Brazil: Logging company ordered to pay $3 million to Amazonian Indigenous community for illegal logging
"Amazonian Indigenous Community Wins 24-Year Lawsuit Against Illegal Loggers," 13 May 2020
After more than two decades, the Amazon rainforest’s Ashaninka indigenous community has finally won a lawsuit against the timber companies who illegally deforested the tribe’s land in the 1980s. Brazil’s Cameli family, who owns the timber companies, was ordered to pay the Ashaninka tribe a $3 million settlement, which will be used to protect the Ashaninka tribe and the Amazon.
As reported by Mongabay, between 1981 and 1987, the Cameli family’s timber companies illegally cut down thousands of trees on the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Reserve. During that time period, the Cameli family deforested a quarter of indigenous reserve’s land, which is located on the edge of the state of Acre, Brazil. The reason? To sell wood to the European furniture industry...
The Ashaninka tribe first lodged this lawsuit in 1996, as per Mongabay. The case made its way through Brazil’s judicial system, and got as high as Brazil's federal Supreme Court in 2011 — but at that point, the case stalled, according to Latin Post. ...
As explained by the WWF, over the past 50 years, humans have clear-cut 17 percent of the Amazon rainforest in order to develop it. Cattle ranching (raising cows for beef and dairy) accounts for about 80 percent of that deforestation. The remaining 20 percent of Amazon deforestation is attributed to humans cutting down land for timber (for wood and paper products), palm oil, soybeans to feed livestock, and more...