Amazon Grassroots Leaders Blast IMF Loan Package for Brazil

In town to brief Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on the crisis in the Amazon, grassroots leaders from the Brazilian Amazon today called the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Brazil bailout package an environmental and social time bomb. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has arranged the meetings with Secretary Babbitt and is working with the indigenous and forest people’s groups to create reserves that protect the rainforest.

“The impacts of the ill-advised IMF loan package in the Amazon will be borne by the forest and the people of the Amazon,” said Claudionor Barbosa da Silva, President of the Amazon Working Group (GTA), a network of Amazon grassroots groups with over 350 members. The groups meeting with Secretary Babbitt fear that Brazil’s recession and budget cuts for social and environmental programs will further damage the country’s environment, pushing growing numbers of the urban poor into desperate forest clearing, illegal logging and mining for survival.

“Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has committed to creating new ‘extractive reserves’ for our people and to funding price support for Amazon wild rubber,” said Jos