March 9, 2006
Brazilian Farm Workers Damage Plantation
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:09 a.m. ET
SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) -- About 2,000 highly organized farm workers invaded a plantation owned by a big Brazilian paper and pulp company Wednesday, uprooting saplings and destroying a laboratory in an environmental rampage against mass eucalyptus tree cultivation, the company and the protesting group said.
The protesters, mostly women with Brazil's branch of the international Via Campesina farm workers rights group, occupied the plantation about 700 miles south of Sao Paulo before dawn, overpowered security guards and left after causing damage that could cost the company millions of dollars, Aracruz Papel e Celulose SA said in a statement.
Via Campesina said it organized the invasion ''to denounce the social and environmental impact of the growing green desert created by eucalyptus monoculture'' in Latin America's largest country. The raid was timed to coincide with International Women's Day.
A top government official criticized the invasion.
''Material that was being made in order to improve peoples' lives was completely destroyed,'' said Agrarian Reform Minister Miguel Rossetto.
The women left the plantation about an hour after they occupied it, and no one was hurt or injured, said group spokesman Igor Felipe.
In a manifesto published on Via Campesina's Web site, the group claimed that increasing cultivation of trees to make paper is forcing poor farmers from their land, causing pollution and creating health problems.
''We are against green deserts, the enormous plantations of eucalyptus, acacia and pines for cellulose, that cover thousands of hectares in Brazil and Latin America,'' the statement said. ''When the green desert advances, biodiversity is destroyed, soils deteriorate, rivers dry up.''
The company denounced the invasion as an attack against the company, the nation's paper and pulp sector and Brazil's internationally renowned agribusiness.