Brazil Creates 20,000 Square Miles of New Indigenous Reserves

December 23, 2009

On Monday, Brazil decreed nine new indigenous reserves covering 51,000 square kilometers (19,700 square miles) of the Amazon rainforest, an areas larger than Denmark or Switzerland, reports the AFP…

“We will never be able to do enough for the indigenous people,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in a speech announcing the decree. “The debt is historic and we can never reimburse through money, we can only make concrete gestures.”

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lulu da Silva’s path towards becoming president was an unlikely one. Born into an impoverished family, he dropped out of school in 4th grade to begin his working life, first as a shoeshine boy, then a street vendor, and eventually a labor organizer and president. Now in his second term, the hugely popular president has done more than any other Brazilian leader to shrink the gap between rich and poor. His latest move has been to declare a series of indigenous reserves–designed to protect both the rainforest and the least-represented of Brazil’s inhabitants. 

Five of the reserves are located in the state of Amazonas, two are in Pará, one is in Roraima, and another is in Mato Grosso do Sul. The protected areas house about seven thousand Indians from 29 ethnic groups, according to FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Índio), Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency.

The largest reserve, Trombetas Mapuera accounts for 80 percent of the new protected area and is home to uncontacted tribes.

Trombetas Mapuera Indigenous Reserve is the largest of the nine new indigenous reserves that Brazil has just created.

Trombetas Mapuera includes parts of Caroebe, Faro, Nhamundá, Oriximiná, São João da Baliza and Urucará municipalities in the state of Amazonas, between the cities of Manaus and Santarém.

39 indigenous reserves have been decreed since 2007 and there are now 663 in Brazil, amounting to more than one million square kilometers. More than half the Brazilian Amazon is now under some form of protection.

Map of Indigenous Reserves in Brazil. In 2007, FUNAI reported that it had confirmed the presence of 67 different uncontacted tribes in Brazil, up from an estimated 40 uncontacted tribes in 2005. Brazil has thus overtaken the island of New Guinea as the region having the largest number of uncontacted tribes in the world.

Brazil aims to reduce deforestation by 70 percent over the next decade as part of its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Forest loss for the 2008-2009 year was the lowest since record-keeping began more than 20 years ago.

Indigenous reserves have been shown to have lower deforestation rates than adjacent parks and unprotected areas. But declaration of an indigenous reserve is no assurance of protection. For example, nearly 95 percent of Marãiwatsede, an Xavante indigenous reservation in the state of Mato Grosso, has been invaded by squatters intent on clearing its forests for cattle pasture.

Below: A Map of Brazil’s current 40 national parks. In 2005, President da Silva created two new national parks, an area totaling roughly ten million acreas and nearly twice the size of Massachusetts. Both parks were implemented through ARPA (Amazon Region Protected Areas), an initiative sponsored by Brazil, the World Bank, and the World Wildlife Fund. The initiative plans to create a 190,000-suqre-mile network of protected areas and sustainable use reserves that will spread across an area one and a half times larger than the entire U.S. national park system. The Brazilian government has currently set aside 37% of the Amazon Basin as a protected area.