah, primarily G8 policies have been affecting our agrarian relations for the last fifty years. And the present strategy of the G8 will destroy our cultivating peasants. The peasants who cultivate. The apprehension and the imminent danger is that they will lose the land, lose their job and will be in the free labour market. And that's their policy. They want to capture our natural resources, land, forest and water, mines so they can impose their economic profit-making economy on our social economic conditions.