Alcoa Razes Rain Forest in Court Case Led by Brazil Prosecutors

[babsbunny]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170&sid=aEmubrLsu.ro

By Michael Smith and Adriana Brasileiro

July 31 (Bloomberg) -- For four decades, Edimar Bentes and his family have survived by farming tiny clearings in the jungle near their dirt-floor shack in the state of Para in the Brazilian Amazon.

On this April afternoon, Bentes, 56, squats in the driving rain and dips a glass into what just four years ago was a crystal-clear stream that provided drinking and bathing water. He frowns as the glass fills with brown silt. A thin man with short-cropped dark hair and a tanned, deeply wrinkled forehead, Bentes gazes around his land.

There are no signs of the deer, armadillos and pacas he used to hunt to feed his wife and 10 children.

For Bentes and thousands of others in the Juruti region of Para whose livelihood depends on wildlife and plants, everything changed in 2006. That’s when New York-based Alcoa Inc., the world’s second-largest primary aluminum producer, started to bulldoze a 56-kilometer (35-mile) swath of the rain forest across hundreds of families’ properties to build a railway.

[DCKit]

1. OK, but you've got to admit, someone with ten kids needs another hobby.

The rainforest can't take so much of that, either.