Native Protesters Celebrate Law Cancelling Rainforest Road By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Oct 25, 2011 (IPS) – With victory cheers and predictions of future campaigns in defence of their ancestral territory, indigenous protesters from Bolivia’s Amazon jungle region celebrated the new law that banned the construction of the road through their rainforest reserve.
The 66-day march by the demonstrators to La Paz and the controversy over the road undermined the backing for President Evo Morales among his main support base, the country’s indigenous majority.
Late Monday, Morales signed into law the agreement putting an end to the plan to build the road that was opposed by some 1,000 native protesters from the Amazon, who made the gruelling 600-km march from the rainforest to La Paz.
The demonstrators, who were subjected to a brutal police crackdown in late September near a remote village 330 km north of La Paz, were greeted as heroes by thousands of people who took to the streets on Wednesday Oct. 19 to welcome them when they reached this city in Bolivia’s western highlands……. …….The indigenous peoples of the Amazon region make up 10 percent of the 10 million inhabitants of Bolivia, where over 60 percent of the population are native people, mainly belonging to the Quechua and Aymara ethnic groups concentrated in the western highlands. Morales, the country’s first-ever indigenous president, is an Aymara Indian.
next…Save the Madidi Campaign
In an interview with IPS, environmentalist Carmen Capriles, one of the leaders of the Save the Madidi Campaign, discussed the concept of the “plurinational state”, as established by the new constitution that went into effect in 2009, in which she said indigenous communities and people of mixed-race or European descent mutually recognise their different identities while declaring their unity in the Bolivian state.
The activist, who is working to defend the 1.9-million-hectare Madidi National Park in northwestern Bolivia, said the plurinational state was achieved by a struggle waged along the country’s roads and in its jungles and mountains, in the face of repression and stiff opposition.
Capriles also said there is a growing sense of unity between indigenous people from poor rural areas and from urban slums, who are forging a natural alliance to defend nature.
Morales’s reputation as one of the world’s foremost champions of the environment was hurt by the plan to build the road across the TIPNIS reserve.
She was referring to areas like the Madidi National Park and the Pilón Lajas Biosphere Reserve and Communal Lands in the north of the province of La Paz – which are close to recently discovered oil reserves.
In addition, the projected El Bala hydroelectric dam would flood some 300,000 hectares of land in the Madidi National Park and the adjacent Pilón Lajas biosphere reserve and indigenous territory, including the TCO owned by the Leco indigenous community.
WASHINGTON, Oct 1, 2011 (IPS) – Home to a fast-growing network of farmers’ markets, cooperatives and organic farms, but also the breeding ground for mammoth for-profit corporations that now hold patents to over 50 percent of the world’s seeds, the United States is weathering a battle between Big Agro and a ripening movement for food justice and security.
Conflicting ideologies about agriculture have become ground zero for this war over the production, distribution and consumption of the world’s food. One camp – led by agro giants like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta – define successful agriculture and hunger alleviation as the use of advanced technologies to stimulate yields of mono-crops.
The other side argues that industrial agriculture pollutes, destroys and disrupts nature by dismissing the importance of relationships necessary for any ecosystem to thrive. At the heart of this struggle is the debate about genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which were given the green light in 1990 when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stated, “(We) are not aware of any information showing that GMO foods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way.”
The Pitfalls of Terminator TechnologyAccording to Frees, one of the worst manifestations of GE/M is the use of Terminator technology, used to cause seed sterility and forcibly eliminate seed saving.
“Terminator is a biological means to enforce intellectual property rights, and its introduction into developing countries that rely on saved seeds for 80 to 90 percent of planting could mean elimination of farmers’ right to save seeds; dramatically higher seed costs; and poor farmers’ inability to survive,” he said.
“Terminator is morally reprehensible and must be banned,” Frees told IPS. Lovera added that between 2001 and 2007, annual U.S. glyphosate use on GE crops doubled to 185 million pounds.
“Ubiquitous Roundup application has spawned glyphosate-resistant weeds, driving farmers to apply even more toxic herbicides, according to a 2010 National Research Council report,” Lovera told IPS.
“Farmers may resort to other herbicides to combat superweeds, including 2,4- D (an Agent Orange component) and atrazine, which have been associated with health risks including endocrine disruption and developmental abnormalities.”
“In the United States, irrigated corn acreage increased 23 percent and irrigated soybean acreage increased 32 percent between 2003 and 2008,” she added. “The rising U.S. cultivation of GE corn and soybeans further threatens the strained High Plains Aquifer, which runs beneath eight western states and provides nearly a third of all groundwater used for U.S. irrigation,” Lovera said.
“Ninety-seven percent of High Plains water withdrawals go to agriculture, and these withdrawals now far exceed the recharge rate across much of the aquifer.”
“The worldwide expansion of industrial-scale cultivation of water- intensive GE commodity crops on marginal land could magnify the pressure on already overstretched water resources,” Lovera warned. “But these are the crops the biotech industry has to offer.”
In addition to wreaking havoc on land, GE/M has also filtered into the oceans, with the attempted introduction by Aqua Bounty of GE salmon engineered with a growth hormone gene to grow faster.
“Studies suggest that the salmon could be more susceptible to disease; and if it’s grown in pens in the ocean and [inevitably] escapes, it could mate with wild salmon and make them less fit, potentially devastating wild salmon populations,” Frees told IPS.
But a report released Wednesday by the Washington- based Food and Water Watch (FWW) on the destructive impacts of GMOs added fuel to a two-decades-long fight by farmers, economists and experts against the FDA’s conclusions.
“Genetically Engineered Food: An Overview” details how the genetic engineering of seeds, crops and animals for human consumption is not the foolproof answer long championed by agribusiness and biotechnology industries to feeding the world.
To the contrary, the study found that genetically engineered/modified (GE/M) organisms do not out-perform their natural counterparts, and their proliferation into vast tracts of cropland have caused a slew of environmental and health crises, and actually increased poverty by forcing millions of farmers to “buy” patented seeds at exorbitant prices.
The report also says that three U.S. federal agencies – the FDA, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – are complicit in these crises due to shoddy oversight, weak enforcement of regulations and a complete absence of coordination.
It found that Big Agro spent half a billion dollars between 1999 and 2009 on lobbying to ease GE regulatory oversight, push GE approvals and prevent GE labeling.
This, after attorney Steven Druker in 1999 obtained 40,000 pages of FDA files containing “memorandum after memorandum warning about the hazards of (GE) food,” including the likelihood that they contained, “toxins, carcinogens or allergens” and testified that GE foods violated “sound science and U.S. law”.
Ceci King, a member of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, told IPS that in 2011, an estimated “60 to 70 percent of all processed foods in the U.S. contain at least one GE element.”
“Eighty-four percent of GM crops in the world today are herbicide- resistant soybeans, corn, cotton or canola, predominantly Monsanto’s ‘Roundup Ready’ varieties that withstand dousing with herbicide,” Bill Frees, science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety (CFS) and author of ‘Why GM Crops Will Not Feed the World’, told IPS.
“Pesticide and chemical companies like Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow and Bayer have bought up many of the world’s largest seed companies, and now call themselves biotech companies – this represents a historic merger of the pesticide and seed industries, which allows them to profit twice by developing expensive GM seeds that increase use of the company’s herbicide products,” he added.
Seed patents, an off-shoot of the “agro-biotech revolution” that also spawned GE/M, have had two negative consequences since their original issuance by the U.S. Patent Office in the mid-1990s, Frees told IPS: “They enticed pesticide companies to buy up seed firms; and they led to criminalisation of seed-saving.” “Farmers have saved seeds from their harvest to replant the next year for millennia,” he added. “Monsanto is changing that. The company has already sued thousands of farmers in the U.S. for saving and replanting its patented seeds and won an estimated 85 to 160 million dollars from farmers, in lawsuits that have ruined farmers’ lives, and (partially explains) why we have ever fewer farmers in America.”
The fightback
Ray Tricomo, a mentor at the Kalpulli Turtle Island Multiversity in Minnesota, told IPS, “People of colour must re-radicalise themselves and go on the offensive including the return to land bases, from Turtle Island to Africa and Asia.” “Ancient knowledge systems are to be painstakingly recovered, even if it takes centuries,” he added. And this is exactly what is happening.
Despite the deep pockets and aggressive efforts of Big Agro, a major pushback from a broad coalition of forces has limited 80 percent of GE/M planting to just three export-oriented countries: the U.S., Brazil and Argentina. Nearly two dozen other countries, including the European Union and China, have passed mandatory GE/M labeling, and millions around the world are refusing seed patenting and developing seed banks to protect, share and preserve their seeds.
In Florida, the 4,000-strong Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is organising to resist farm wage-slavery and “seed-servitude”. The Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil has organised 400,000 peasants to join forces with the nearly half-billion farms around the world that are responsible for producing 70 percent of the world’s food. Navdanya, an organisation in the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh, has united 500,000 farmers in their struggle to fight chemical dependency and save indigenous seeds, including preserving over 3,000 varieties of rice. “For five years, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (CSD) had indigenous farmers from all over the globe come to speak against destructive farm practices and GMOs,” King told IPS.
“During the Indigenous People’s Permanent Forum, there were complaints about the harm caused by industrial agriculture and the acts in the name of agribusinesses. Farm workers like the (CIW) are protesting their fate,” she added. “They are picketing companies like Trader Joes and Whole Foods, letting the public know that their tomatoes were picked from workers who are basically slave labour.” “Third World Network is fighting back by exploring the problem of GMOs and publishing findings that scientists working on GMOs are capitalists using humans as guinea pigs in a global lab experiment,” she added.
“[Numerous] deaths and disabilities have been traced back to a GM product emulating tryptophan. It took nearly 20 years to find the source of the problem,” King told IPS. “GM technology i antithetical to an agroecological approach to agriculture, our only hope for truly sustainable food production,” Frees told IPS. “Without radical change we will continue to have famines,” he added. “Haiti is a good example of what happens when a country’s farmers are put out of business by cheap, subsidised imports from a rich producer nation (here the U.S.).”
A judge in Brazil has ordered a halt to construction of a multi-billion-dollar dam project in the Amazon region.
Judge Carlos Castro Martins barred any work that would interfere with the natural flow of the Xingu river.
He ruled in favour of a fisheries group which argued that the Belo Monte dam would affect local fish stocks and could harm indigenous families who make a living from fishing.
The government says the dam is crucial to meeting growing energy needs. Judge Martins barred the Norte Energia company behind the project from “building a port, using explosives, installing dikes, building canals and any other infrastructure work that would interfere with the natural flow of the Xingu river, thereby affecting local fish stocks”.
Legal battle
He said the building of canals and dikes could have negative repercussions for river communities living off small-scale fishing.The judge said building work currently underway on accommodation blocks for the project’s many workers could continue as it would not interfere with the flow of the river.
The consortium behind the project will appeal against the decision.
Now is the moment to escalate the campaign as this will probably be only a temporary victory
Bolivian President Evo Morales has suspended work on a highway being built in the Amazon, amid a national furore over the way opposition to the road has been handled.
On Sunday police fired tear gas and rounded up hundreds of activists staging a march against the road.
A minister quit in protest and Mr Morales condemned the action when he announced the project’s suspension.
He now says he will allow local regions to decide on the future of the road.
“There needs to be a national debate so the two provinces [Cochabamba and Beni] involved in this can decide… In the meantime the project is suspended,” said Mr Morales, according to Reuters news agency.
He did not specify how the two provinces would decide, but on Sunday he said a referendum could be held – though government sources say this could take six months or more to organise.
The issue triggered anti-government protests in Cochabamba, Beni and La Paz – where thousands of protesters, mainly college students, gathered around the Quemado government palace.
Brutal e inhumana represión a la VIII Marcha Indígena
(Comisión de Comunicación de la Marcha).- Hoy 25 de septiembre a horas 16:30 se inició un operativo policial y/o militar de cerco sobre el campamento del puente San Miguel a 5 Km de Yucumo, donde estaban descansando alrededor de 800 marchistas, incluyendo más de dos centenares de niños y bebés.
Alrededor de las 17 horas empezó una despiadada gasificación contra la gente indefensa, lo que provocó una confusión total y por ese motivo empezaron a extraviarse y desaparecer muchos de los niños que estaban ahí acampados junto a sus madres.
Posteriormente efectivos de la policía procedieron a perseguir a la gente, a acorralarlos, golpearlos, quemando el campamento, gasificando mujeres embarazadas y deteniendo enseres personales de la prensa, obligaron a la gente a subir a camionetas para de esta manera, digna de la peor de las dictaduras, intervenir y acabar con la marcha.
Posteriormente estas personas fueron obligadas a subir a buses que en número de 8 partieron con dirección a Yucumo, obligados por el bloqueo de caminos que ya esta efectuándose en San Borja, donde la población salió a la calle enardecida una vez que circuló la noticia de la intervención a la marcha……..
Show your support for the Indigenous Peoples of TIPNIS!Avaaz.orghas sponsored a petition in support of the ongoing march to defend the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and
Since August 15, 2011, Indigenous Peoples from the TIPNIS have been marching against a new highway that the government of Bolivia wants to build through the protected territory.
So far, more than 1,500 people have joined the 375-mile journey from the eastern lowlands of Bolivia to La Paz–a number that’s growing by the day.
Sadly, President Evo Morales has responded to the march by labeling the protesters “enemies of the nation.” He is also trying to discredit the protesters by portraying them as being confused by NGOs. He even tried to denounce the march as another strategy of US imperialism.
As of late, this misleading rhetoric has turned into action. According to NACLA,
urgent 24 sept.police block march. No water...
“The government has sent in 450 federal police for the stated purpose of avoiding a confrontation. Rather than guarantee the marchers’ safe passage, the police have prevented them from advancing and, according to news reports, have impeded their access to water, while the colonists have blocked delivery of other supplies. The colonists contend, and the government agrees, that some of the indigenous groups’ demands ‘violate their rights,’ and should be dropped before the march is allowed to proceed.”
At this point, there’s no telling what will happen next. Sufficed to say, the international community should be on alert for the worst possible outcome.
Dia 38 de la marcha por el Tipnis. 1000 marchistas por el Tipnis están ‘sequestrados’ por el bloqueo masivo de policias sin sombra y con poca agua, bajo un sol tropical peligroso.
El cordón de policías instalado en el puente del arroyo Chaparina permite el paso de las movilidades, que dejan una estela de polvo a los marchistas sentados o parados al lado del camino, donde sea que hubiere una mancha de sombra. “Aquí estamos totalmente incómodos, directamente al calor del sol. Desde que partió la marcha (de la ciudad de Trinidad el 15 de agosto pasado) siempre hemos enviado una comisión de avanzada que buscaba lugares con arboleadas para poder realizar nuestro campamento. Pero aquí estamos detenidos a la fuerza, estamos a la intemperie, porque la Policía está aquí enfrente y no deja avanzar a la marcha. Además, no permiten que pasen vehículos con donaciones para los marchistas. Incluso los bloqueadores retienen a los vehículos que nos traen alimentos, agua y medicamentos. Esto tiene que saberlo el mundo entero: el gobierno nacional está frenando el derecho de reclamar por el cumplimiento de nuestros derechos. Como pueblos indígenas clamamos justicia, porque en nuestro país pareciera que viviéramos en una dictadura”, sostuvo Vargas.
Ha habido manifestaciones de apoyo en todo Bolivia y en muchas lugares del mundo (incluso en Barcelona) además que una petición gigante hecho por Avaaz
COB iniciarán marchas si no solucionan conflicto de TIPNIS
Última Actualización Viernes, 23 de Septiembre de 2011. 06:57h.
El Comité Ejecutivo Nacional de Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) determinó ayer respaldar la marcha indígena del Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS) y advirtieron con movilizaciones si el Gobierno no soluciona hasta fin de semana el conflicto indígena.
HUELGA PARA EL MIERCOLES….COB !
ultima noticia..La Paz, 23 Sep. (ANF).- La dirigencia Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) determinó, este viernes en su ampliado nacional, ejecutar un paro de 24 horas el miércoles próximo, en respaldo a los indígenas que marchan en defensa del TIPNIS. Los trabajadores exigen al gobierno que se instale el diálogo a brevedad posible.
Agencias.- El alcalde Luis Revilla anunció que se realizará una campaña de recolección de alimentos y vituallas en favor de los indígenas del Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS) que el 15 de agosto iniciaron una marcha en rechazo a la construcción de la carretera Villa Tunari – San Ignacio de Moxos y que pasaría por medio de este parque nacional. Asimismo, reiteró el apoyo que brindó la Asamblea de la Paceñidad a la marcha de los indígenas, a su derecho a manifestarse y a transitar libremente por el territorio nacional para hacer conocer su legítimo reclamo para la preservación del Parque Isiboro
”El presidente dijo en Estados Unidos que en Bolivia los pueblos indígenas quieren enfrentar a este gobierno, que queremos que este gobierno sea destruido, que estamos impulsados por la derecha, por las ONG y que estamos cometiendo el delito de conspiración –dijo Vargas-. Creemos que el Presidente debería hacer al revés, más bien debería decir que el gobierno nacional está en una franca conspiración para deshacer a los pueblos indígenas de la Amazonía, que conspira para deshacer a la Madre Tierra, para destruir al medio ambiente. Creemos que ese debería ser su discurso, para dejar de estar mintiendo al mundo entero y al pueblo boliviano”.
16:00 Viernes 23 | Sociedad
Medios radiales, televisivos y escritos registraron lo sucedido con los policías en Chaparina, que además de cerrarles el paso se opusieron a que los indígenas acceden a las aguas del arroyo existente en el lugar, para que se aseen y refresquen, ante las elevadas temperaturas que se registran en el lugar.
Native Protesters Celebrate Law Cancelling Rainforest Road By Franz Chávez
main support base, the country’s indigenous majority.
its jungles and mountains, in the face of repression and stiff opposition. 
Allegations of police violence towards protesters triggered further protests in Bolivian cities
The Free 
