INTERVIEW: Brazil REDD project proceeds against 'land grabbing'

Quantum Commodity Intelligence – A giant REDD project in the Brazilian Amazon is proceeding normally despite attempts by local activists and "land grabbers" to disrupt its activities, American entrepreneur Michael Greene told Quantum in an interview.

The Ribeirinho avoided deforestation, or REDD, scheme (VCS2620) in Portel, Pará state, has been in development since 2018 under the Verified Carbon Standard.

Earlier this month, the public defender of Pará state, Andreia Macedo Barreto, filed a civil case against the companies involved and the municipality of Portel, claiming some irregularities with the use of the land – a common dispute in Brazil.

Portel passed a law in 2022 to authorise carbon projects in public areas, but the public defender has argued it is unconstitutional.

In Brazil, the public defender's office is in charge of delivering free legal aid to people in need, a right enshrined in the constitution, both at the federal and state levels.

But Greene, who acts as a consultant on the project and was named by the public defender in her report, told Quantum the case does not equate to legal action, while in parallel "land grabbers" have continued to disrupt project activities.

Ribeirinho has received support from 2,200 households, a more than 90% acceptance rate, after it pledged to build schools in 32 river tributaries around the Portel area and gave inhabitants a certificate representing a right to use the land.

It also operates a brick factory and a medical facility, while Agfor, Michael Greene's outfit, has dug 300 water wells in the area and is in discussions with the Brazilian development bank about a wider programme to reduce poverty across the Amazon region.

Greene said the schools will act as community centres and will also be used to monitor barges circulating on the river loaded with illegal wood, while legal action has been taken against 200 or so land grabbers for attempts to invade the area, which he describes as a first of its kind in the country.

"In Brazil, when a person wants to land grab, the first thing they want to do is discredit the person they're land grabbing. So if you own a farm and you're going to invade it, first thing you're going to say is, well, he's the land grabber," said Greene.

"After the project became a success, that's when the illegal loggers and their associations would come out and they would literally go in front of our boat and warn the houses: Don't accept, they're coming, don't accept, they're just here to steal your land."

REDD+ capital of the world

Portel, in northern Pará and situated close to the mouth of the Amazon river, has four operational REDD+ projects and a further four in preparation, according to Greene and industry sources.

This is an increase of two from reports by the Intercept and the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) about the area published late last year.

Michael Greene calls the region "the capital of REDD for the world, bottom line".

He said: "Portel is the number one location in Brazil because there's a critical mass of forestry and it can be managed, with a lot of lawsuits.

"Number two is São Felix do Xingu. But there, the invaders have already staked all their claims in that area and it would be too difficult to recover."

"You're disrupting the region, they don't like it. You're changing the status quo, they don't like it. They want the population to be poor, they want them to be uneducated."

The reports by Intercept and WRM noted a lack of transparency about the financial accounting of the Portel REDD+ projects, which altogether span more than 700,000 hectares, or 28% of the entire municipality, according to the NGOs.

"None of the projects clarifies who exactly owns the immense areas of each project; the documents do not conclusively prove ownership of the areas in question. This information is essential to clarify who the supposed owners are; it would also help to understand whether the titles are valid or not," said WRM.

Greene, for his part, said all due process was followed and that setting up a REDD project in the region is hard work after it had to fire four companies in charge of building the schools for embezzling some money.

He said Pará's public defender wants to put local communities onto a collective land permit against the will of many inhabitants, and has waged a personal campaign against him.

At the end of January, the State Secretariat for the Environment and Sustainability cancelled 219 certificates – called Cadastre Ambientais Rurais (CAR) which are a right to use the land but not ownership – and suspended another 735 linked to carbon contracts in the city.

"This is complex. You have to go out there, you have to get individual ID, you have to take a picture of their ID, you have to scan it, you have to have a technician who is licensed with the government to insert it into the government system... We hired a professor from the Federal University of Pará to do all the work for us."

"The illegal loggers were kicking out the poor people before we arrived. If they didn't cooperate with the illegal loggers, they were evicted, and that's how it worked."

Dorothy Stang, an American-born activist on behalf of the poor and against loggers and landowners, was murdered by hit men in nearby Anapu in 2005 in a case that grabbed international headlines.

WRM has previously defended Stang's legacy and argued that Greene makes "the unsubstantiated claim that the Workers' Union is financed by illegal loggers and uses false pretexts to create new settlements...This is a falsehood".

"More recently, REDD project entrepreneurs have become an additional adversary for these residents' and workers' associations; they try to superimpose their REDD projects over the land of these settlements," the NGO has also said.

"Sister Dorothy was murdered because she was seen as a threat to these groups, just like many other workers' leaders who have been killed when they began to organize their communities and demand their rights."

Well-known figure

Michael Greene is the CEO of Agfor and other businesses active in carbon project development in Brazil.

He has acted as a consultant on several REDD+ projects situated near Portel, including RMDLT (VCS977) and the ADPML scheme (VCS981), and his company operates Rio Anapu Pacaja (VCS2252).

"He's very known in Brazil because his projects are always huge and with big credit projections...his projects alone account for about 20% of Brazilian ex-ante credits," said one source at a competing developer.

The source also said that "many of his projects have also gone through re-designs on Verra because he has had to exclude areas from it", something Greene has acknowledged himself, adding that he no longer relies on external calculations.

Last month, US ratings agency Renoster said Greene's Rio Anapu Pacaja project uses a conservative emissions baseline and is highly additional, giving it a grade of 1.80, the second highest in its publicly available rankings.

Renoster said: "Each year roads are constructed nearer to the project's borders, increasing accessibility. With that, land-grabbing and clearcutting has followed."

Territorial disputes are common in Brazil, the world's fifth largest country, due to complex administrative layers and the fact that around 16% of the country is unclaimed land and 36% public lands.

"Land tenure in many parts of Brazil remains uncertain and controversial. These problems have recently been exacerbated by changes in the legal framework regulating protected areas and the land market," wrote academics from the University of São Paulo.

"A particular challenge facing attempts to improve land tenure security and governance in Brazil is the lack of a single, integrated assessment of all types of lands."

In 2009, during president Lula Inacio Lula da Silva's first term, a programme called Terra Legal was adopted to benefit landless peasants, however the scheme has been abused by food conglomerates to grab even more land in the Amazon, and was subsequently associated with an increase in deforestation.

A reform of the programme in 2013 has been described as "land grabbing supercharged" and allowed for vast swathes of the Amazon to be turned into pastures or crops.

"I've been doing this for a while and I really understand the parts of the Brazilian Amazon that have the best qualification for REDD," said Greene.

"I came to Brazil 14 years ago to do REDD and ever since it's been a struggle, but we are really good at it," he added.