English This International Day of the World’s Indigenous People we’d like to highlight our new initiative to support the indigenous Kayapo of the Amazon.
The Landworkers Alliance, alongside Hodmedod’s and investment partners, will be working with the Kayapo to import wild harvested Brazil Nuts, collected by their communities who live deep in the Amazon.
This year the Kayapo have harvested 30 tons of Brazil Nuts to sell. We will be importing 4 tons of these and supporting efforts to find a market for the rest as the dangers facing the Kayapo from gold miners at the moment are acute and they need financial autonomy to defend their land.
This autumn we’re seeking to import 4 tons of Brazil Nuts straight from the Amazon through an emerging Solidarity Trading Company in partnership with COOPBAY, a cooperative of the Kayapo themselves. The income from the sales of these nuts will go directly to their traditional tribal communities to support their survival in ways decided by their own autonomous community structures.
We are calling on all activists to become Community Ambassadors, helping us sell these nuts so that we can place an even larger order with the Kayapo next year as a means of providing them with a secure income.
You can sign up here to get involved in the emerging Solidarity Trading Company by becoming a Community Ambassador.
The territories of the Kayapo are vast, protecting over 11 Million hectares of the Amazon. They have guideposts where their warriors stop loggers, miners, fishers and other outside invaders from destroying. At the moment the gold mining cartels are very strong and dangerous, but the Kayapo still defend their land. Without the Kayapo, the forest would have long disappeared into frontier society.
We are entering into this initiative because campaigns coordinator Jyoti Fernandes recently visited the Kayapo to talk to them and ask them how we can support them in maintaining their defence of the land.
She says:
“Every time I visit villages and watch the children play and the elderly, the feeling never changes, it never changes- that feeling that we could be immersed in the highest frequencies of life as we provide for our daily needs. The Amazon is home to one-third of global terrestrial biodiversity and cycles about one quarter of the Earth’s fresh water.
When you visit, it’s clear that there is a way of life, a means of food production, that works with the complex and vibrant web, instead of destroying it.
Here in the UK almost everyone is being affected by the cost of living crisis and we have few opportunities to meet our basic needs from the land. But, the foresters, farmers, growers and craftspeople of the Landworkers’ Alliance seek to provide for our needs in a way that regenerates the earth. We promote a lifestyle more in connection with the land and our small steps towards a way forward for the future. Yet, in all our advocacy efforts at a governmental level, the narrative that isn’t discussed is how to make this grow and how to protect the people on our planet who both depend on ecosystems and simultaneously nurture them.
Across the world, ecosystems dependent communities, peasants and indigenous people are the most marginalized to the point of nearly being invisible. Those wild ecosystems that we hold in our imagination are our psychological sanctuary, but the reality is that they are under fire.
The battle they are fighting for their land and their lives is as serious a battle as the war in Ukraine, and it’s just as present. It’s a battle for our precarious future. We have to support them with whatever means we can.”
That’s what solidarity means. As people of the land, we recognise that we are all in this together.
You can read more about the Kayapo here.
Sign up here to get involved and become a Community Ambassador.
Photo credit: Simone Giovine
