April 25, 2008
"Brazil to Control Access to Amazon"
The BBC reports that the Brazilian Justice Ministry has sent the congress a bill requiring "foreign visitors and workers in the Amazon region to have a permit." It's not clear whether this includes visitors to cities in the broad region or not.
The chief concern mentioned in the article was bio-piracy, but one quote from the Minister (Romeu Tuma) says it all, I think: "We want to establish the Amazon as ours."
He's either pandering to some of the more lunatic lawmakers in certain Amazonian states or has swallowed the whole "internationalization of the Amazon" discourse, with its geography textbook hoaxes, the "Mafia Verde" wackos, and all the rest. It's already next to impossible for non-Brazilian biologists to get CNPq permission to work in the region anyway. Requiring what would no doubt be an onerous and interminable approval process would also help keep out snooping environmentalists and journalists like those who have been showing how weak the Lula administration has been on environmental issues.
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May 30, 2007
Internet in the Amazon
The World Changing website reports on an initiative by the Brazilian government to bring satellite Internet to indigenous peoples in the Amazon. (I haven't seen Brazilian media coverage on this yet, but I'm going to look.) The blog entry by Sara Rich presents this prospect as advantageous for conservation work but mentions fears about cultural change inevitably following this technology. This is important to worry about, although not necessarily in the culture-loss/cultural survival way this writer suggests.
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