The Ideas of Chico Mendes and the National Council of Rubber Tappers

Posted: 01-Jun-1999; Updated: 28-May-2009

by Atanagildo de Deus Matos Gatatildeo
founder of the rural union movement in the Amazon state of Pará, and President of the National Council of Rubber Tappers

We the rubber tappers of Amazonia continue the struggle that Chico Mendes started. His ideas, formulated in Xapuri, Acre, today belong to all of the extractivist populations of Amazonia. The struggle started by the rubber tappers is today also the struggle of the women who gather babaçu palm-nuts, of Brazil nut gatherers, and many others. Today the National Council of Rubber Tappers is in practice the National Council of the Extractivist Populations of the Amazon.

We continue the struggle of Wilson Pinheiro, Chico Mendes, Arnaldo Ferreira and many other companions who have fallen, assassinated by those who think that by killing an individual one kills an idea. We know that others will fall, but we have absolute certainty that many others will take their places.

For us the objectives of the struggle are simple -- we fight for rights to the land, to work, for health and education for our children, and to keep our forests standing, since we depend on them to live.

This is why it is so difficult for us understand why those who have political and economic power, who can and should offer solutions, instead pass their time in meetings and abstract discussions. As international assistance for environmental projects in the Amazon has increased, the destruction of the forest has also increased and the peoples of the Amazon have become poorer.

It has not been easy to spread Chico's ideas -- to make people aware that in the Amazon, man and nature are one, that there is no real chance to maintain the enormous Amazon forest except with the peoples that are its traditional inhabitants. To think that the Amazon forest can be conserved with parks, sanctuaries, forest guards and helicopters is simply to be unacquainted with our reality, or often worse: to be acquainted with it, without understanding it.

Worse still, there are also dramatic inconsistencies between national public policies and the policies of the Multilateral Agencies2, which are not only ideological but result in facts, in laws, investments, works, in projects, which in our understanding are contradictory and cancel one another out.

Today the G73, the World Bank, the European Community, the Inter American Development Bank, KfW 4and other agencies have considerable investments in projects for the protection and conservation of the Amazon forest. At the same time our government's policy has opened the doors to international competition without any sort of protection for the basic products of Amazonian extractivism.

Thus, strategic extractive products such as native rubber that we collect in the forest are supposed to compete in the international market with cultivated Asian plantation rubber. The point of this is to increase the competitiveness of the of the multinational tire oligopoly in Brazil: Pirelli, Firestone, Good Year, and Michelin. In other words, the poor in the middle of the Amazon who are struggling to survive and to maintain their forest standing, are to compete in the global marketplace in order for multinational tire companies to better compete internationally.

This means in practice that Amazon rubber production has never been lower, and the standard of living of the rubber tappers has never been worse.

It is difficult to understand why we, among the poorest of the poor, have to compete in this global marketplace, when at the same time the agricultural populations of the developed countries are protected. How are we to explain to our companions that while Japan subsidizes its rice, and Portugal protects its olive oil, in Brazil, we must demonstrate to the national and international technocracy that Amazonian extractivism is economically viable on the open market and that we have the capacity, coming from a primitive economy, to compete in the international market?

Some specialists claim that we do not have proposals and that we are only looking for handouts. Perhaps our proposals are too simple to be understood by the Professors in Brasilia, Washington, Brussels and Bonn.

We call for a direct subsidy for Amazon native rubber. With what the National Highway Department spends in a year on the upkeep of 100 miles of road in the Amazon, we can support all the rubber tappers in the Amazon, and bring back those who were forced to migrate to Bolivia.

We call for Ecological Land Reform to transform 10% of the Amazon into Extractive Reserves by the year 2002. This will allow us to defend 50 million hectares of forest, secure the land rights and improve the living conditions of tens of thousands of families.

The costs of this would be trivial if we were to put it in the context of forgiving 5% of Brazil's international debt, and using the funds for forest conservation in Brazil. Would this be too much to dream of for international solidarity?

The truth is that the biggest projects and investments work against the continued presence of extractivist populations in the Amazon. On one hand, there are infrastructure investments that only accelerate deforestation, and on the other the people are driven out of the forest, since they lack the minimal conditions to remain there. We understand by minimal conditions an economic activity that brings them $100 a month, and that they have access to health care and education.

Out of due regard for the truth we should allow that when the rubber tappers mobilized in March 1997 and put these same points to the President, he heard us and took action to solve the problems. But nothing happened, just as when the President announced the creation of new extractive reserves, and fifth or sixth level bureaucrats paralyzed their creation. There is a species of institutionalized environmental anarchy in the Federal Government, which always works against the interests of the extractivist workers of the Amazon.

Faced with these contradictions, perhaps the best summary of the situation are the words of a friend of mine who lives on a rubber estate in Xapuri in the interior of Acre:

"Nothing's so easy it can't get harder."