Brazilian eucalyptus plantations of Stora Enso, a giant Finnish-Swedish reforestation company is involved in a serious conflict with local organizations, environmentalists and small farmers. The MST, in particular, is tired of the two faces of Stora Enso. Finnish public institutions have a considerable portion (35%) of the shares in Stora Enso[1], but the government refuses to intervene in the operations

1. The History

The month of April has become a symbol of the fight for democratization of land in Brazil, and the world. On the 17th of April of 1996, 19 rural workers who participated in a protest march, were brutally murdered by the Military Police of the Brazilian state of Pará, in the municipality of Eldorado do Carajás.

by Hanna Nikkanen

Stora Enso, a Finnish-Swedish giant of the "forest" industry, is conquering Brazil at high speed. The action involves multiple problems, but neither the shareholders nor consumers seem to even bother. Could South America be the Wild West for the paper industry, based on eucalyptus?

Day of action calls for government promises made in August, such as the updating of indices and the settlement of dispossessed workers

The MST occupied the INCRA (Agency for Land Reform) headquarters in Brasília as well as its offices in São Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Pará, Piauí and Paraíba this Monday, on the National Day of Struggle for Land Reform. The movement has also kept up its occupation of INCRA's Pernambuco office since Saturday.

A Terra de Direitos - Organization for Human Rights (http://terradedireitos.org.br/) published a case study on the various human rights violations by Syngenta Seeds, multinational agribusiness corporation which produces genetically modified seeds and pesticides. The actions that violate include murder, physical and moral violence against landless rural workers, maintenance of private armed militias, carrying out forced evictions without a court order, tampering with poisons, soil contamination with pesticides, contamination of agro-biodiversity with GM seeds, criminalization of social movements, among many other actions.

From: Sócio-Environmental Fórum of the Extreme South of Bahia and the Alert against the Green Desert Network

With this statement, we express our enormous outrage about the death of 24-years old Henrique Souza Pereira, who was killed on 16 March 2010. According to Fibria´s press release (Fibria is the former Aracruz Celulose and partner of Stora Enso in the Veracel Celulose company), a team of GARRA, the private ‘security’ company of Fibria, shot Henrique, alleging that he was stealing wood and ‘acting aggressively’ when he was requested to leave an area with eucalyptus trees. But the father of Henrique, Osvaldo Pereira Bezerra, declared in an interview with a local newspaper, he was accompanying Henrique on a motorcycle going home when the conflict happened. During the incident, the security force broke the arm of Henrique’s father.