Day 239 - 23 Apr 96 - Page 30
1 but some things are relevant to the issues in this case and
2 some things are not.
3
4 MR. MORRIS: Mr. Monbiot was indicating across this whole swathe
5 is what he would call rainforest.
6 A. That is correct, and what I was trying to show was
7 that it is no different in type to the rainforest in the
8 north of the River Amazon, that we have broadly the same
9 sort of vegetational characteristics. So you cannot draw a
10 line and then write off everything below that as not being
11 rainforest.
12
13 Q. Right. Are there any other comments on Mr. Cesca's
14 evidence that you would like to make?
15 A. Well, I must say that I found quite a lot of what he
16 had to say disturbing simply because it seemed to indicate
17 a complete failure to understand what is going on up there.
18 By his own admission he does not speak Portuguese, but he
19 seems to claim to understand the political and sociological
20 situation in Brazil. One of his claims is that the
21 deforestation of the Amazon is driven by over population
22 and by poverty.
23
24 Well, the over population -- I mean, Brazil is a country 35
25 times the size of Britain and has a population
26 three-and-a-half times the size of that of Britain. It has
27 an area outside the Amazon, but within Brazil, of land the
28 size of India which has been cleared by ranchers and it is
29 cultivated at a very low level because you have very few
30 cattle per area.
31
32 The great majority of Brazilian peasants have cultivated no
33 land, or very little land of their own. The smallest, 56
34 percent of proprietors, own only 3 percent of the land in
35 Brazil. What is absolutely clear is that the reason for
36 movement of people into the Amazon out of the other areas
37 of Brazil is that their land has been taken from them; they
38 have been pushed off, they have been forced off, not
39 through poverty per se, but through land alienation and
40 seizure, and this is something which had been widely
41 acknowledged by many, many researches in this field. So, I
42 feel he was labouring under a very considerable
43 misapprehension on that particular point.
44
45 Also I feel that his own survey, flying along that supposed
46 line in a light aircraft for 2 weeks, is not any way to
47 work out what is happening to the vegetation below and, I
48 have to say, having read his testimony to the court, I did
49 not feel that he was a very credible witness in this trial.
50
51 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That is for me to judge. By all means tell
52 me where he was factually inaccurate or where I have
53 mis-assessed the situation.
54 A. I am sorry, I beg your pardon?
55
56 Q. But I have got to judge that.
57
58 MR. MORRIS: He did say he was not an expert on vegetation
59 matters.
60
