Amazonian leaders bring a dark message on gold trading to London

A delegation of Amazonian leaders journeyed from the world’s largest rainforest to the financial center of London last week to deliver a message: capitalism has failed their home and its inhabitants.

Representatives of the Yanomami, Krenak and Kambeba peoples of the Brazilian Amazon met with leaders in British academia and finance to give first-hand accounts of the hidden devastation behind commodity trading, highlighting the impacts that large, unchecked extraction of natural resources have on Indigenous communities.

“The earth is ill,” said Dario Yanomami, vice-president of the Hutukara Yanomami Association, which represents disparate Yanomami communities in Brazil. “For 525 years, we, Indigenous people, have been protecting the land, and now the global society has to protect Mother Nature from being destroyed by the capitalist system.”

Amazonian groups’ attempts to save forests from Brazil’s mining, logging and agribusiness industries have often been met with violence, the representatives said. Yanomami land, in particular, has been ravaged and polluted by illegal mining for gold, as market prices for the commodity have soared to record highs of more than $3,000 an ounce.

The leaders spoke with journalists in Bloomberg’s London headquarters as Brazil prepares to host the next United Nations climate talks, COP30, in the Amazonian town of Belem. The summit will draw representatives from nearly 200 countries to discuss action on global warming. The leaders said they are concerned about lending legitimacy to COP meetings as they feel the invitation to Indigenous communities is only “symbolic.”

“I wouldn’t want to participate at COP by just listening in,” said Adana Omagua Kambeba, one of the first Indigenous medical doctors in Brazil and a shaman-in-training. “I would like to speak and to actually represent my people,” she said.

Ahead of the talks in November, Brazil has championed the creation of a $125 billion fund to compensate tropical countries for preserving forests and pledged that a portion will go to Indigenous communities; but Davi Yanomami, the leader of the Yanomami people, said he hadn’t been consulted about the plan.

Skeptics of the idea and market-based solutions like carbon credits include Ailton Krenak, a member of the delegation and author of Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, a book that calls for a rethink of people’s relationship to nature.

“The market will not solve the problem it creates,” he said. “That would be naivete.”

(By Yinka Ibukun)