Death in Manaquiri: A time bomb in the Amazon

While the world’s leaders haggle and prevaricate in Copenhagen, real and devastating climate change is happening in many countries across the world. The third world is bearing the brunt of the problem and the story of Manaquiri, in Brazil’s Amazon Basin is a microcosm of a much larger problem. Producing one fifth of the world’s oxygen, a quarter of the world's fresh water and home to the world’s largest rainforest, the Basin is often described as “The Lungs of the World”. But these lungs are now struggling to breathe as the region is crippled with the worst drought since records began. (photo: Reuters)

Manaquiri is a small sleepy town in the Brazilian State of Amazonas. It is not on the highway, but the state capital Manaus is a short trip three hours downstream where the Parana de Manaquiri River eventually flows into the mighty Amazon. The river that shares the name of the town is the area’s lifeblood. 800 of the town’s population of almost 20,000 are fishermen. And 14,000 people rely on the river as an economic lifeline. All are suffering as the river loses its grip on life.

Manaquiri is the centre of a drought that has last a month. It has not rained in 25 days which does not sound like much but it rarely happened before recent times in this lush rainforest region. The length of time without rain is enough to have a devastating effect on the local river. All the tributaries that supply water to the Manaquiri have choked up and have deprived the water of oxygen. As a result, the drought is killing tonnes of fish. Their rotting bodies are polluting the water and leaving thousands of people with no clean water.

Al Jazeera quoted a local scientist who says the problem is directly attributable to climate change. Philip Fearnside is a research professor in the Department of Ecology at the National Institute for Research in the Amazon (INPA) in Manaus. Fearnside has lived in the Amazon for 33 years and he says the drying up of the Manaquiri may signal similar droughts occurring with higher frequency as the climate continues to change. "[Climate change] is something we have experience with and know from the data, it's not something that depends on the outcome of a computer simulation," he said.

A photo essay on the petroleum.berkeley.edu site shows the extent of the devastation in Manaquiri. Boats are stranded in dry lakes and whole lagoons have evaporated. The parched conditions have triggered forest fires killing off fish and crops. As the waters receded, many people were trapped in their home without access to food or medical treatment.

The current drought is happening just four years after Manaquiri suffered “its worst drought in 40 years”. The 2005 drought lasted for over two months and local officials were forced to close 40 schools and cancel the school year because of a lack of food, transport and potable water. Cases of diarrhoea rose in the region as wells became poisoned and stagnant water caused a rise in malaria. One local, 39 year old Manuel Tavares Silva was quoted at the time saying "I've never seen anything like this."

But now Silva is seeing it again. Manaquiri is a microcosm of a wider problem. The New York Times noted that in mid-October, the governor of Amazonas State, Eduardo Braga, decreed a "state of public calamity” which remains in effect two months later. Many boats cannot reach Manaus as the river level in Amazonian tributaries drop to near zero. The drought also affects neighbouring states and other Amazonian Basin countries such as Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.

Many scientists say the drought is most likely a result of the same rise in water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean that caused Hurricane Katrina. If global warming is involved as they suspect, it is likely to mean more severe and frequent droughts in the region. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace are less circumspect and say the problems in Manaquiri and in the Amazon region are a direct result of deforestation and global warming. "If you compare the rainfall averages over the last five years, you see that there have been growing rain deficits each year," said Manaus-based Greenpeace activist Carlos Rittl about the 2005 drought. "It will be extremely worrying if this becomes a tendency." Whether those meeting in Copenhagen like it or not, that tendency has now arrived.

Amazon: a catalogue of fails and glitches

Amazon has publicly apologised overnight for blacklisting gay and lesbian books. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said it was an error and called it "embarrassing and ham-fisted.” Amazon claims they have now fixed the problem. The story began a few days ago when Amazon removed sales ranks for a number of its offerings, many of which were gay and feminist-related. Without a rank, books will not show up on Amazon's bestseller lists or recommendation engines. So you won’t see the words "If you like this book, you might also like this book based on what others have bought".

Over Easter thousands of books lost their sales rank. This is the number that Amazon uses to show how well one title sells compared with another. According to The Guardian, the change occurred as the company sought to make its bestseller lists more family friendly. It says the change of rules affected not only high profile writers such as Annie Proulx, EM Forster and Jeanette Winterson, but also thousands of other gay and lesbian titles regardless of their sexual content.

One of the authors affected was Mark R Probst. When he inquired about why his gay teen novel The Filly was stripped of its ranking, he was told by Amazon “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.” But Probst noted the hypocrisy of the move saying a multitude of “adult” literature was continuing to get a ranking including such authors as Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins. “[Amazon] are using categories THEY set up (gay and lesbian) to now target these books as somehow offensive,” claimed Probst.

The LA Times blog Jacket Copy contacted Amazon Director of Corporate Communications Patty Smith for an explanation. Smith told the blog there was a glitch with the sales rank feature which was “in the process of being fixed.” Jacket Copy then asked whether Smith had a comment on why gay and lesbian authors were unduly affected by the “glitch’. But Smith had nothing to say. “Unfortunately, I'm not able to comment further,” she said. “We're working to resolve the issue, but I don't have any further information.”

Smith’s unconvincing defence of the “glitch” did not wash and it didn’t take long for a backlash to occur. Before the weekend was out Amazon had a PR disaster on its hands. People using the #amazonfail hashtag inundated Twitter with calls for Amazon boycotts. Many users say they have cancelled existing orders, and others are threatening to close their Amazon accounts. As The Inquisitr writes, Amazon could lose millions. “Even if Amazon spins their heart out now, the damage has already been done, and there will be no stopping lost orders; the only possibility is to mitigate the flood,” it says.

Even though the release of subsequent information backs up the ‘glitch’ thesis, it remains a PR disaster for Amazon. It will be interesting to see it will have the serious financial impact predicted by The Inquisitr. Up to this weekend, Amazon had continued to defy the economic downturn. Their Kindle 2 product is starting to take off after it was released to fanfare in February. Version 2 is a significant change from the original and supports text to speech threatening the lucrative audio book industry. It didn’t hurt when Oprah Winfrey announced that the new Kindle e-book reader was her "favourite new gadget" and said it was not only "life-changing" but also "the wave of the future."

This would have been music to the ears of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The 45 year old Bezos continues to be the CEO and the leading shareholder with 24 percent of the stock. Bezos took Amazon public in 1997 and it was one of the few companies to survive the dot com crash. Books continue to drive the virtual mall's $14.8 billion sales and Bezos was worth $8.2 billion last year. He was Time’s person of the year in 1999 and he was still on their top 100 list in 2008. Bezos claims his mantra is: “Try to give your customers the biggest selection at the best prices, delivered cheaply and easily.” After this weekend, he will find out whether best prices are the only thing that drives customer behaviour.

How Chicken McNuggets are destroying Mato Grosso

Mato Grosso is a state in Western Brazil. The name ‘mato grosso’ means thick jungle in Portuguese and the state is at the heart of Amazonia. Apart from the state capital, Cuiabá, there are few cities. However, Mato Grosso is the site of some of the worst deforestation in the world. In 2005, the Brazilian federal government said that 48 percent of Amazon deforestation that took place in 2003 and 2004 occurred in Mato Grosso. Although some deforestation is part of the country’s plans to develop its agriculture and timber industries, other deforestation is the result of illegal logging and squatters. Because the forest is so large and is difficult to access or patrol, the government uses satellite images to detect illegal deforestation. The images taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASAs Terra satellite can provide an initial alert that tells officials where to look for illegal logging.

Mato Grosso is an agrarian state with economy based on cattle-raising in the land-cleared areas. The area is also the major producer of soybeans in Brazil. The Agricultural Federation of Mato Grosso said Thursday they oppose a decision made last month by the nation's soy crushers and traders, prohibiting purchases of soybeans grown in recently deforested regions of the Amazon biome. On July 24, the Brazilian Vegetable Oils Industry Association announced they would not buy soy from recently deforested Amazon forest for the next two years. The decision comes on the heels of an announcement by the European branch of McDonald's to stop buying soy meal for chicken feed made from soybeans in the Amazon. The company said they made the decision following a report titled "Eating the Amazon" by Greenpeace International, which put much of the onus on Amazon deforestation on McDonald's as well as the US-owned agricultural giants Cargill, ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) and Bunge. Europe is the main export market and imports 18 million tons of Amazonian soya beans mainly for use as animal feed. The Mato Grosso soya beans ultimately ends up inside the British, French and German consumers in the form of McDonald’s chicken nuggets.

In 1977 the state was split into two halves, with Mato Grosso do Sul becoming a new state. Mato Grosso is now the northern half of the region and is sparsely populated with barely a million inhabitants. Most of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, which is marginally more populous, is either seasonal flood plain or open scrubland. The Pantanal wetlands is one of the world’s great swamps and extends into both states. It is one of the largest nature reserves in the world and has the greatest concentration of fauna in the Americas. But it too faces an uncertain future stemming from a series of socioeconomic pressures. United Nations University experts warn that the Pantanal is at growing risk from intensive peripheral agricultural, industrial and urban development – problems expected to be compounded by climate change.

Some of the local indigenous tribes are fighting back. For decades, the 7,000 strong Kayapó nation have defended their 113,000-square kilometre, Cuba-sized homeland in Mato Grosso and Pará from incursions by speculators, ranchers, gold miners, loggers and squatters. Today the Kayapó fight two new threats: five huge hydroelectric dams planned on their lifeline Xingu River, and completion of the second half of BR-163, the road that slices through Amazonia north to south. Brazil's government is preparing to let private companies embark on a $417 million paving project to turn BR163 into a modern two-lane toll highway stretching 1,800kms. That would link Brazil's most important soy-growing region with a deep-water Amazon River port.

The 1,000 strong Bororo tribe also live in Mato Grosso. They been constricted to an ever-shrinking territory but the agricultural and ranching activities of the settlers have altered the environment so much that the former subsistence activities of the Bororo have become increasingly less productive. With many of the old cultural traits no longer practiced or forgotten, and with a dwindling population, the modern-day Bororo bear little resemblance to their forebears.

The flora and the fauna and the indigenous tribes all face the same rapacious enemies. With the combined threat of roads and dams for farmers, and soya beans for Chicken McNuggets, it is unlikely to be too long before Mato Grosso becomes a thick jungle in name only.