Word: landless
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This road may provide food and money for Brazil's landless and more funds for the government, but only for a short time. THEODORE VARNS, age 16 Wailuku, Hawaii...
That's why scientists are so worried about the paving of BR-163. In the Brazilian Amazon, roughly 75% of deforestation has occurred within 30 miles of a paved road. Despite laws prohibiting settlement in virgin lands, politicians, who see settlers as voters, have encouraged Brazil's 10 million landless poor to migrate into the interior, torching forest as they go. But the rain forest is not good agricultural land, and many of the farmers sell out to cattle ranchers. The only reason enormous stretches of the forest did not burn down in 1998 was that paved roads...
...rain forest have grown worse. While Brazil?s Congress has eliminated some subsidies that promoted indiscriminate cattle ranching and forest clearing and passed laws prohibiting new settlements in virgin forests, it has turned a blind eye to other forms of destruction. Politicians have encouraged some of the 10 million landless poor to migrate into the interior, torching forest as they go. Settlers persist in using fire to clear land for their subsistence farms because it is cheap and easy...
...from lands where he has aggressively pushed replanting from the outset. His partners and employees try to encourage neighbors to reduce their vulnerability to fire. But most lack the means to take effective action even if they have the will. He wonders why the government can?t settle the landless on land that is not virgin forest. ?incra dumps people in the forest and thinks they are finished with their responsibilities,? he says. Yet baranek still sees the road as inevitable, and a good thing. ?You can?t stop progress,? he says and shrugs, ?and it will connect Santar?m...
...inflaming the situation may be precisely what Mugabe has in mind. Playing to the landless rural poor by encouraging land invasions has been widely interpreted as an election ploy to reverse the declining support of a president who has ruled Zimbabwe through its 20 years of independence. With parliamentary elections likely by May, Mugabe's support in urban areas is down to about 25 percent. But the fact that 70 percent of the country's best farmland is owned by some 4,000 white commercial farmers gives the issue some resonance with the country's impoverished rural majority...