URUAÇU, Brazil — When the Chinese came looking for more soybeans here last year, they inquired about buying land — lots of it.
Officials in this farming area would not sell the hundreds of thousands of acres needed. Undeterred, the Chinese pursued a different strategy: providing credit to farmers and potentially tripling the soybeans grown here to feed chickens and hogs back in China…
(Note: An estimated 100 uncontacted tribes still exist in the world, with the majority of them inhabiting Brazil (with an estimated 67 uncontacted tribes) and Peru (with 15). Most are located not far from the Peru-Brazil border in the Amazonian portions of those countries. Meanwhile, more than 180 oil and gas blocks now cover most of the western Amazon, the most species rich area on earth and home to many uncontacted or extremely isolated tribes. Many of these oil and gas concessions currently overlap indigenous territories, that is, land that has either been titled to native groups or else is currently lived upon by isolated tribes. Recently, a BBC film crew flew over an uncontacted village of what are probably Panoan natives in Brazil’s remote jungle near the Peruvian border. The following is a film clip of that footage from Survival International):
Scientists Find Evidence Discrediting Theory Amazon Was Virtually Unlivable
The Washington Post
September 5, 2010; 7:57 PM
SAN MARTIN DE SAMIRIA, PERU – To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial – from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines…
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…
(Note: Paramount Productions has announced that Brad Pitt will star in an upcoming film set in the Amazon (and filmed in Bolivia) called “The Lost City of Z,” based on the non-fiction book of the same name. In the film, which Pitt’s “Plan B” production company will produce, Pitt will portray the English explorer, Percy Harrison Fawcett. The latter disappeared somewhere in the Brazilian Amazon in 1925 while hot on the trail of a supposed “lost city.” No trace of Fawcett or of his travelling companions was ever found–KM)
