Daniela Meirelles
Dani has worked with FASE-ES for over 15 years. She has extensive experience fighting for justice and strong relationships with local communities.
“What is on both sides of this “compensatory balance”? Who measures and defines the values? On one side the dizzying expansion of monocultures in all their forms and expressions, and the other biodiversity through its reproductive capacity. Can you support life by compensating it with death? Can what threatens biodiversity at the same time be the balancing counterpart? It sounds very strange. It smells like big business.
But, even more incredible is the plan of the capitalist dictators that have found a way to impose their more fancy value formula. Now they found a humanist tone through offsets. In Brazil there is no lack of political institutional mechanisms to make these contraptions work at any cost. Financing electoral candidates, changing the Forest and Mineral Codes [Brazilian forest and mining laws], creating a requirement for land owners through the Rural Environmental Registry, reducing production and environmental conservation to Payment for Environmental Services (PES), water offsets, loss of rights of traditional peoples and local communities, restricting the production and reproduction of seeds, criminalization of resistance, and many more devices; Meanwhile inequalities deepen.
Offsets are the relationship of dependence and domination from “compensator” with the “compensated”, by taking away all productive autonomy, local and traditional culture and replacing it with a financial element – as always. What a waste!”