Brazil's Quilombola Communities Fight Palm Oil Firms Over Amazon Land
Descendants of enslaved Brazilians face displacement by subsidized biofuel companies claiming traditional territory in Pará, the country's most deforested state.
Quilombola communities in Brazil's northern Pará state — descendants of people once enslaved on sugar cane and coffee plantations — are mounting legal challenges, blockades and checkpoints to resist encroachment by palm oil companies producing biofuels for global markets.
For Josias Dias dos Santos, 39, known as Jota, the pressure has been relentless. He and other quilombola families say they were driven from their rainforest settlements first by loggers, then by ranchers and miners. The arrival of the industrial palm oil sector, they contend, brought the most severe displacement yet.
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Palm oil firms have claimed progressively larger portions of quilombola ancestral land over roughly two decades, a trend enabled in part by federal government subsidies tied to Brazil's biofuel sector. Pará, where these communities are concentrated, has become the country's most deforested state, underscoring the scale of land-use pressure bearing down on traditional inhabitants.
The conflict sits at the intersection of global commodity supply chains and indigenous and Afro-Brazilian land rights. Biofuel demand — driven partly by international clean-energy mandates — has elevated the commercial value of land that quilombola families have occupied for generations, intensifying disputes that advocates say carry echoes of Brazil's colonial-era forced labor economy.
Community members are responding with on-the-ground resistance and court action, determined to halt what they describe as decades of cyclical dispossession. Continue reading at Business | The Guardian.
