Stanford collaboration offers new perspectives on evolution of Brazilian language
Using a novel combination of data mining, literary analysis and evolutionary biology to study six centuries of Portuguese-language texts, Stanford scholars discover the literary roots of rapid language evolution in 19th-century Brazil.
BY TOM WINTERBOTTOM
L.A. Cicero Stanford biology Professor Marcus Feldman, left, and Cuahtemoc Garcia-Garcia, a graduate student in Iberian and Latin American Cultures, combined forces to investigate the evolution of Portuguese as spoken in Brazil.
Literature and biology may not seem to overlap in their endeavors, but a Stanford project exploring the evolution of written language in Brazil is bringing the two disciplines together.
Over the last 18 months, Iberian and Latin American Cultures graduate student Cuauhtémoc García-García and biology Professor Marcus Feldman have been working together to trace the evolution of the Brazilian Portuguese language through literature.
By combining Feldman’s expertise in mathematical analysis of cultural evolution with García-García’s knowledge of Latin American culture and computer programming, they have produced quantifiable evidence of rapid historical changes in written Brazilian Portuguese in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Specifically, Feldman and García-García are studying the changing use of words in tens of thousands of texts, with a focus on the personal pronouns that Brazilians used to address one another.
Their digital analysis of linguistics development in literary texts reflects Brazil’s complex colonial history.
The change in the use of personal pronouns, a daily part of social and cultural interaction, formed part of an evolving linguistic identity that was specific to Brazil, and not its Portuguese colonizers.
“We believe that this fast transition in the written language was due primarily to the approximately 300-year prohibition of both the introduction of the printing press and the foundation of universities in Brazil under Portuguese rule,” García-García said.
What Feldman and García-García found was that spoken language did in fact evolve during those 300 years, but little written evidence of that process exists because colonial restrictions on printing and literacy prevented language development in the written form.
A national sentiment of “write as we speak” arose in Brazil after Portuguese rule ended. García-García said their data shows an abrupt introduction in written texts of the spoken pronouns that were developed during the 300-year colonization period.
Drawing on Feldman’s experience with theoretical and statistical evolutionary models, García-García developed computer programs that count certain words to see how often they appear and how their use has changed over hundreds of years.
In Brazilian literary works produced in the post-colonial period, Feldman said, they have “found examples of written linguistic evolution over short time periods, contrary to the longer periods that are typical for changes in language.”
The findings will figure prominently in García-García’s dissertation, which addresses the transmission of written language across time and space.
The project’s source materials include about 70,000 digitized works in Portuguese from the 13th to the 21st century, ranging from literature and newspapers to technical manuals and pamphlets.
García-García, a member of The Digital Humanities Focal Group at Stanford, said their research “shows how written language changed, and through these changes in pronoun use, we now have a better understanding of how Brazilian writing evolved following the introduction of the printing press.”
Feldman, a population geneticist and one of the founders of the quantitative theory of cultural evolution, said he sees their project as a natural approach to linguistic evolution.
“I believe that evolutionary science and the humanities have a lot to offer each other in both theoretical and empirical explorations,” Feldman said.
Language by the numbers
García-García became interested in language evolution while studying Brazilian Portuguese under the instruction of Stanford lecturer Lyris Wiedemann. He approached Feldman, proposing an evolutionary study of Brazilian Portuguese, and Feldman agreed to help him analyze the data. García-García then enlisted Stanford lecturer Agripino Silveira, who provided linguistic expertise.
García-García worked with Stanford Library curators Glen Worthey, Adan Griego and Everardo Rodriguez for more than a year to develop the technical infrastructure and copyright clearance he needed to access Stanford’s entire digitized corpus of Portuguese language texts. After incorporating even more source material from the HathiTrust digital archive, García-García began the time-consuming task of “cleaning” the corpus, so data could be effectively mined from it.
“Sometimes there were duplicates, issues with the digitization, and works with multiple editions that created ‘noise’ in the corpus,” he said.
Following months of preparation, Feldman and García-García were able to begin data mining. Specifically, they counted the incidences of two pronouns, tu and você, which both mean the singular “you,” and how their incidence in literature changed over time.
“After running various searches, I could correlate results and see how and when certain words were used to build up a comprehensive image of this evolution,” he said.
“Tu was – and still is – used in Portugal as the typical way to say ‘you.’ But, in Brazil, você is the more normal way to say it, particularly in major cities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo where the majority of the population lives,” García-García explained.
However, that was not always the case. When Brazil was a Portuguese colony, and up until the arrival of the printing press in1808, tu was the canonical form in written language.
As part of the run-up to independence in 1822, universities and printing presses were established in Brazil for the first time in 1808, having been prohibited by the Portuguese colonizers in what García-García calls “cultural repression.”
By the late 19th century, você emerged as the way to address people, shedding part of the colonial legacy, and tu quickly became less prominent in written Brazilian Portuguese.
“Our findings quantifiably show how pronoun use developed. We have found that around 1840, vocêwas used about 10-15 percent of the time by authors to say ‘you.’ By the turn of the century, this had increased to about 70 percent,” García-García said.
“Our data suggest that você was rarely used in the late 17th and 18th centuries, but really appears and takes hold in the middle of the 19th century, a few decades after 1808. Thus, the late arrival of the printing press marks a critical point for understanding the evolution of written Portuguese in Brazil, ” he said.
From Romanticism to realism
Their research revealed an intriguing literary coincidence – the period of transition from tu to vocêcorrelated with the broad change in the dominant literary genre in Brazilian literature from European Romanticism to Latin American realism.
Interestingly, the researchers noticed that the rapid change was most evident several decades after Brazil’s independence in the 1820s because it took that long for Brazilian writers to develop their own voice and style.
For centuries Brazilian writers were forced to write in the style of the Portuguese, but as García-García said, “with their new freedom they wanted to write stories that reflected their national identity.”
“Machado de Assis, arguably Brazil’s greatest author, is a fine example. His early novels are archetypally Romanticist, and then his later novels are deeply Realist, and the use of the pronouns shift from one to the other,” García-García said.
Nonetheless, in Machado’s work there is sometimes a purposeful switch back to the tu form if, for example, the author wanted to evoke a certain sentiment or change the narrative voice.
“The data-mining project cannot ascertain subtle uses of words and how, in some works, the pronouns are ‘interchangeable,’” he added.
Computational expertise was no substitute for literary expertise, and García-García used the two disciplines in tandem to get a clearer picture in his data.
“I had to stop using the computer and go back to a close reading of a large sample of books, and the literary genre change reflects this period of post-colonial social and historical change,” he said.
Feldman and García-García hope to use their methodology to explore different languages.
“Next we hope to study the digitized Spanish language corpus, which currently comprises close to a quarter of a million works from the last 900 years,” García-García said.
Tom Winterbottom is a doctoral candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford. For more news about the humanities at Stanford, visit the Human Experience.
Summary: Results suggest that immediately following positive news coverage of Obama’s handling of the storm’s aftermath, Sandy positively influenced attitudes toward Obama, but that by Election Day, reminders of the hurricane became a drag instead of a boon for the president, despite a popular storyline to the contrary.
After Mitt Romney was defeated by President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, some political pundits and even Romney himself tried to pin the loss in part on Hurricane Sandy.
Observers, particularly conservatives, believed the storm was an “October surprise” that allowed Obama to use the trappings of his office to show sympathy and offer support for the victims. The devastating storm hit a week before Election Day, killing hundreds and causing more than $50 billion worth of damage.
But a new study examining the psychological impact of Sandy on people’s voting intentions indicate the storm’s influence was basically a washout.
“Results suggest that immediately following positive news coverage of Obama’s handling of the storm’s aftermath, Sandy positively influenced attitudes toward Obama, but that by Election Day, reminders of the hurricane became a drag instead of a boon for the president, despite a popular storyline to the contrary,” said Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology and the study’s author.
The study appears in the June/July issue of Social Science Research, a major journal that publishes papers devoted to quantitative social science research and methodology.
Two days after Hurricane Sandy made landfall Oct. 29, Hart began surveying likely voters when it became apparent the storm could impact the bitterly contested race between Obama and Romney.
Over the course of a week, the nearly 700 voters polled were asked about their exposure to the storm and related media coverage, as well as their voting intentions. Hart randomly assigned around half of each day’s sample to think about the hurricane before reporting their voting intentions, so he could compare preference for Obama versus Romney between voters who had been thinking about the storm, and those who had not.
Prior to the positive news coverage for Obama on Oct. 31, there was no influence of Sandy reminders on Obama’s vote share. This was also true on Nov. 1, the day after his well-publicized embrace with New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie while touring the hard-hit Jersey Shore. It was that appearance in particular that angered Romney supporters since Christie was a Romney surrogate.
Obama did receive a slight bump in support from study participants on Nov. 2 and 3 who thought about Sandy before reporting their voting intentions, but by Election Day, this trend reversed, when news coverage of the storm shifted and became more negative, focusing on loss of life, lingering damage and power outages.
“The data suggest that people going to the polls Nov. 6 with the hurricane on their mind would have been less inclined to vote for Obama,” Hart said.
Still, that didn’t stop a number of pundits from speculating that the storm was a critical factor in Romney’s loss by slowing his momentum, despite polling evidence to the contrary. In winning 26 states and collecting 332 electoral votes, Obama received 51.1 percent of the popular vote to Romney’s 47.2 percent.
Shortly after the election, Romney insisted Sandy played no role in his defeat.
“I don’t think that’s why the president won the election,” Romney told Fox News, instead blaming his own “47 percent” comments and his inability to connect with minority voters.
Six months later, Romney changed his tune.
“I wish the hurricane hadn’t have happened when it did because it gave the president a chance to be presidential and to be out showing sympathy for folks,” Romney told CNN.
Hart said his study doesn’t reflect the whole of the story on Sandy’s effect in the 2012 race, but that the results say more about the pundits than the voters.
“What it says about voters, perhaps, is that it can be difficult to predict or intuit exactly how they are going to process something like Sandy,” he said.
“It depends on a number of variables and the effect may change over even shorter stretches of time. Yet pundits tend to seize on certain ‘laws’ such as presiding over a disaster makes an incumbent look presidential. But each event like Sandy deserves to be studied as a unique occurrence to help answer questions about the impact of unpredictable, large-scale events as they unfold.”
In trying to determine whether or how an event affects elections, Hart says that it is important to use experimental approaches to test the influence of “priming,” or activating thoughts of different topics, on voters’ attitudes, in addition to more traditional polling methodology.
Journal Reference:
Joshua Hart. Did Hurricane Sandy influence the 2012 US presidential election?Social Science Research, 2014; 46: 1 DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2014.02.005
FILE – In this Nov. 2005 FILE photo released by Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazonia (INPA), an Amazon river dolphin swims in the Airao River in Amazonas state, Brazil. Brazil will temporarily ban the catch of a type of catfish in an effort to halt the killing of the Amazon pink dolphin, whose flesh is used as bait, the Fishing and Aquaculture Ministry said Tuesday, June, 3, 2014. (Sefora Antela Violante, INPA, File/Associated Press)
BY ASSOCIATED PRESSJune 3
SAO PAULO — Brazil will temporarily ban the catch of a type of catfish in an effort to halt the killing of the Amazon pink dolphin, whose flesh is used as bait, the Fishing and Aquaculture Ministry said Tuesday.
Ministry spokesman Ultimo Valadares said the government is working out the details of a five-year moratorium on fishing of the species called piracatinga that is expected to go into effect early next year.
“That should give us enough time to find an alternative bait for the piracatinga,” Valadares said by phone.
Nivia do Campo, president of an environmental activist group in the northern jungle state of Amazonas, welcomed the news because more than 1,500 freshwater dolphins are killed annually in the Mamiraua Reserve where she studies the mammals.
She said that since 2000, when fishermen started slaughtering them for bait, the number of dolphins living on the reserve has been dropping by about 10 percent a year. The reserve currently has a population of about 13,000 dolphins.
Poor fishermen are encouraged to use dolphin flesh as bait by merchants from neighboring Colombia, a big market for that species, de Campo said.
Known as the “water vulture” because it thrives on decomposing matter in rivers, the piracatinga is not consumed by people living along the rivers of the Amazon region.
The pink dolphin is under threat, “and if nothing is done to stop the killing it will become extinct,” de Campo added. “That is why the moratorium is excellent news. It will allow us to discover other baits fishermen can and continue earning money selling piracatinga she said.
The moratorium will also help stop the killing of the Amazon caiman, whose flesh is also used as bait to catch piracatinga.
For centuries, the pink dolphins have been revered by locals and protected by myth. According to one tale, the dolphins transform into handsome men and leave the water at night, seducing local women before returning to the river. Many consider it bad luck to kill them.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Brazil is building five submarines to patrol its massive coast, including one powered by an atomic reactor that would put it in the small club of countries with a nuclear sub.
The BNS S34 Tikuna Brazilian diesel-electric powered submarine moored at the navy base in Niteroi, Brazil. (AFP/Yasuyoshi Chiba)
RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil is building five submarines to patrol its massive coast, including one powered by an atomic reactor that would put it in the small club of countries with a nuclear sub.
The South American giant is in the process of exploring major oil fields off its shores that could make it one of the world’s top petroleum exporters.
The new submarines aim to protect that resource, said the navy official coordinating the US$10-billion project, Gilberto Max Roffe Hirshfeld.
“The nuclear-propelled submarine is one of the weapons with the greatest power of dissuasion,” he told AFP.
“Brazil has riches in its waters. It’s our responsibility to have strong armed forces. Not to make war, but to avoid war. So that no one tries to take away our riches.”
The new submarines, which will replace Brazil’s aging fleet of five conventional subs, are being built at a sprawling 540,000-square-metre complex in Itaguai, just south of Rio de Janeiro.
The project is a joint venture between the navy, Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht and French state defense firm DCNS.
Brazil and France signed a deal for the project in 2008 under which DCNS is providing building materials and training while Brazil builds up its own submarine industry.
Brazil is developing the nuclear reactor and enriched uranium itself.
The first submarine, a conventional sub called SBR1, is 45-percent complete and scheduled to launch in 2017. The second is in the early stages of construction and is due to launch in 2019.
Work on the nuclear sub, SNBR, is supposed to start in 2017, with a launch target of 2025, the year the project wraps up.
Workers are assembling the submarines in a massive 38-metre-tall hangar, putting together the giant sheets of steel that will form the hulls.
When complete, the nuclear submarine will measure 100 metres long and weigh 6,000 tonnes. Its conventional cousins will be slightly smaller, at 75 metres and 2,000 tonnes.
Currently the only countries to design and build their own nuclear submarines are the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — plus India, which has completed one and is in the process of building more.
Unlike conventional submarines, which run on electric or diesel engines and have to resurface every 12 to 24 hours to refuel, nuclear submarines run on atomic power and can stay immersed indefinitely.
They can also be outfitted to launch nuclear warheads — though under Brazil’s constitution and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the country is barred from developing atomic weapons.
Its five new submarines will be equipped with conventional torpedos.
Brazil’s navy says the conventional submarines will patrol ports and other strategic points along the country’s 8,500-kilometre coast.
The SNBR will patrol farther away, around the country’s “pre-salt” deepwater oil reserves — estimated at up to 35 billion barrels — and the so-called Blue Amazon, a biodiverse area off the coast with minerals including gold, manganese and limestone.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Brazil had one of the world’s 15 largest defense budgets in 2013, at US$31.5 billion.
UNDERGRADUATE EUGENIA KWOK: WORKING WITH COMMUNITY DOGS IN BRAZIL
June 3, 2014
Under the supervision of UBC’s Nina von Keyserlingk, Eugenia Kwok, an undergraduate in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems Applied Animal Biology Program, applied for a MITACS undergraduate research grant to work this summer with Dr Carla Molento, Laboratório de Bem-estar Animal, Division of Agricultural Sciences, Universidade Federal do Parana. Eugenia will spend the summer working on a project entitled “Assessing the incidents of positive and negative behaviour and interaction between stray dogs and the community of Campo Largo, Brazil”. While these animals are collectively cared for by community members, community dogs seem to maintain casual relationships with people and lack true owners or guardians. Currently, very little is known about the daily activities of these stray dogs or the types of interactions that they encounter with humans and other dogs in their area. Eugenia hopes that her work will contribute valuable information that can improve population management of these community dogs without jeopardizing animal welfare.
Avaliação é de Jerry Hatfield, diretor do Laboratório Nacional de Agricultura e Meio Ambiente do Departamento de Agricultura dos Estados Unidos (foto:Eduardo Cesar/FAPESP)
03/06/2014
Por Elton Alisson
Agência FAPESP – As mudanças climáticas têm causado alterações nas fases de reprodução e de desenvolvimento de diferentes culturas agrícolas, entre elas milho, trigo e café. E os impactos dessas alterações já se refletem na queda da produtividade no setor agrícola em países como Brasil e Estados Unidos.
Promovido pelo Programa FAPESP de Pesquisa sobre Mudanças Climáticas Globais, o objetivo do evento foi reunir pesquisadores do Brasil e dos Estados Unidos para compartilhar conhecimentos e experiências em pesquisas sobre o impactos das mudanças climáticas globais na agricultura e na pecuária.
“Sabemos há muito tempo que as mudanças climáticas terão impactos nas culturas agrícolas de forma direta e indireta”, disse Jerry Hatfield, diretor do Laboratório Nacional de Agricultura e Meio Ambiente do Departamento de Agricultura dos Estados Unidos (USDA, na sigla em inglês). “A questão é saber quais serão o impacto e a magnitude dessas mudanças nos diferentes países produtores agrícolas”, disse o pesquisador em sua palestra no evento.
De acordo com Hatfield, um dos principais impactos observados nos Estados Unidos é a queda na produtividade de culturas como o milho e o trigo. O país é o primeiro e o terceiro maior produtor mundial desses grãos, respectivamente. “A produção de trigo [nos Estados Unidos] não atinge mais grandes aumentos de safra como os obtidos entre as décadas de 1960 e 1980”, afirmou.
Uma das razões para a queda de produtividade dessa e de outras culturas agrícolas no mundo, na avaliação do pesquisador, é o aumento da temperatura durante a fase de crescimento e de polinização.
As plantas de trigo, soja, milho, arroz, algodão e tomate têm diferentes faixas de temperatura ideal para os períodos vegetativo – de germinação da semente até o crescimento da planta – e reprodutivo – iniciado a partir da floração e formação de sementes.
O milho, por exemplo, não tolera altas temperaturas na fase reprodutiva. Já a soja é mais tolerante a temperaturas elevadas nesse estágio, comparou Hatfield.
O que se observa em diferentes países, contudo, é um aumento da frequência de dias mais quentes, com temperatura até 5 ºC mais altas do que a média registrada em anos anteriores, justamente na fase de crescimento e de polinização.
“Observamos diversos casos de fracasso na polinização de arroz, trigo e milho em razão do aumento da temperatura nessa fase. E, se o aumento de temperatura ocorrer com déficit hídrico, o impacto pode ser exacerbado”, avaliou.
Segundo Hatfield, a temperatura noturna mínima tem aumentado mais do que a temperatura máxima à noite. A mudança causa impacto na respiração de plantas à noite e reduz sua capacidade de fotossíntese durante o dia, apontou.
Pesquisas com milho
Em um estudo realizado no laboratório de Hatfield no USDA em um rizontron – equipamento para a análise de raízes de plantas no meio de cultivo –, pesquisadores mantiveram três diferentes variedades de milho em uma câmara 4 ºC mais quente do que outra com temperatura normal, para avaliar o impacto do aumento da temperatura nas fases vegetativa e reprodutiva da planta.
“Constatamos que a fisiologia da planta é muito afetada por aumento de temperatura principalmente na fase reprodutiva”, contou o pesquisador.
Em outro experimento, os pesquisadores mantiveram uma variedade de milho cultivada nos Estados Unidos em uma câmara com temperatura 3 ºC acima da que a planta tolera na fase de crescimento, em que é determinado o tamanho da espiga.
O aumento causou uma redução de 15 dias no período de preenchimento dos grãos de milho e interrupção na capacidade da planta de completar esse processo, o que se refletiu em queda de produtividade.
“Observamos que, se as plantas forem expostas a uma temperatura noturna relativamente alta no período de preenchimento dos grãos, essa fase de desenvolvimento é interrompida”, afirmou Hatfield.
“O problema não é a temperatura média a que a planta pode ficar exposta na fase reprodutiva, mas a temperatura mínima. Precisamos entender melhor essa interação das culturas agrícolas com o ambiente e o clima para aumentar a resiliência delas à elevação da temperatura e à frequência de eventos climáticos extremos”, avaliou.
Impactos no Brasil
No Brasil, as mudanças climáticas já modificam a geografia da produção agrícola, afirmou Hilton Silveira Pinto, diretor do Centro de Pesquisas Meteorológicas e Climáticas Aplicadas à Agricultura (Cepagri), da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp).
O ano passado foi o mais seco desde 1988 – quando o Cepagri iniciou suas medições climáticas. Registrou-se uma média de 1.186 milímetros de chuva contra 1.425 milímetros observados nos anos anteriores. O mês mais crítico do ano foi dezembro, quando choveu 83 milímetros. A média para o mês é 207 milímetros, comparou Silveira Pinto.
“O final de ano muito seco atrapalhou bastante a agricultura em São Paulo, porque a época de plantio dos agricultores daqui é justamente no período entre outubro e novembro”, disse Silveira Pinto durante sua palestra.
“O plantio de algumas culturas deverá ser atrasado, porque há uma variabilidade bastante sensível no regime pluviométrico das áreas em que determinadas culturas podem ser plantadas”, afirmou.
Segundo o pesquisador, a partir dos anos 2000 não foi registrada mais geada em praticamente nenhuma região de São Paulo, evidenciando um aumento da temperatura no estado.
Um reflexo dessa mudança é a migração da produção do café em São Paulo e Minas Gerais para regiões mais elevadas, com temperaturas mais propícias para o florescimento da planta. A cada 100 metros de altitude, a temperatura diminui cerca de 0,6 ºC, segundo Silveira Pinto.
Durante o período de florescimento do café, quando os botões florais tornam-se grãos de café, a planta não pode ser submetida a temperaturas acima de 32 ºC. Apenas uma tarde com essa temperatura nesse período é suficiente para que a flor seja abortada e não forme o grão.
“O registro de temperaturas acima de 32 ºC tem ocorrido com mais frequência na região cafeeira de São Paulo. Com o aquecimento global, deverá aumentar entre 5 e 10 vezes a incidência de tardes quentes no florescimento da planta”, disse Silveira Pinto. “Isso pode fazer com que não seja mais viável produzir café nas partes mais baixas de São Paulo nas próximas décadas.”
“A produção do café no Brasil deve migrar para a Região Sul”, afirmou. “O café brasileiro deverá ser produzido nos próximos anos em estados como Paraná e Santa Catarina.”
Microssensores instalados em insetos vão colher dados sobre seu comportamento e do ambiente
Nas suas idas e vindas das colmeias, as abelhas interagem com boa parte do ambiente em sua volta, além de realizarem um importante trabalho de polinização de plantas que muito contribui para a manutenção da biodiversidade e a produção de alimentos em todo mundo. Agora, enxames delas vão assumir um outro papel, o de estações meteorológicas “biônicas”, para ajudar a monitorar os efeitos das mudanças climáticas na Amazônia e em seu próprio comportamento.
Desde a semana passada, pesquisadores do Instituto Tecnológico Vale (ITV) e da CSIRO, agência federal de pesquisas científicas da Austrália, estão instalando microssensores em 400 abelhas de um apiário no município de Santa Bárbara do Pará, a uma hora de distância de Belém, na primeira fase da experiência, que também visa descobrir as causas do chamado Distúrbio de Colapso de Colônias (CCD, na sigla em inglês), que só nos Estados Unidos já provocou a morte de 35% desses insetos criados em cativeiro.
– Não sabemos como as abelhas vão se comportar diante das projeções de aumento da temperatura e mudanças no clima devido ao aquecimento global – conta o físico Paulo de Souza, pesquisador-visitante do ITV e da CSIRO e responsável pela experiência. – Assim, entender como elas vão se adaptar a estas mudanças é importante para podermos estimar o que pode acontecer no futuro.
Souza explica que os microssensores usados no experimento são capazes de gerar a própria energia e captar e armazenar dados não só do comportamento das abelhas como da temperatura, umidade e nível de insolação do ambiente. Tudo isso espremido em um pequeno quadrado com 2,5 milímetros de lado com peso de 5,4 miligramas, o que faz com que as abelhas, da espécie Apis mellifera africanizadas, com em média 70 miligramas de peso, sintam como se estivessem “carregando uma mochila nas costas”.
– Mas isso não afeta o comportamento delas, que se adaptam muito rapidamente à instalação dos microssensores – garante.
Já a partir no próximo semestre, os pesquisadores deverão começar a instalar os microssensores, que custam US$ 0,30 (cerca de R$ 0,70) cada, em espécies nativas da Amazônia não dotadas de ferrão. Segundo Souza, estas abelhas são ainda mais importantes para a polinização das plantas da região, e são também mais sensíveis a mudanças no ambiente. Assim, a escala da experiência deve aumentar, com a utilização de 10 mil dos pequenos aparelhos ao longo de várias gerações de abelhas, que vivem em média dois meses.
O tamanho dos atuais sensores, porém, não permite que o dispositivo seja instalado em insetos menores, como mosquitos. Por isso, o grupo de Paulo de Souza já trabalha numa nova geração de microssensores com um décimo de milímetro, ou o equivalente a um grão de areia. Segundo o pesquisador, os novos sensores, que devem ficar prontos em quatro anos, terão as mesmas capacidades dos atuais, com a vantagem de serem “ativos”, isto é, vão poder transmitir em tempo real os dados coletados.
– Quando tivermos os sensores deste tamanho, poderemos aplicá-los na forma de spray nas colmeias, além de usá-los para monitorar outras espécies de insetos, como mosquitos transmissores de doenças – diz. – Mas a vantagem principal é que com eles vamos poder fazer das abelhas e outros insetos verdadeiras estações meteorológicas ambulantes, permitindo um monitoramento ambiental numa escala sem precedentes, já que cada abelha ou mosquito vai atuar como um agente de campo.
A consulta pública disponível no site do Ministério das Relações Exteriores (MRE)
Uma consulta sobre mudanças climáticas está disponível no site do Ministério das Relações Exteriores (MRE). O objetivo da consulta à sociedade civil é subsidiar o processo de preparação da contribuição que o Brasil levará à mesa de negociações do novo acordo sob a Convenção-Quadro das Nações Unidas sobre Mudança do Clima (UNFCCC, na sigla em inglês), de forma a ampliar a transparência do processo e dar oportunidade a que todos os setores interessados da sociedade participem e opinem.
A consulta será realizada em duas fases. Esta primeira, aberta até 18 de julho, busca definir devem ser os elementos principais da chamada “contribuição nacionalmente determinada” brasileira. São perguntas abertas com base em um questionário orientador, e comentários adicionais podem ser enviados por e-mail.
Com base nos aportes recebidos, será elaborado um relatório preliminar com indicação de possíveis opções e modalidades para a contribuição nacional – compromisso a ser assumido pelo Brasil no contexto da negociação internacional. Na segunda fase, esse documento será submetido a uma nova rodada de consultas.
Estão em andamento negociações de um novo acordo sob a convenção, a serem finalizadas em 2015, para entrada em vigor a partir de 2020. Nesse contexto, a 19ª Conferência das Partes na UNFCCC (COP-19, realizada em Varsóvia, Polônia) instou os países signatários a iniciar ou intensificar as preparações domésticas de suas pretendidas contribuições ao novo acordo e a comunicá-las antes da COP-21.
Os testes só serão admitidos em produtos com ingredientes que tenham efeitos desconhecidos no ser humano e caso não haja outra técnica capaz de comprovar a segurança das substâncias
O Plenário da Câmara dos Deputados aprovou nesta quarta-feira (4) a restrição ao uso de animais em testes na indústria de cosméticos, higiene pessoal e perfume. Os testes só serão admitidos em produtos com ingredientes que tenham efeitos desconhecidos no ser humano e caso não haja outra técnica capaz de comprovar a segurança das substâncias. A proposta segue para análise do Senado Federal.
Os parlamentares aprovaram o parecer do deputado Weverton Rocha (PDT-MA) ao Projeto de Lei 6602/13, do deputado Ricardo Izar (PSD-SP). O texto aprovado é menos severo que o projeto original, que bania qualquer uso de animal na indústria cosmética, mas incluiu na proibição os produtos de higiene pessoal e perfumes.
Pelo texto aprovado, a pesquisa em animais será banida quando os ingredientes utilizados em cosméticos, perfumes, ou produtos de higiene pessoal forem comprovadamente seguros para uso humano ou quando se tratar de produto cosmético acabado, a ser definido pela Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária (Anvisa).
Quando houver produto com efeito desconhecido, a proibição de uso de animais só será aplicada em até cinco anos contados do reconhecimento de uma técnica alternativa capaz de comprovar a segurança para uso humano.
Weverton Rocha destacou que o texto não é o ideal, mas inicia o debate para acabar de vez com o uso de animais nas pesquisas para cosméticos. “Ainda não é o que individualmente gostaríamos, mas é uma boa saída entre governo e oposição para levar ao Senado um marco zero para abolir o uso de animais em testes em cosméticos, como já ocorre na União Europeia”, disse.
Rocha afirmou que o Brasil deixa de exportar cerca de R$ 900 milhões em cosméticos para a Europa pelo fato de usar animais nos testes.
Instituto Royal
O debate sobre o uso de animais em testes e pesquisas de cosméticos ganhou força após o caso do Instituto Royal. Em outubro de 2013, 178 cães da raça beagle e sete coelhos usados em pesquisas foram retirados por ativistas e moradores de São Roque, no interior paulista, de uma das sedes do instituto.
Deputados criaram uma comissão externa para investigar o caso e recomendaram a votação da proposta. Ativistas também passaram a cobrar a instalação de uma comissão parlamentar de inquérito (CPI) na Câmara para investigar os maus-tratos em animais.
Multas
O projeto também aumenta o teto das multas para quem violar as regras para o uso de animais em ensino, testes e pesquisa, que poderão chegar a até R$ 500 mil.
A multa para instituições que violem as regras será elevada de R$ 5 mil a R$ 20 mil para R$ 5 mil a R$ 500 mil; e a penalidade para pessoas que descumpram as regras será aumentada de R$ 1 mil a R$ 5 mil para R$ 1 mil a R$ 50 mil.
Empresas estrangeiras
O deputado Domingos Sávio (PSDB-MG) apresentou uma emenda para impedir a importação de cosmético que tenha ingrediente testado em animais sem cumprir os requisitos da lei brasileira, mas a emenda foi rejeitada, o que gerou protestos do deputado.
“Sabemos que outros países permitem o teste, assim as empresas fazem a pesquisa com animais lá fora e importam o produto. Além de criar concorrência desleal, continuam sacrificando animais”, disse.
Summary: While western eyes are focused on the ongoing problems of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor site, thousands of people are still evacuated from their homes in north-eastern Japan following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear emergency. Many are in temporary accommodation and frustrated by a lack of central government foresight and responsiveness to their concerns.
While western eyes are focused on the ongoing problems of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor site, thousands of people are still evacuated from their homes in north-eastern Japan following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear emergency. Many are in temporary accommodation and frustrated by a lack of central government foresight and responsiveness to their concerns.
With the exception of the ongoing problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, outside of the Tohoku region of Japan, the after effects of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, and the subsequent tsunami and nuclear disaster, are no longer front page news. The hard work of recovery is the everyday reality in the region, and for planning schools and consultants across the country the rebuilding of Tohoku dominates practice and study.
But while physical reconstruction takes place, progress is not smooth. Many victims of the disasters and members of the wider public feel that the government is more interested in feeding the construction industry than addressing the complex challenges of rebuilding sustainable communities. This is a region that was already suffering from the challenges of an aging population, the exodus of young people to Tokyo and the decline of traditional fisheries-based industries. In the worst cases people are facing the invidious choice of returning to areas that are still saturated with radioactive fallout or never going home.
The frustration is reflected in four short pieces in Planning Theory and Practice’s Interface Section from architecture, design and planning practitioners working with communities in four different parts of Tohoku.
Christian Dimmer, Assistant Professor at Tokyo University and founder of TPF2 — Tohoku Planning Forum which links innovative redevelopment schemes in the region says:
“The current Japanese government’s obsession with big construction projects, like mega-seawalls that have already been shown to be not likely to be effective, is leading to really innovative community solutions being marginalized, the voices of communities being ignored, and sustainability cast aside.”
According to community planner and academic, Kayo Murakami — who edits this Interface section: “The troubles of the Tohoku reconstruction are not just a concern for Japan. They highlight some of the fundamental challenges for disaster recovery and building sustainable communities, in which people are really involved, all over the world.”
Journal Reference:
Kayo Murakami, David Murakami Wood, Hiroshi Tomita, Satoshi Miyake, Rieko Shiraki, Kayo Murakami, Koji Itonaga, Christian Dimmer. Planning innovation and post-disaster reconstruction: The case of Tohoku, Japan/Reconstruction of tsunami-devastated fishing villages in the Tohoku region of Japan and the challenges for planning/Post-disaster reconstruction in Iwate and new planning chal. Planning Theory & Practice, 2014; 15 (2): 237 DOI:10.1080/14649357.2014.902909
Summary: Was it humankind or climate change that caused the extinction of a considerable number of large mammals about the time of the last Ice Age? Researchers have carried out the first global analysis of the extinction of the large animals, and the conclusion is clear — humans are to blame. The study unequivocally points to humans as the cause of the mass extinction of large animals all over the world during the course of the last 100,000 years.
Skeleton of a giant ground sloth at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, circa 1920. Credit: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Was it humankind or climate change that caused the extinction of a considerable number of large mammals about the time of the last Ice Age? Researchers at Aarhus University have carried out the first global analysis of the extinction of the large animals, and the conclusion is clear — humans are to blame. A new study unequivocally points to humans as the cause of the mass extinction of large animals all over the world during the course of the last 100,000 years.
“Our results strongly underline the fact that human expansion throughout the world has meant an enormous loss of large animals,” says Postdoctoral Fellow Søren Faurby, Aarhus University.
Was it due to climate change?
For almost 50 years, scientists have been discussing what led to the mass extinction of large animals (also known as megafauna) during and immediately after the last Ice Age.
One of two leading theories states that the large animals became extinct as a result of climate change. There were significant climate changes, especially towards the end of the last Ice Age — just as there had been during previous Ice Ages — and this meant that many species no longer had the potential to find suitable habitats and they died out as a result. However, because the last Ice Age was just one in a long series of Ice Ages, it is puzzling that a corresponding extinction of large animals did not take place during the earlier ones.
Theory of overkill
The other theory concerning the extinction of the animals is ‘overkill’. Modern man spread from Africa to all parts of the world during the course of a little more than the last 100,000 years. In simple terms, the overkill hypothesis states that modern man exterminated many of the large animal species on arrival in the new continents. This was either because their populations could not withstand human hunting, or for indirect reasons such as the loss of their prey, which were also hunted by humans.
First global mapping
In their study, the researchers produced the first global analysis and relatively fine-grained mapping of all the large mammals (with a body weight of at least 10 kg) that existed during the period 132,000-1,000 years ago — the period during which the extinction in question took place. They were thus able to study the geographical variation in the percentage of large species that became extinct on a much finer scale than previously achieved.
The researchers found that a total of 177 species of large mammals disappeared during this period — a massive loss. Africa ‘only’ lost 18 species and Europe 19, while Asia lost 38 species, Australia and the surrounding area 26, North America 43 and South America a total of 62 species of large mammals.
The extinction of the large animals took place in virtually all climate zones and affected cold-adapted species such as woolly mammoths, temperate species such as forest elephants and giant deer, and tropical species such as giant cape buffalo and some giant sloths. It was observed on virtually every continent, although a particularly large number of animals became extinct in North and South America, where species including sabre-toothed cats, mastodons, giant sloths and giant armadillos disappeared, and in Australia, which lost animals such as giant kangaroos, giant wombats and marsupial lions. There were also fairly large losses in Europe and Asia, including a number of elephants, rhinoceroses and giant deer.
Weak climate effect
The results show that the correlation between climate change — i.e. the variation in temperature and precipitation between glacials and interglacials — and the loss of megafauna is weak, and can only be seen in one sub-region, namely Eurasia (Europe and Asia). “The significant loss of megafauna all over the world can therefore not be explained by climate change, even though it has definitely played a role as a driving force in changing the distribution of some species of animals. Reindeer and polar foxes were found in Central Europe during the Ice Age, for example, but they withdrew northwards as the climate became warmer,” says Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Sandom, Aarhus University.
Extinction linked to humans
On the other hand, the results show a very strong correlation between the extinction and the history of human expansion. “We consistently find very large rates of extinction in areas where there had been no contact between wildlife and primitive human races, and which were suddenly confronted by fully developed modern humans (Homo sapiens). In general, at least 30% of the large species of animals disappeared from all such areas,” says Professor Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus University.
The researchers’ geographical analysis thereby points very strongly at humans as the cause of the loss of most of the large animals.
The results also draw a straight line from the prehistoric extinction of large animals via the historical regional or global extermination due to hunting (American bison, European bison, quagga, Eurasian wild horse or tarpan, and many others) to the current critical situation for a considerable number of large animals as a result of poaching and hunting (e.g. the rhino poaching epidemic).
Journal Reference:
C. Sandom, S. Faurby, B. Sandel, J.-C. Svenning. Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2014; 281 (1787): 20133254 DOI:10.1098/rspb.2013.3254
Máquina seria capaz de prevenir doenças congênitas
Cientistas britânicos lançaram nesta semana um pequeno robô, capaz de operar fetos ainda no útero das mães. A máquina, que custou cerca de R$ 30 milhões, pode revolucionar o tratamento de más formações congênitas.
O minúsculo aparelho é capaz de fornecer imagens em 3D dos bebês imersos na placenta. Com a visão do “paciente”, o robô começa as intervenções médicas, controladas por uma equipe de especialistas que ficam nos bastidores. A invenção poderia, por exemplo, fazer cirurgias ou até implantar células-tronco em órgãos com deformações da criança.
O projeto é coordenado por engenheiros da University College London (UCL) e Universidade Católica da Lovaina, na Bélgica. De acordo com o líder da pesquisa, Sebastien Ourselin, o máquina evitará riscos tanto às mães quanto aos bebês.
– O objetivo é criar tecnologias cirúrgicas menos invasivas para tratar uma ampla gama de doenças no útero, com muito menos risco para ambos – disse Ourselin ao The Guardian.
O primeiro alvo em vista dos médicos é o tratamento de casos mais graves de espinha bífida, má formação da espinha dorsal que pode atinge um entre cada mil fetos. Ela ocorre quando a coluna não é plenamente desenvolvida, dando margem para que líquido amniótico penetre e leve consigo germes que poderiam atingir o cérebro e prejudicar o crescimento da criança. A intenção é que o novo robô possa fechar esses espaços na espinha, prevenindo a doença.
No entanto, cientistas alertam que operações deste tipo têm elevado risco cirúrgico, com fortes chances de sequelas nas mães. Intervenções médicas em fetos só podem ser realizadas após, pelo menos, 26 semanas de gestação. O procedimento é praticamente impossível atualmente.
O robô é composto por uma sonda muito fina e altamente flexível. A cabeça do equipamento teria um fio equipado com uma pequena câmera que iria usar pulsos de laser e ultra-som detecção – uma combinação conhecida como imagens foto-acústica – para gerar uma fotografia 3D no interior do útero. Estas imagens, então, seriam utilizadas pelos cirurgiões para orientar a sonda para a sua meta: a lacuna na coluna do feto.
Con un espectacular tiro libre de “Gomito” Gómez, de 39 años y máximo ídolo del club, el cuadro de Mataderos venció por 1-0 a Colegiales como visitante y se adjudicó el título.
Nueva Chicago logró el ascenso a la B Nacional al vencer por 1-0 como visitante aColegiales y obtener así el campeonato de la Primera B Metropolitana.
El “Torito” de Mataderos se impuso con un golazo de Christian “Gomito” Gómez, de tiro libre a los 15 minutos del primer tiempo, en la cancha de Colegiales, y allí, en Munro y ante una multitud de hinchas “neutrales” (no está permitido el ingreso del público visitante), festejó el ansiado retorno a la antesala del fútbol grande.
De la mano de su técnico Pablo Guede, Chicago alcanzó 73 puntos y les sacó una diferencia irremontable a sus seguidores Temperley (65 con dos partidos por jugar) y Atlanta (64).
“Gomito” Gómez, enganche de 39 años y máximo ídolo de la institución, volvió a ser la figura del equipo de Mataderos como en toda la temporada y goleador, ahora con 10 tantos.
La gran campaña de Chicago para resultar campeón y ascendido a una fecha del final incluyó 20 victorias, 13 empates y seis derrotas, con 42 goles a favor y 22 en contra.
Barrio de guapos, historia pura
Chicago es patrimonio de un barrio del oeste de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, donde desde el 1899 se instaló el Matadero Municipal, que también tiene una antigua prosapia tanguera y donde nacieron el cantor Horacio Deval y el bailarín Juan Carlos Copes.
Uno de los signos distintivos del club Nueva Chicago es su seguidora hinchada, que si bien en los últimos tiempos le ha dado dolores de cabeza a sus dirigentes por las sanciones que acarrearon sus comportamientos, se caracterizó siempre por ser una de las más conocidas del Ascenso.
Esa hinchada fue, por su fuerte identificación peronista, un baluarte de resistencia durante la dictadura militar y sufrió, por ejemplo, el 25 de octubre de 1981, el arresto de 49 de sus miembros, que fueron llevados al trote a la comisaría 48va. de la Federal, por cantar la marcha partidaria durante un partido contra Defensores de Belgrano.
Nueva Chicago, apodado “El Torito de Mataderos”, igual que aquel prestigioso boxeador de peso liviano llamado Justo Suárez, también nacido a principios del siglo XX en el corazón del barrio de los corrales y los frigoríficos, fue fundado el 1 de julio de 1911 por iniciativa de un grupo de jóvenes en las calles Tellier (hoy Lisandro de la Torre) y Francisco Bilbao.
El nombre elegido para el nuevo club fue “Los Unidos de Nueva Chicago”, en coincidencia a la ciudad estadounidense que al igual que el barrio porteño nucleaba en el país del norte a los frigoríficos.
Los colores de la camiseta, tras largas discusiones, fueron elegidos de manera singular ya que, estando reunidos los fundadores, pasó por la avenida Crovara una ‘chata’ hacia los corrales cargada con fardos de pasto que tenía los colores verde y negro y José Varela al verla exclamó:
“Muchachos, ya tenemos los colores, serán el verde y negro”, que fue aceptado por la mayoría. La primera y modesta cancha estuvo ubicada en un predio delimitado por las calles San Fernando (hoy Lisandro de la Torre), Tandil, Chascomús y Jachal (hoy Timoteo Gordillo) y, a partir de 1940, se mudó al terreno donde se encuentra su actual estadio República de Mataderos, en las calles Justo Suárez, Cárdenas y Francisco Bilbao.
El estadio fue famoso porque también allí se desarrollaron a partir de la década del ’70, alrededor del campo de juego, las carreras de autos categoría ‘midget’ (sin caja de velocidades y sin frenos).
Chicago militó mucho tiempo en el ascenso, pero tuvo también la oportunidad de jugar en Primera División en 1930 (bajó de categoría en 1934), 1981 (luego descendió en 1983), 2001 (en el 2004 se fue a la B Nacional) y 2006 (bajó en 2007).
De todas esas épocas, el resultado más resonante fue la victoria contra Boca Juniors, por 5-0, en el Torneo Metropolitano de 1983, partido jugado en Vélez. En ese histórico encuentro anotaron Claudio Otermín (2), Carlos Acuña (2) e Ignacio Vera Benítez.
Na Argentina, elas foram reprimidas por baionetas quando indagaram, em 1977, pelos filhos presos. Os generais golpistas debocharam: “son las locas de Plaza de Mayo“. Obstinadas, não desistiram. Desafiaram o terror e continuaram ocupando a Praça de Maio, desfilando o seu protesto semanal diante da Casa Rosada e da catedral até que, finamente, reconhecidas pela sociedade, contribuíram para o fim da ditadura e a prisão dos torturadores.
No Brasil, vários movimentos nos fizeram ouvir a voz de quem foi silenciado. No entanto, como ninguém entende línguas indígenas, nem se interessa por aprendê-las, não se escuta o clamor dos índios, seja de mães indígenas por seus filhos ou de índios por seus pais desaparecidos. Desta forma, os índios, sempre invisíveis na historia do Brasil, ficaram de fora das narrativas e não figuram nas estatísticas dos desaparecidos políticos. Na floresta, não há praças de maio.
Mas agora isso começa a mudar. Relatório do Comitê Estadual da Verdade do Amazonas, que será em breve publicado pela Editora Curt Nimuendajú, de Campinas (SP), dá voz aos índios e mapeia os estragos, comprovando que na Amazônia, mais do que militantes de esquerda, a ditadura eliminou índios, entre outros, Cinta-Larga e Surui (RO/MT), Krenhakarore na rodovia Cuiabá-Santarém, Kanê ou Beiços-de-Pau do Rio Arinos (MT), Avá-Canoeiro (GO), Parakanã e Arara (PA), Kaxinawa e Madiha (AC), Juma, Yanomami e Waimiri-Atroari (AM/RR).
O foco do primeiro relatório, de 92 páginas, já encaminhado à Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV), incide sobre os Kiña, denominados também como Waimiri-Atroari, cujos desaparecidos são conhecidos hoje por seus nomes, graças a um trabalho cuidadoso que ouviu índios em suas línguas, consultou pesquisadores e indigenistas, fuçou arquivos e examinou documentos, incluindo desenhos que mostram índios metralhados por homens armados com revólver, fuzil, rifles, granadas e cartucheira, jogando bombas sobre malocas incendiadas.
Os desaparecidos
De noite, nas malocas, os sobreviventes narram a história da violência sofrida, que começou a ser escrita e desenhada por crianças, jovens e adultos alfabetizados na língua Kiña pelos professores Egydio e Doroti Schwade com o método Paulo Freire. Toda a aldeia Yawará, no sul de Roraima, participou do processo, em 1985 e 1986, até mesmo crianças de colo. A comunicação foi facilitada pelo fato de o casal morar lá com seus quatro filhos pequenos, antes de ser expulso pelo então presidente da Funai, Romero Jucá, lacaio subserviente das empresas mineradoras.
Todo o processo de alfabetização ocorreu num clima que iniciou com a narração oral das historias e continuou com a criação dos desenhos, a leitura dos desenhos, a discussão sobre eles e, finalmente, com a escrita alfabética.
Durante esse período, Egydio registrou, com ajuda de Doroti, as narrativas contadas por quem testemunhou os fatos ou por quem ouviu falar sobre eles. Os primeiros textos escritos por recém-alfabetizados, ilustrados por desenhos, revelaram “o método e as armas usadas para dizimá-los: aviões, helicópteros, bombas, metralhadoras, fios elétricos e estranhas doenças. Comunidades inteiras desapareceram depois que helicópteros com soldados sobrevoaram ou pousaram em suas aldeias” – diz o relatório.
Com a abertura da rodovia BR-174 e a entrada das empresas mineradoras, muitas outras aldeias foram varridas do mapa. “Pais, mães e filhos mortos, aldeias destruídas pelo fogo e por bombas. Gente resistindo e correndo pelos varadouros à procura de refúgio em aldeia amiga. A floresta rasgada e os rios ocupados por gente agressiva e inimiga. Esta foi a geografia política e social vivenciada pelo povo Kiña desde o início da construção da BR-174, em 1967, até sua inauguração em 1977” – segundo o relatório.
Alguns sobreviventes refugiados na aldeia Yawará conviveram durante dois anos com Egydio e Doroti. Lá, todas as pessoas acima de dez anos eram órfãs, exceto duas irmãs, cuja mãe sobreviveu ao massacre. O relatório transcreve a descrição feita pelo índio Panaxi:
“Civilizado matou com bomba” – escreve Panaxi ao lado do desenho, identificando um a um os mortos com seus nomes: Sere, Podanî, Mani, Priwixi, Akamamî, Txire, Tarpiya.
A eles se somaram outros de uma lista feita por Yaba: Mawé, Xiwya, Mayede – marido de Wada, Eriwixi, Waiba, Samyamî – mãe de Xeree, Pikibda, a pequena Pitxenme, Maderê, Wairá – mulher de Amiko, Pautxi – marido de Woxkî, Arpaxi – marido de Sidé, Wepînî – filho de Elsa, Kixii e seu marido Maiká, Paruwá e sua filha Ida, Waheri, Suá – pai de Warkaxi, sua esposa e um filho, Kwida – pai de Comprido, Tarakña e tantos outros.
Quem matou
A lista é longa, os mortos têm nomes, mas às vezes são identificados pelo laço de parentesco: “a filha de Sabe que mora no Mrebsna Mudî, dois tios de Mário Paruwé, o pai de Wome, uma filha de Antônio”, etc. O relatório se refere ao“desaparecimento de mais de 2.000 Waimiri-Atroari em apenas dez anos”. Na área onde se localiza hoje a Mineradora Taboca (Paranapanema) desapareceram pelo menos nove aldeias aerofotografadas pelo padre Calleri, em 1968, em sobrevoos a serviço da FUNAI. Os alunos da aldeia Yawará desenharam casas e escreveram ao lado frases como:
– Apapa takweme apapeme batkwapa kamña nohmepa [o meu pai foi atirado com espingarda por civilizado e morreu] – escreveu Pikida, ao lado do desenho que ilustra o fato.
– Taboka ikame Tikiriya yitohpa. Apiyamyake, apiyemiyekî? [Taboca chegou, Tikiria sumiu, por que? Por que?]
A resposta pode ser encontrada no ofício 042-E2-CONF. do Comando Militar da Amazônia, de 21/11/1974, assinado pelo General Gentil Nogueira, que recomendava o uso da violência armada contra os índios, segundo o relatório encaminhado à Comissão Nacional da Verdade. Era uma política de Estado a serviço de interesses privados, implementada com métodos de bandidagem.
Um mês e meio depois, o sertanista Sebastião Amâncio da Costa, nomeado chefe de Frente de Atração Waimiri-Atroari (FAWA), em entrevista ao jornal O Globo (06/01/1975), assumiu de público as determinações do general Gentil, declarando que faria “uma demonstração de força dos civilizados que incluiria a utilização de dinamite, granadas, bombas de gás lacrimogêneo e rajadas de metralhadoras e o confinamento dos chefes índios em outras regiões do País”.
O resultado de toda essa lambança é descrito por Womé Atroari, em entrevista à TV Brasil, relatando um ataque aéreo a uma aldeia e outros fatos que presenciou:
– Foi assim tipo bomba, lá na aldeia. O índio que estava na aldeia não escapou ninguém. Ele veio no avião e de repente esquentou tudinho, aí morreu muita gente. Foi muita maldade na construção da BR-174. Aí veio muita gente e pessoal armado, assim, pessoal do Exército, isso eu vi. Eu sei que me lembro bem assim, tinha um avião assim um pouco de folha, assim, desenho de folha, assim, um pouco vermelho por baixo, só isso. Passou isso aí, morria rapidinho pessoa. Desse aí que nós via.
Os tratores que abriam a estrada eram vistos pelos índios como tanques de guerra. “Muitas vezes os tratores amanheciam amarrados com cipós.Essa era uma maneira clara de dizer que não queriam que as obras continuassem. Como essa resistência ficou muito forte, o Departamento Estadual de Estradas de Rodagem do Amazonas-DER-AM, inicialmente responsável pela construção, começou a usar armas de fogo contra os indígenas”.
Sacopã e Parasar
O relatório informa que “as festas que reuniam periodicamente os Waimiri-Atroari foram aproveitadas pelo PARASAR para o aniquilamento dos índios”. Conta detalhes. Registra ainda o desaparecimento de índios que se aproximaram, em agosto de 1985, do canteiro de obras da hidrelétrica do Pitinga, então em construção:
“É muito provável que tenham sido mortos pela Sacopã, uma empresa de jagunços, comandada por dois ex-oficiais do Exército e um da ativa, subordinado ao Comando Militar da Amazônia, empresa muito bem equipada, que oferecia na época serviços de “limpeza” na floresta à Paranapanema no entorno de seus projetos minerais. Os responsáveis pela empresa foram autorizados pelo Comando Militar da Amazônia a manter ao seu serviço 400 homens equipados com cartucheiras 20 milímetros, rifle 38, revolveres de variado calibre e cães amestrados”.
Os autores do relatório dão nomes aos bois, esclarecendo que quem comandava a Sacopã no trabalho de segurança da Mineração Taboca/Paranapanema e no controle de todo acesso à terra indígena eram dois militares da reserva: o tenente Tadeu Abraão Fernandes e o coronel reformado Antônio Fernandes, além de um coronel da ativa, João Batista de Toledo Camargo, então chefe de polícia do Comando Militar da Amazônia.
É Rondon de cabeça pra baixo: “Matar ainda que não seja preciso; morrer nunca”, num processo iniciado com o colonizador e ainda não concluído. Na Amazônia, o cônego Manoel Teixeira, irmão do governador Pedro Teixeira, em carta ao rei de Portugal, em 5 de janeiro de 1654, escrita no leito da morte, na hora da verdade, declara que “no espaço de trinta e dois anos, são extintos a trabalho e a ferro, segundo a conta dos que ouviram, mais de dois milhões de índios de mais de quatrocentas aldeias”.
O relatório é um bom começo, porque evidencia que os índios precisam de uma Comissão da Verdade não apenas para os 21 anos de ditadura militar, mas para os 514 anos de História em que crimes foram e continuam sendo cometidos contra eles. Assim, podem surgir praças de maio dentro das malocas para que o Brasil generoso e solidário cobre mudanças radicais na política indigenista do país, impedindo que o Estado continue a serviço de interesses privados escusos.
Na próxima terça-feira, 3 de junho, a Comissão de Agricultura, Pecuária, Abastecimento e Desenvolvimento Rural da Câmara dos Deputados realizará audiência pública para debater sobre a revogação do Brasil à subscrição da Convenção 169 da Organização Internacional do Trabalho (OIT).
A Audiência pública foi requerida por Paulo Cezar Quartiero, Deputado Federal (DEM) ruralista denunciado pelo Ministério Público Federal por crimes cometidos contra indígenas em Roraima, principalmente durante o processo de desocupação da Reserva Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol, em 2008. Neste período Quartiero chegou a ser preso acusado de posse ilegal de artefato explosivo e formação de quadrilha. O deputado reponde ou já respondeu por pelo menos seis ações penais na Justiça Federal.
Foram convidados para a audiência pública Celso Luiz Nunes Amorim, Ministro de Estado da Defesa, Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, ministro de Estado das Relações Exteriores, General Maynard Marques de Santa Rosa, Oficial da Reserva das Forças Armadas, Lorenzo Carrasco, e o antropólogo Edward Mantoanelli Luz.
A Convenção 169 da OIT é uma conquista internacional dos povos indígenas e demais comunidades tradicionais cujas condições sociais, culturais e econômicas apresentam significativas diferenças quanto a outros setores da coletividade nacional. Vigente no Brasil desde 2004, quando foi aprovada pelo Congresso Nacional, a convenção garante a indígenas, quilombolas e povos tradicionais importantes direitos, como o direito à terra, à saúde, educação, a condições dignas de emprego e o direito fundamental de serem consultados sempre que sejam previstas medidas legislativas ou administrativas suscetíveis de afetá-los diretamente.
Para Fernando Prioste, advogado popular e o coordenador da Terra de Direitos, a iniciativa ruralista é um claro ataque a indígenas, quilombolas e povos tradicionais que lutam pela efetivação de direitos. “Muitos dos direitos previstos na convenção já estão assegurados em outras normas, inclusive na Constituição Federal. Contudo, existem direitos específicos que podem sofrer grandes retrocessos, como o direito de Consulta Livre, Prévia e Informada, além do direito à terra para povos e comunidades tradicionais”.
O advogado aponta que o princípio da proibição do não retrocesso social é um dos principais fundamentos contra a revogação da Convenção 169 da OIT no Brasil, já que os direitos assegurados por esse instrumento normativo são essenciais para a sobrevivência digna de indígenas, quilombolas e povos tradicionais. “Se de um lado o Governo Federal não tem atuado para assegurar a realização de direitos dos povos do campo e da floresta, por outro os ruralistas tentam derrubar as poucas leis que reconhecem direitos”.
Investida ruralista
A iniciativa ruralista faz parte de um pacote de medidas com o objetivo de retirar direitos fundamentais dos povos do campo e da floresta. Entre as tentativas de retrocesso está a Proposta de Emenda à Constituição – PEC 215, que visa transferir a competência da União na demarcação das terras indígenas para o Congresso Nacional, possibilitar a revisão das terras já demarcadas e mudar critérios e procedimentos para a demarcação destas áreas.
Também afetando diretamente os povos indígenas, a Portaria 303 da Advocacia Geral da União (AGU) quer restringir os direitos constitucionais dos índios e afronta tratados internacionais com a Convenção 169 da OIT, especialmente no que diz respeito à Consulta Prévia, Livre e Informada, e a Convenção Internacional sobre a Eliminação de Todas as Formas de Discriminação Racial.
As comunidades quilombos têm seu direito à terra questionada pela Ação Direta de Inconstitucionalidade (ADI) 3239, ajuizada pelo partido Democratas (DEM) em 2004, contra o Decreto Federal 4887/03, que trata da titulação de territórios quilombolas. A ADI teve o primeiro julgamento no Supremo Tribunal Federal-STF em 2012, quando o Ministro Relator Cesar Peluso votou pela inconstitucionalidade. Outros dez ministros do Supremo Tribunal Federal ainda deverão votar, por isso não é possível afirmar a posição do STF acerca do tema. Em dezembro de 2014 o Tribunal Regional Federal da 4ª Região (TRF4) decidiu pela constitucionalidade do Decreto.
Estudo do genoma de espécies do Semiárido e do Cerrado (como opequi) que são tolerantes a temperaturas elevadas e à escassez hídrica pode contribuir para o melhoramento genético de culturas como soja, milho, arroz e feijão, diz pesquisador da Embrapa (foto: Wikipedia)
02/06/2014
Por Noêmia Lopes
Agência FAPESP – A seriguela e o umbuzeiro, árvores comuns do Semiárido nordestino, e a sucupira-preta, do Cerrado, fazem parte de um grupo de plantas brasileiras que poderão desempenhar um papel importante para a agricultura no enfrentamento das consequências das mudanças climáticas. Elas estão entre as espécies do país com grande capacidade adaptativa, tolerantes à escassez hídrica e a temperaturas elevadas.
De acordo com Eduardo Assad, pesquisador do Centro Nacional de Pesquisa Tecnológica em Informática para a Agricultura (CNPTIA) da Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (Embrapa), o estudo do genoma dessas espécies pode ajudar a tornar culturas como soja, milho, arroz e feijão tão resistentes quanto elas aos extremos climáticos. Assad foi um dos palestrantes no quarto encontro do Ciclo de Conferências 2014 do programa BIOTA-FAPESP Educação, realizado no dia 22 de maio, em São Paulo.
“O Cerrado já foi muito mais quente e seco e árvores como pau-terra, pequi e faveiro, além da sucupira-preta, sobreviveram. Precisamos estudar o genoma dessas árvores, identificar e isolar os genes que as tornam tão adaptáveis. Isso pode significar, um dia, a chance de melhorar geneticamente culturas como soja e milho, tornando-as igualmente resistentes”, disse. “Não é fácil, mas precisamos começar.”
Assad destaca que o Brasil é líder em espécies resistentes. “O maior armazém do mundo de genes tolerantes ao aquecimento global está aqui, no Cerrado e no Semiárido Nordestino”, disse em sua palestra O impacto potencial das mudanças climáticas na agricultura.
Os modelos de pesquisa realizados pela Embrapa, muitos deles feitos em colaboração com instituições de outros 40 países, apontam que a redução de produtividade de culturas como milho, soja e arroz decorrente das mudanças climáticas deve se acentuar nas próximas décadas. “Isso vale para as variedades genéticas atuais. Uma das soluções é buscar genes alternativos para trabalhar com melhoramento”, disse Assad.
Outras plantas do Cerrado com grande capacidade adaptativa lembradas pelo pesquisador são a árvore pacari e os frutos do baru e da cagaita. No Semiárido Nordestino, árvores como a seriguela, o umbuzeiro e a cajazeira foram apontadas como opções importantes não só para estudos genéticos como também para programas voltados à geração de renda pela população local.
“Em vez de produzir culturas exóticas à região, é preciso investir naquelas que já fazem parte da biodiversidade nordestina e têm potencial de superar as consequências do aquecimento global”, adiantou Assad.
Para o melhoramento de espécies, de forma a que se tornem tolerantes ao estresse abiótico, a Embrapa planeja lançar, em 2015, uma soja resistente à deficiência hídrica, produzida a partir de um gene existente em uma planta do Japão. “Testamos essa variedade este ano, no Paraná, em um período sem chuvas. Ainda há estudos a serem feitos, mas ela está se saindo muito bem”, disse o pesquisador.
Assad também citou avanços empreendidos pelo Instituto Agronômico do Paraná (Iapar), que já lançou quatro cultivares de feijão com tolerância a temperaturas elevadas, além de pesquisas feitas no município de Varginha (MG) em busca de variáveis mais tolerantes para o café.
Prejuízos e mudanças no sistema produtivo
Cálculos da Embrapa feitos com base na produtividade média da soja mostram que somente esse grão acumulou mais de US$ 8,4 bilhões em perdas relacionadas às mudanças climáticas no Brasil entre 2003 e 2013. Já a produção de milho perdeu mais de US$ 5,2 bilhões no mesmo período.
A área considerada de baixo risco para o cultivo do café arábica deve diminuir 9,45% até 2020, causando prejuízos de R$ 882 milhões, e 17,15% até 2050, elevando as perdas para R$ 1,6 bilhão, de acordo com análises feitas na Embrapa e na Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp).
Diante dos prejuízos, outra solução apontada por Assad é a revisão do modelo produtivo agrícola. “A concentração de gases de efeito estufa na atmosfera aumentou mais de 20% nos últimos 30 anos, tornando indispensável a implantação de sistemas produtivos mais limpos”, disse à Agência FAPESP.
“O Brasil é muito respeitado nesse tema, em especial porque reduziu o desmatamento na Amazônia e, ao mesmo tempo, ampliou a produtividade na Região Amazônica”, disse.
Segundo Assad, isso abre canais de diálogo sobre a sustentabilidade na agricultura e sobre a adoção de estratégias como integração entre lavoura, pecuária e floresta, plantio direto na palha, uso de bactérias fixadoras de nitrogênio no solo, rochagem (uso de micro e macronutrientes para melhorar a fertilidade dos solos), aplicação de adubos organominerais, além do melhoramento genético.
“O confinamento do gado é outro ponto que está em discussão por pesquisadores e criadores em diversas partes do mundo. Ele pode resultar em menos emissão de gases de efeito estufa, mas torna o rebanho mais vulnerável à doença da vaca louca. Nesse caso, uma alternativa é a recuperação de pastos degradados”, afirmou Assad.
Estudos feitos na Embrapa Agrobiologia mostram que um quilo de carne produzido em pasto degradado emite mais de 32 quilos de CO2 equivalente por ano. Já em pasto recuperado a partir do que a agricultura de baixa emissão de carbono preconiza, a emissão por quilo de carne pode ser reduzida a três quilos de CO2 equivalente anuais.
“Isso mostra que ambientalistas, ruralistas, governo e setor privado precisam sentar e decidir o que fazer daqui em diante – qual sistema de produção adotar? Com ou sem pasto? Com ou sem árvores? Rotacionado ou não? São mudanças difíceis, de longo prazo, mas muitos agricultores já estão preocupados com essas questões, com os prejuízos que o aquecimento global pode trazer, e começam a buscar soluções”, disse.
A new study co-authored by Neil Burgess, Head of Science at UNEP-WCMC has proved the scientific value of indigenous and local knowledge collected from community members using focus groups.
Bringing together “western scientific” and “indigenous and local” knowledge is a goal of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The information is needed to fulfil a function of IPBES which is to produce assessments of the state of the planet’s environment, and identify changes over time. However, assuring its usefulness and quality is a challenge of bringing together western science and indigenous knowledge.
To test the utility of focus groups for validating data collected by a local community, UNEP-WCMC collaborated in a study led by Nordisk Fund for Miljø og Udvikling. The Miskito and Mayangna communities who live in the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve in Nicaragua – an area that is a global priority for conservation – participated in community-level focus group discussions on the abundance of natural resources such as mammals, birds and plants.
At the same time, data was collected by trained scientists or members of the local community using transect lines which is a common scientific method. All participants from the local community had considerable experience of hunting and collecting forest products which made them ideal candidates for the accurate identification of the species, and both males and females were represented.
When compared, the information provided by the focus groups was as accurate as the data collected using the more traditional scientific methods. In addition, the focus group approach empowered the indigenous and local communities who generally have limited engagement in such activities.
The results of this study confirm that indigenous and local knowledge is valid source of information for assessment processes such as IPBES. The focus groups were also found to be eight times cheaper than deploying scientists to conduct transect lines so this method could be a cost-effective and efficient way of supplying the increasing demand for environmental information.
FAMOUS FAN: A natural poster boy for the campaign was one of Sport Recife’s most famous fans, 69-year-old Ivaldo Firmino dos Santos, who received a heart transplant 12 years ago.
Published — Monday 2 June 2014
Last update 2 June 2014 12:07 am
RIO DE JANEIRO: An organ donation campaign by one of Brazil’s biggest football clubs targeting its fans has led to a massive rise in the number of life-changing transplants and reduced waiting lists for organs in the area almost to zero.
“Every Brazilian is born with football in the soul,” says Jorge Peixoto, of Sport Club Recife, one of the top teams in the north-east of the country.
For the last two years though, he has been more concerned about what happens to fans’ bodies when they die.
The club decided it “must look beyond the 11 players on the field and use its power for bigger things,” says Peixoto, the club’s vice-president for social programs.
It asked them to become “immortal fans” donating their organs after they die so that their love for the club will live on in someone else’s body, the BBC reported.
“I promise that your eyes will keep on watching Sport Club Recife,” says one man waiting for a cornea transplant in the television ad made to publicize the campaign.
“I promise that your heart will keep on beating for Sport Club Recife,” says a potential recipient of a transplanted heart.
The video is screened at every match in the club’s Ilha do Retiro stadium, a venue that seats 35,000 but could be filled almost twice over with the number of people who have signed up for a donor card — 66,000 so far.
The waiting list for organ transplants in the city of Recife was reduced to zero in the first year, Peixoto says, and the impact has also been felt throughout the surrounding state of Pernambuco.
“We used to perform from five to seven heart transplants a year, but last year we achieved 28… it was an incredible increase,” says Fernando Figueira, director of heart transplants at Pernambuco’s Institute of Integrated Medicine.
“There is a very tight connection between the campaign and this rise.”
People can apply online for the Sport Donor card — it’s the size of a credit card, the words printed over the outline of a heart with a fiery red backdrop.
According to Brazilian law, it’s up to the family to decide whether the organs of their loved ones will be donated after their death. But making this decision is not easy in such painful moments.
The success of the campaign has been noticed around the world and Sport Recife has been contacted by Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona, both thinking about adopting similar campaigns, Peixoto says.
He hopes the forthcoming World Cup will help spread the idea further.
A New York Times investigation of match fixing ahead of the last World Cup gives an unusually detailed look at the ease with which professional gamblers can fix matches.
JOHANNESBURG — A soccer referee named Ibrahim Chaibou walked into a bank in a small South African city carrying a bag filled with as much as $100,000 in $100 bills, according to another referee traveling with him. The deposit was so large that a bank employee gave Mr. Chaibou a gift of commemorative coins bearing the likeness of Nelson Mandela.
Later that night in May 2010, Mr. Chaibou refereed an exhibition match between South Africa and Guatemala in preparation for the World Cup, the world’s most popular sporting event. Even to the casual fan, his calls were suspicious — he called two penalties for hand balls even though the ball went nowhere near the players’ hands.
Mr. Chaibou, a native of Niger, had been chosen to work the match by a company based in Singapore that was a front for a notorious match-rigging syndicate, according to an internal, confidential report by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body.
FIFA’s investigative report and related documents, which were obtained by The New York Times and have not been publicly released, raise serious questions about the vulnerability of the World Cup to match fixing. The tournament opens June 12 in Brazil.
The report found that the match-rigging syndicate and its referees infiltrated the upper reaches of global soccer in order to fix exhibition matches and exploit them for betting purposes. It provides extensive details of the clever and brazen ways that fixers apparently manipulated “at least five matches and possibly more” in South Africa ahead of the last World Cup. As many as 15 matches were targets, including a game between the United States and Australia, according to interviews and emails printed in the FIFA report.
Although corruption has vexed soccer for years, the South Africa case gives an unusually detailed look at the ease with which professional gamblers can fix matches, as well as the governing body’s severe problems in policing itself and its member federations. The report, at 44 pages, includes an account of Mr. Chaibou’s trip to the bank, as well as many other scenes describing how matches were apparently rigged.
After one match, the syndicate even made a death threat against the official who tried to stop the fix, investigators found.
“Were the listed matches fixed?” the report said. “On the balance of probabilities, yes!”
The Times investigated the South African match-fixing scandal by interviewing dozens of soccer officials, referees, gamblers, investigators and experts in South Africa, Malaysia, England, Finland and Singapore. The Times also reviewed hundreds of pages of interview transcripts, emails, referee rosters and other confidential FIFA documents.
FIFA, which is expected to collect about $4 billion in revenue for this four-year World Cup cycle for broadcast fees, sponsorship deals and ticket sales, has relative autonomy at its headquarters in Zurich. But The Times found problems that could now shadow this month’s World Cup.
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A letter from Football 4U International to the South African soccer federation offered to provide referees for South Africa’s exhibition matches before the World Cup.
■ FIFA’s investigators concluded that the fixers had probably been aided by South African soccer officials, yet FIFA did not officially accuse anyone of match fixing or bar anyone from the sport as a result of those disputed matches.
■ A FIFA spokeswoman said Friday that the investigation into South Africa was continuing, but no one interviewed for this article spoke of being contacted recently by FIFA officials. Critics have questioned FIFA’s determination and capability to curb match fixing.
■ Many national soccer federations with teams competing in Brazil are just as vulnerable to match-fixing as South Africa’s was: They are financially shaky, in administrative disarray and politically divided.
Ralf Mutschke, who has since become FIFA’s head of security, said in a May 21 interview with FIFA.com that “match fixing is an evil to all sports,” and he acknowledged that the World Cup was vulnerable.
“The fixers are trying to look for football matches which are generating a huge betting volume, and obviously, international football tournaments such as the World Cup are generating these kinds of huge volumes,” Mr. Mutschke said. “Therefore, the World Cup in general has a certain risk.”
Mr. Chaibou, the referee at the center of the South African case, said in a phone interview that he had never fixed a match, and he denied knowing or having ever spoken to Wilson Raj Perumal, a notorious gambler who calls himself the world’s most prolific match fixer and whom FIFA called one of the suspected masterminds of the South Africa scheme.
“I did not know this man,” Mr. Chaibou said. “I had no contact with him ever.”
Mr. Chaibou said FIFA had not contacted him since his retirement in 2011. He declined to answer any questions about money he may have received in South Africa.
The tainted South African matches were not the only suspect ones. Europol, the European Union’s police intelligence agency, said last year that there were 680 suspicious matches played globally from 2008 to 2011, including World Cup qualifying matches and games in some of Europe’s most prestigious leagues and tournaments.
“There are no checks and balances and no oversight,” Terry Steans, a former FIFA investigator who wrote the report on South Africa, said of the syndicate’s efforts there in 2010. “It’s so efficient and so under the radar.”
An exhibition match between Guatemala and host South Africa in May 2010 at Peter Mokaba Stadium in Polokwane was “manipulated for betting fraud purposes,” a 44-page FIFA report found.CreditAssociated Press
Referees for Sale
As players from South Africa and Guatemala gathered for their national anthems, Mr. Chaibou stood between the teams at midfield. He was flanked by two assistant referees who had also been selected by Football 4U International, the Singapore-based company that was the front for the match-rigging syndicate.
They were present because of a shrewd maneuver the fixers had begun weeks earlier to penetrate the highest levels of the South African soccer federation.
A man identifying himself as Mohammad entered the federation offices in Johannesburg carrying a letter dated April 29, 2010. The letter offered to provide referees for South Africa’s exhibition matches before the World Cup and pay for their travel expenses, lodging, meals and match fees, taking the burden off the financially troubled federation. “We are extremely keen to work closely with your good office,” the letter read.
It was signed by Mr. Perumal, the match fixer, who was also an executive with Football 4U.
Penalty kicks in an exhibition match between Guatemala and host South Africa in May 2010 awarded by the referee Ibrahim Chaibou aided South Africa’s 5-0 victory. According to FIFA’s report, Mr. Chaibou received as much as $100,000 to fix the match. Mr. Chaibou said he had never fixed a match.CreditGianluigi Guercia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The offer sounded strange to Steve Goddard, the acting head of refereeing for the South African Football Association at the time. An amiable, heavyset Englishman who sometimes used a table leg for a walking stick, Mr. Goddard had had an eclectic career in and out of soccer. He sang in Welsh choirs and worked as a sound engineer for an album made at Abbey Road Studios. He knew that FIFA rules allowed only national soccer federations to appoint referees. Outside companies, like Football 4U, had no such authority.
Several days later, Mr. Goddard said, Mohammad returned and offered him a bribe of about $3,500, saying he was holding up the deal. Mr. Goddard said he declined the offer.
Nevertheless, other South African executives moved forward with Football 4U. At least two contracts were drafted, giving Football 4U permission to appoint referees for five of the country’s exhibition matches. The FIFA report called the contracts “so very rudimentary as to be commercially laughable.”
One contract, unsigned, bore the name of Anthony Santia Raj, identified by FIFA as an associate of the Singapore syndicate. The other contract was signed by Leslie Sedibe, then the chief executive of the South African soccer federation.
In an interview, Mr. Sedibe said that someone from Football 4U had lied to him about the company’s intentions, and that the FIFA report belonged “in a toilet.”
“It is the biggest load of rubbish,” he said.
Mr. Santia Raj could not be reached for comment.
Investigators found that South African soccer officials performed no background checks on “Mohammad” or Football 4U. The company was already infamous: It had attempted to fix a match in China about eight months earlier. Mohammad turned out to be Jason Jo Lourdes, another associate of the Singaporean match-fixing syndicate, according to the FIFA report. Mr. Lourdes could not be reached for comment.
The report said the South African soccer officials were “either easily duped or extremely foolish.”
But their behavior “inevitably leads to the conclusion” that several employees of the federation “were complicit in a criminal conspiracy to manipulate these matches,” the report said.
Fixers are attracted to soccer because of the action it generates on the vast and largely unregulated Asian betting markets. And if executed well, a fixed soccer match can be hard to detect. Players can deliberately miss shots; referees can eject players or award penalty kicks; team officials can outright tell players to lose a match.
Most fixed bets are placed on which team will win against the spread and on the total number of expected goals. Gamblers often place large bets in underground markets in Asia. By some estimates, the illegal betting market in Asia amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
The South African federation, troubled by financial difficulties and administrative dysfunction, was a ripe target. Once Football 4U had insinuated itself, the syndicate was able to switch referees at the last moment, and it had access to dressing areas and the sidelines.
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According to an email from Wilson Raj Perumal to Ace Kika, a South African federation official, the Singapore syndicate asked to provide referees for matches.
“The situation was ideal for the criminal organization using Football 4U to exploit these vulnerabilities and to offer money to SAFA staff, who were themselves suffering financial hardship,” the FIFA report said.
Mr. Perumal did not respond to requests for an interview. But he wrote a memoir, published in April, that captured his brazenness and provided details consistent with FIFA’s report. He wrote that his group offered $60,000 to $75,000 to Mr. Chaibou and his crew for each exhibition match they would fix.
“I can do the job,” Mr. Chaibou replied, according to Mr. Perumal’s memoir, “Kelong Kings.” (“Kelong” is Malay slang for match fixing.)
The memoir says Mr. Chaibou was paid $60,000 for manipulating the South Africa-Guatemala match.
The day of the match, Mr. Chaibou walked with Robert Sithole, a South African member of the officiating crew, to a Bidvest Bank in Polokwane, about three hours northeast of Johannesburg, Mr. Sithole said in the report.
Mr. Sithole told investigators that he watched as Mr. Chaibou deposited a “quite thick” wad of $100 bills, perhaps as much as $100,000, though Mr. Sithole could not be certain of the amount. Mr. Chaibou said he wired the money to his wife in Niger, according to the report.
A woman at the bank gave Mr. Chaibou a gift of coins bearing the likeness of Mandela, an apparent reward for “having deposited a huge amount of money on this account,” Mr. Sithole told FIFA investigators.
Hours later, Mr. Chaibou arrived at Peter Mokaba Stadium for the match. Another referee from Niger was scheduled to officiate.
Instead, Mr. Chaibou took the field.
Questionable Calls
That night, only seats in the lower bowl were full, but the crowd of about 25,000 was noisily expectant.
As the match began, FIFA’s Early Warning System, which monitors gambling on sanctioned matches, began to detect odd movements in betting. Gamblers kept increasing their expectations of how many goals would be scored, a possible sign of insider betting.
Before the match, the betting line had been 2.68 goals, an ordinary number, said Matthew Benham, a former financial trader who runs a legal gambling syndicate in England. By kickoff, the expected goals rose drastically, to 3.48, and then to more than 4 during the match, Mr. Benham said.
The questionable calls began early. In the 12th minute, South Africa scored on a penalty kick after a Guatemalan defender was called for a hand ball even though he was clearly outside the penalty area. At halftime, the two assistant referees from Tanzania “looked shivering, nervous,” Mr. Sithole said in the report. He was part of the officiating crew.
South Africa vs Guatemala (5-0) HighlightsVideo by Ecuatoriano122395
In the 50th minute, Guatemala was awarded a suspicious penalty kick for a hand ball, even though a South African defender stopped a shot in front of the goal with his chest, not his arm.
Mr. Goddard watched from the grandstands, where he noticed others seemed just as incredulous about the refereeing. A South African broadcaster kept looking in his direction in disbelief. A fellow South African soccer official repeatedly turned to Mr. Goddard with open arms, as if to say, “What about that?”
In the 56th minute, another debatable penalty kick was awarded to South Africa, which resulted in the team’s fourth goal in a 5-0 rout.
The FIFA report stated plainly that “we can conclude that this match was indeed manipulated for betting fraud purposes.”
‘We’re Going to Eliminate You’
South Africa had one more warm-up match, against Denmark on June 5, before it opened the World Cup. While expectations for the team soared, some officials in the South African soccer federation had grown concerned about the refereeing.
The night before the match with Denmark, several South African officials delivered a stern lecture to the appointed referees, who were from Tanzania and had been selected by Football 4U. Nothing inappropriate would be tolerated, they were told.
Ace Kika, one of three South African federation officials present, was vehement. He later complained to investigators that men connected to Football 4U had consistently tried to enter the referees’ dressing room at halftime of the exhibition matches.
The morning of the Denmark match, the scheduled chief referee withdrew, citing a stomach bug, although the report described him as “clearly alarmed.” A substitute referee was needed — fast.
Given the officiating in the Guatemala match, Mr. Goddard already had another referee on standby. “I was prepared for anything to happen that afternoon,” he said in an interview.
He persuaded Matthew Dyer, a respected South African referee, to officiate, even though it was unusual for a referee to work a match involving his home country.
But when Mr. Goddard arrived at the stadium, he found a familiar figure already there — Mr. Chaibou.
As the teams prepared to take the field, Mr. Dyer was hidden away in an unused room to perform his warm-up exercises. Mr. Chaibou received a massage and completed his own warm-ups, but that was as far as he got.
As Mr. Chaibou waited in a tunnel to lead the teams onto the field, Mr. Goddard said, he put his hand on Mr. Chaibou’s shoulder and told him: “I am kicking you out of the match. You are joining me in the grandstand.”
Another South African soccer official said he locked Mr. Chaibou in the referees’ dressing room while Mr. Dyer took the field instead.
Steve Goddard, the acting head of refereeing for the South African Football Association in 2010, said he had refused a bribe from Football 4U International, a front for a match-fixing syndicate, over the appointment of referees.CreditJoao Silva/The New York Times
South Africa won, 1-0. In Mr. Perumal’s memoir, he wrote that the fixers had wanted three goals in the match, and that $1 million “went up in smoke.” He also wrote that Mr. Goddard was “a big troublemaker.”
After the match, as Mr. Goddard drove away from the stadium, his cellphone rang. It was Mr. Perumal, who had once been convicted of assault for breaking the leg of a soccer player in an aborted match-fixing attempt.
“This time, you really have gone too far and, you know, we’re going to eliminate you,” he said, according to Mr. Goddard. Mr. Perumal later bragged about the episode, the report said. But in his memoir he said that he had threatened only to sue Mr. Goddard for breach of contract, not kill him.
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Goddard testified that Mr. Perumal threatened his life.
The South African officials made no written report of the threat and did not alert FIFA or the police at the time.
But Mr. Goddard said he took the threat so seriously that “to save my life,” his colleague, Mr. Kika, suggested that they allow the Singapore syndicate to pick the referee for the next day’s exhibition match between Nigeria and North Korea. Under duress, Mr. Goddard said, he agreed.
“That was basically to save my neck,” he said in an interview.
That night, at 8:26, Mr. Kika sent an email granting permission for Football 4U executives to appoint the referee. Mr. Kika declined a request for comment.
The referee in the Nigeria-North Korea match made several questionable calls. FIFA investigators could not confirm whether it was Mr. Chaibou, but they said the referee was definitely not the Portuguese official who had been assigned.
The referee took “a very harsh stance” in giving a red card for a seemingly lesser infraction, and he later took “a very liberal stance” in awarding a suspicious penalty kick, the report said. Nigeria won, 3-1.
If the Singapore syndicate was not shocked by the result, many bettors were. “We were absolutely trashed in that game,” said Mr. Benham, the professional gambler. “It made no sense at all in the betting market.”
As South Africa faced Denmark on June 5, the United States defeated Australia, 3-1, in another exhibition. According to an email from Mr. Perumal to Mr. Kika on May 24, the Singapore syndicate asked to provide referees for the match. In an interview, Mr. Goddard said that Football 4U proposed using three referees from Bosnia and Herzegovina who, according to the FIFA report, would later receive lifetime bans from soccer for their involvement in match fixing.
Mr. Goddard said he had warned American and Australian officials of Football 4U’s intentions. Ultimately, South African referees officiated the match.
United States soccer officials said they did not recall receiving any warnings about fixers or a change in referees. The FIFA report gives no indication that the game was manipulated.
“We’ve never heard anything about this before and have no reason to doubt the integrity of the match,” said Sunil Gulati, the president of the United States Soccer Federation.
Even if it could not place referees in the United States match, Perumal wrote in his memoir that the Singapore syndicate walked away from the South African exhibitions “with a good four to five million dollars.”
Shrugging at the Evidence
Mr. Perumal remained in South Africa until June 30, 2010, deep into the World Cup, according to the FIFA report. Mr. Perumal wrote that he offered a referee $400,000 to manipulate a World Cup match, but that the referee declined because he thought Mr. Perumal had a “loose tongue.”
After the World Cup, a freelance journalist, Mark Gleason, reported suspicions among some African soccer officials that exhibition matches had been rigged. FIFA did nothing at the time.
In fact, FIFA did not investigate the suspicious games for nearly two years, until March 2012. By then, Mr. Chaibou had reached FIFA’s mandatory retirement age, 45. FIFA has said it investigates only active referees, so its investigation of Mr. Chaibou stopped. “It took a while to get around to it, longer than we would have liked,” Mr. Steans, the author of the report, said in an interview.
At the time, FIFA’s investigative staff amounted to five people responsible for examining dozens of international match-fixing cases, he said. The group has no subpoena power or law enforcement authority.
Investigators spent only three days in South Africa and never interviewed the referees or the teams involved, the report said. An unsuccessful attempt was made to interview Mr. Chaibou at the time, according to Mr. Steans.
FIFA officials in Zurich received the report in October 2012 and passed it to the soccer officials in South Africa; it had little meaningful effect there. A few South African officials were suspended but later reinstated. And no one was charged with a crime even though FIFA had found “compelling evidence” of fixed exhibitions and apparent collusion by some South African soccer officials.
“We never got to speak to the referees, which was sad,” said Mr. Steans, who operates his own sports security firm. “It would have tied up a lot of loose ends. I’m sure they would have given us some relevant information.”
Mr. Sedibe, then the chief executive of the South African soccer federation, shrugged off the report as a politically motivated witch hunt. “Why is it taking so long to get to the bottom of this?” he said. “Why not refer this matter to the police to investigate and bring closure to it?”
Three months after the suspicious South African matches, Mr. Perumal was linked to another daring scheme. In September 2010, he organized a match in Bahrain in which the opponent was a fake squad claiming to be the national team of Togo, in West Africa. The referee for that match? Mr. Chaibou.
The presence of Football 4U and Mr. Chaibou made soccer organizers uneasy. In 2011, a South African official, Adeel Carelse, said that after being misled by some in his national federation, he learned that Mr. Chaibou was about to referee an under-23 age-group match in Johannesburg. Mr. Carelse said he raced across the city with a car full of South African referees to replace Mr. Chaibou’s crew at the last minute.
Ibrahim Chaibou, second from left in Nigeria in 2011, the referee at the center of the South African case, was seen depositing a “quite thick” wad of $100 bills before a suspect exhibition match, according to FIFA.CreditSunday Alamba/Associated Press
Mr. Chaibou retired to Niger in 2011.
Mr. Perumal was arrested in Finland in 2011 and found guilty of corruption. He was given a two-year sentence, although he was released early. He was arrested again in Finland in late April for his continued role in match fixing.
Since the South African episode, Mr. Steans has left FIFA. He said the investigative staff in Zurich had a docket of about 90 match-fixing cases worldwide. along with other security duties. To seriously combat match fixing, Mr. Steans said, FIFA needs at least 10 investigators working full time on monitoring the manipulation of games, and two offices in each of its six international soccer confederations.
“You need the local intelligence and local knowledge on the ground,” Mr. Steans said. “You need to be talking to sources face to face to get live information that helps you counter match fixing before the fix happens.”
A FIFA spokeswoman said Friday that the Zurich staff now included six investigators and that FIFA worked with a broad network of law enforcement officials including Interpol. Delia Fischer, the spokeswoman, said that for the World Cup, 12 security officers would be assigned to each stadium, with the monitoring of potential match fixing among their duties.
In addition, Ms. Fischer said, a security staff of 18 will be on hand from FIFA headquarters in Zurich. Mr. Mutschke, FIFA’s security chief, said on the organization’s website that a primary concern about fixing is the third and final game of the group phase of the World Cup, when a particular team has been eliminated or has already qualified for the second round.
“Prevention is not something where you can see easy success stories the next day,” Mr. Mutschke said in the FIFA.com interview. “So we are investing in long-term solutions, and we certainly need the help of our member associations as well to be successful in the end.”
In late 2012, an elite anticorruption police unit, called the Hawks, said it was investigating potential corruption linked to the match-fixing scandal inside South Africa’s soccer federation, including a possible bribe of about $800,000. But in March, President Jacob Zuma of South Africa said he would not form a commission to examine charges of match fixing, leaving the matter to FIFA.
“I’m disappointed for South African football,” Mr. Steans said. “I’m disappointed for football in general because when these things happen to the game, they need to be investigated and the truth found. And two years, well, four years since this happened was way too long.”
The other day, as she was priming her re-election campaign, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff hit a speed bump. There she was, racing across the country to launch shiny public-works projects ahead of the World Cup, and the only thing those annoying journalists wanted to know was if the airports would be renovated on time and up to “FIFA standards.” The reference, of course, was to the rigorous Switzerland-based global soccer authority. “The airports will not be FIFA-standard,” she shot back. “They will be Brazil-standard airports.”
And there it was, in a sound bite, the official spin on Brazil’s complicated moment in the sun, a candid take on the rolling public-relations disaster that has been this country’s relationship with the wider world and its international gatekeepers. Rousseff’s prickly riposte might have been calculated. With presidential elections scheduled for October, she has been struggling in the polls. Hardly a week passes without some angry klatsch or another taking the streets — not least because of Brasilia’s perceived weak hand in dealing with those overweening bean counters from Zurich. A mini-genre of anti-FIFA articles has bloomed here and abroad. It’s about time the Brazilians kicked back, she said.
It’s an odd moment to circle the wagons. Brazil is days away from the curtain call for the crown event of the most popular sport on the planet. Two years from now, Rio de Janeiro will stage the Summer Olympics, drawing hundreds of thousands of athletes and tourists, plus billions of television viewers. And yet nationalism and resentment have flared, and with them memories of times that Brazilians had imagined were behind them. “FIFA go home,” says a message stenciled in white on the pavement of Copacabana, Rio’s signature beachfront neighborhood.
Squint a little and you can see the faded graffiti of another cranky time, some three decades ago, when international creditors were banging on Brazil’s door for their due and the International Monetary Fund was their policeman. FIFA Go Home! is the direct heir to IMF Go Home!
This is passing strange. Brazil, with the world’s seventh-largest economy, traffics in a globalized world and its signifiers and acronyms, from the Gini coefficient, which measures economic inequality, to the International Organization for Standardization, which sets proprietary, industrial and commercial standards. When the country excels, Brasilia trumpets the achievement. The nation’s traditionally skewed income inequality score has improved since the beginning of the last decade, even as most fast-growing developing nations become more lopsided. When the country flops, such as in the PISA — the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s yardstick for 15-year-olds, measured by standardized scholastic tests (Brazil is a lowly 58th on a scale of 65 nations) — the official handlers rush to print disclaimers. Then there’s the mother of all acronyms, the WTO. Not only does a Brazilian, Roberto Azevedo, head the World Trade Organization, few countries have been as aggressive as his in wielding its authority, taking protectionists to task 26 times since 1995.
That’s one of the big reasons that Brazilians revere soccer. Roberto DaMatta, the brilliant anthropologist, nailed it when he said that futebol isn’t some opiate for the witless. Brazilians love the game because it is fair, has transparent rules and is played on a level playing field. What counts on the pitch is how you play, not who you know. It’s a scale model of a better world. The current World Cup anger notwithstanding, Brazilians have always been proud of their FIFA standing (currently fourth), and they will remind visitors that they got there the proper way: by beating the best.
More than an ankle kick at Brazil’s intrusive outsiders, Rousseff’s FIFA outburst was essentially the declaration of an era. To her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil was destined for glory. He pushed for a seat on the United Nations Security Council and a nuclear energy deal with Iran. He opened 40 new embassies abroad. Bagging the World Cup was part of the package. Brazil “will now with great pride do its homework,” he promised the FIFA brass in Zurich. That was then.
To contact the writer of this article: Mac Margolis at macmargolis@terra.com.br.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net.
Can Elinor Ostrom’s revolutionary ideas halt climate change, improve people’s livelihoods, and save the world’s forests?
“[T]here’s a five-letter word I’d like to repeat and repeat and repeat: Trust.”
Thus spoke Elinor Ostrom in her 2009 Stockholm lecture, when at age 77 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. A professor of political science at Indiana University-Bloomington until her death in 2012, she’d spent a lifetime traveling the world and observing everyday citizens cooperating against all odds.
Ostrom’s famous smile. Photo courtesy of the International Land Coalition under a Creative Commons license from Flickr.com.
Ostrom frequently encountered groups of people managing commonly shared resources, creating systems based on trust, such as peasant farmers in Nepal cooperatively managing simple irrigation systems, and people working to solve human-wildlife conflict with forest elephants in Kenya. Why, she wondered, were these people sacrificing their own time and energy to collectively solve social and environmental problems, creating local institutions that lasted many generations? Such collective behavior flew in the face of the longstanding theory of the day, which said that people will selfishly take whatever they can, ultimately causing a “tragedy of the commons” – depleting fish stocks, destroying forests and pastures, usurping groundwater, and otherwise destroying the planet and ultimately, their own livelihoods. People, so the theory went, were too stupid or selfish to solve their own problems and needed regulation by market forces or a top-down government, or the planet was toast.
Yet through trial and error and much research, Ostrom had found the secret. “When people have trust that others are going to reciprocate and be trustworthy, including their officials, they will be highly cooperative,” Ostrom said in an interview with journalists after the Nobel Committee announced her prize. “When there’s no trust, no matter how much force is threatened, people won’t cooperate unless immediately facing a gun.” When people don’t trust others, they “cheat” – breaking rules and seeking their own self-interest.
In her 1990 book Governing the Commons – which the Nobel Committee called her most important contribution – Ostrom proposed eight “design principles” (see Sidebar) that she found were consistently present in sustainable, cooperatively managed commons (any resource shared by multiple people). Drawn from several decades of research, Ostrom’s insights stemmed from personally witnessing examples in the real world, but she named the specific principles by statistically analyzing thousands of published studies in many fields.
Ostrom found environmentally and socially sustainable ‘common pool resources’ had several of these principles in place.
Ostrom devoted the last decades of her life to figuring out how to have sustainable communities and healthy ecosystems (particularly forests) – rather than humans and nature being at odds. She believed in the power and intelligenfce of ordinary people to collectively solve their own problems so long as higher-level governments did not interfere. Her alma mater, UCLA, called her “an ardent champion of the idea that people will learn to share and thrive if given the opportunity.”
“If given the opportunity” is key. Ostrom’s research did not find that people always cooperate. “There are settings in which they will grab like mad,” she explained in a video interview with Nobelprize.org. “Humans are neither all angels or all devils. It is the context in which they find themselves that enables them to have more willingness to use reciprocity, to trust one another.”
“The resources in good condition around the world have users with long-term interest who invest in monitoring and building [trust]. I really want that to be a big lesson,” she said in the final moments of her Nobel lecture. “Unfortunately, many policy analysts and public officials haven’t absorbed the lesson yet, and that’s a problem.”
Ostrom’s work lives on at Indiana University’s Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, and in the many scholars and colleagues who continue to study, refine, and apply her theories in the real world. However, her untimely death from pancreatic cancer three years after receiving the highest honor in her field deprived her work of a folksy, outspoken, kind-hearted champion of the common man and woman.
“She had incredible energy and determination, and an easy way of communicating with ordinary people,” says her colleague Mike McGinnis, IU political science professor and Workshop member.
Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Founded The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in the 1970s, where Lin co-directed it until her death in 2012. It is housed in an old house on the Indiana University-Bloomington campus, and Workshop members (professors, graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scholars) have offices in this as well as two neighboring buildings. Photo (c) copyright 2014 Wendee Nicole.
The Nobel brought Ostrom’s already robust theories greater acclaim, and the theories remain super-hot in academic circles, yet her lessons have yet to be fully absorbed into global policy. While many countries have now embraced some forms of decentralization – giving more power to regional and local authorities – these policies do not always mean local people are given more influene. And among the general public there remains a general lack of awareness of Ostrom’s revolutionary ideas; say “polycentricity” or “commons” to a friend, and watch their eyes glaze over.
Yet Ostrom’s theories cut across political party lines and offer deep, meaningful insights about how to manage forests, fisheries, and communities – all of which are in flux as global climate change may reach crisis proportions in the coming decades. In her latter years, Ostrom grew deeply concerned that the United Nations REDD+ [reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation] mechanism would lead to more, not less, deforestation if indigenous and local people are not given rights and land tenure, and she openly discussed the applicability of her research to global climate negotiations. Even though REDD+ policies are designed to benefit locals, without land tenure, those policies could lead to evictions of forest users when people with more power and wealth engage in a “carbon grab,” as a recently publishedreport called it.
“If local users and Indigenous peoples in the developing world are not recognized and assigned clear rights, REDD could lead to more deforestation,” Ostrom said at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen. Neglecting her work could be suicidal in times such as these.
Understanding how cooperation and trust help people create sustainable social-ecological systems began to gel for Ostrom in the 1980s, during her travels around the world. “I came back from a particularly vivid occasion in Nepal … where someone had dug into an irrigation channel and several [people] went running down the hill yelling and screaming [at the perpetrator] and others started patching it immediately,” she says in the Nobelprize.org interview. “I mean, the energy they put in! There was no rational calculation about this. They just did it. The game theory prediction was they wouldn’t.”
She knew the theory must be wrong, because the real world was staring her in the face.
Game theory came into the public consciousness with the 2001 biopic A Beautiful Mind, about the life of Economics Nobel Laureate John Forbes Nash. The movie simplified his theory this way: most guys go for the best-looking girl (“the blonde”), resulting in a lot of losers since only one gets the girl. In a similar vein, biologist Garrett Hardin theorized in his famous 1968 Science article, “Tragedy of the Commons,” that people adding cows to a commonly used pasture would act selfishly, ignoring the collective good.
“Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited,” Hardin wrote, adding dramatically, “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
With daily news reporting razed tropical forests, biological extinctions, eroded and desertified land and an atmosphere rapidly accumulating CO2, it seems that these theories match reality. Why then, did Ostrom keep finding real-world situations that defied the predictions?
Batwa men and women in Uganda’s Makongoro village process reeds from the forest to weave baskets which they sell to make money for their families and communities. Now conservation refugees evicted from their traditional forest home, now they must receive permits from the Ugandan government to harvest forest products, but most are not educated and need assistance to fill out forms and paperwork. In contrast with Ostrom’s design principles, the government did not actively consult the Batwa when evicting them from the forest but chased them out with guns, giving no land or resources to establish new lives. Photo (c) copyright 2014 Wendee Nicole.
Taking Hardin, Nash and similar theorists to heart, policymakers opted for two opposite solutions to protecting the commons: privatize natural resources (leading to “payment for ecosystem services” type projects), or have governments lock natural areas up in preserves. The latter usually meant stripping rights from locals who had long used these commons for subsistence fishing or hunting, or in the case of forests, gathering firewood, medicinal plants, and other forest products. Many governments (supported by large conservation organizations) evicted indigenous peoples from their homeland in the belief they damaged ecosystems. Ostrom’s research found that such policies are sometimes counterproductive. Many of the evicted people receive little or no government assistance and end up as “conservation refugees,” adrift with nowhere to go and no means to support themselves.
In Uganda, indigenous Batwa forest pygmies lived within the Echuya Forest Reserve, acting as forest monitors for non-indigenous locals who could only access the forest once per week. Compared to four other community-managed forests where Batwa did not live, the Echuya forest experienced the least illegal firewood harvest and other non-sanctioned activities. Yet in 1992, Uganda evicted Batwa from all government forests in order to create national parks for tourism. Regaining rights to harvest forest products has been a slow, uneven process and these indigenous people now suffer some of the worst poverty in all of Uganda. As Ostrom’s theories would predict, evidence suggests that poaching and illegal access of the forest have increased since the Batwa were evicted.
Three young Batwa children run and play in their land adjacent to Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. The Batwa were evicted by the government in 1991 and now live as conservation refugees outside the park, often in extreme poverty. Research by Workshop scholar Abwoli Banana (who runs the Uganda IFRI Center) showed that forests in which Batwa lived before their eviction had less, not more, forest degradation, than other community-managed forests, which matches Ostrom’s theories. Photo (c) copyright 2014 Wendee Nicole.
“There are environments, especially in some of the developing world, where [locals’] own institutions that had evolved over long periods of time were taken away from them. They’ve lived under top-down regimes and some of the trust and capability of working together have been destroyed,” Ostrom said in a documentary created about the 2009 Economics Nobel Laureates, herself and Oliver Williamson. “It’s very hard to re-establish [trust] once you’ve taken it away.” Ostroms found that taking rights away from locals and indigenous can lead to more, not less, forest degradation.
Lin the Connector
Described by The Economist as “a little like Agatha Christie’s detective, Jane Marple, apparently a bit sweet and scatty, in reality sharp as a paper cut,” Ostrom was remarkably far-sighted in her long, illustrious career.
“I’ve never met anyone like her in my life. She was a ball of energy,” says Burnell Fischer, her IU colleague and current co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which Ostrom directed until she died in June 2012. (Her husband, Vincent Ostrom, died within weeks of Lin’s passing).
“She was connected to all kinds of people around the world, says Fischer.”
Ostrom not only knew people in varied fields the world over, she connected them – and their ideas. She was what Malcolm Gladwell would call a Connector, one of the rare few whose “ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, and energy” – the type of person who can spark a fire, tip the scales, and change the world. “By having a foot in so many different worlds,” writes Gladwell in The Tipping Point, “[connectors] have the effect of bringing them all together.”
“Stories of Ostrom’s collaborative genius are legion: suggesting just the right article or idea to jump-start a dissertation; making a contact that launches a recently minted Ph.D.’s career,” wrote Jeremy Shere in IU’s SPEA (School of Public and Environmental Affairs) magazine.
Born Elinor Awan, her life – and her interest in cooperation – began under less than ideal circumstances. Raised mainly by a single mom in Los Angeles during the Depression, she first saw people cooperating during the war, planting victory gardens and voluntarily limiting the use of their resources. Whatever passions drove her, Ostrom overcame obstacles throughout her life with a surprising degree of self-confidence. Peers taunted her over her father’s Jewish heritage, even though she attended her mother’s Protestant church, and setbacks she experienced as a woman in academia gave her much empathy for those who experience discrimination. Setbacks only seemed to push her forward.
Photo taken January 1992 of Vincent Ostrom, Tej Kumari Mahat (chair person of the FMIS in Sera-baguwa bandh irrigation system, Tharpu, Tanahu) and Elinor Ostrom in Tharpu village, Tanahu. Photo under the Digital Library of the Commons.
In an article about her life, Ostrom explains that because she stuttered in high school, a teacher told her to join Speech Club. When she recited poetry in the club, others called poetry a “sissy” thing, so she enrolled in debate instead. She loved debate so much that upon enrolling at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), she asked her undergraduate advisor if she could major in debating. He recommended education, ‘the best major for a girl.’ Her parents, neither of whom had attained a university degree, considered college a wasted investment, so she worked to pay her way. Her freshman year, she took a political science class and made it her major, despite the advisor’s advice. After graduating, she became the first woman with a job higher than secretary at a firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she helped her first husband through Harvard Law School. The first question asked in her interview was, “Do you know shorthand?”
After her divorce in the early 1960s, she returned to L.A. and was easily accepted in a political science Masters program at UCLA, but applying for a doctorate proved challenging. She wanted a Ph.D. in Economics, but did not have enough mathematics because her undergraduate advisors had dissuaded her from those classes. But soon she became one of four women – the first in 40 years — accepted into the political science Ph.D. program after the department faculty argued vehemently over whether to admit any women.
Lin – as everyone called her – met her second husband Vincent Ostrom in a seminar in which each student picked a groundwater basin in southern California to study. They soon fell in love, and married in 1963. She continued studying irrigation systems for her graduate research, and when Hardin published his famous “Tragedy of the Commons” article, she was immediately skeptical – and stayed so, eventually showing that his theory was wrong in many situations.
Lin followed Vincent to Indiana University, where he got a job as a tenure-track professor and she was hired only as a lecturer. As the Vietnam War escalated, the political science department asked her to serve as graduate advisor to some 90 students, at which point she negotiated to have IU hire her as a full-time faculty member.
During the 1970s, she and Vincent, who made furniture as a hobby, created the “Workshop in Political Theory”, modeled after an artisan-style woodworkers’ workshop, where people from varied disciplines could collaborate, brainstorm, and hammer out ideas. The workshop and the offices the Ostroms filled with their larger-than-life personalities are located in a large old house on the IU-Bloomington campus.
Design for the Commons
People in many academic fields and nations had studied the use of “common pool resources” or commons (any resource that is used in common with others), but since disciplinary and regional “silos” rarely communicate, nobody had synthesized the information to develop a unified understanding. “Historians, anthropologists, economists, political scientists – a vast array of people had written sometimes long histories or descriptions,” Ostrom said in her Nobel talk, “but they wrote about a particular sector or a particular region of the world.”
In the mid-1980s, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences gathered researchers from varied fields together, including Ostrom, to compile data on the management of common pool resources around the world. The NAS work resulted in the Common Pool Resource Database, still online, and Ostrom’s book, Governing the Commons. As she tested what made people cooperate and self-organize and worked on her book while on a sabbatical in Germany, she became exasperated.
“I tried like mad to see statistically, aha, the market always works, or hierarchy always works, or entry limitation [barriers to the number of people allowed in a system] always works,” she said in the Nobel documentary. “I really struggled.”
Photo taken March 1993 of elephant embankment platform in Ghadgain, (L to R) Indra Sharan K.C., Douglas Vermillion, Elinor Ostrom and Rabi Poudel during the final day of Workshop outing to the RCNP. Photo under the Digital Library of the Commons.
“I tried to move up a level – [to ask] what were the generalities across the systems,” she explained in the NobelPrize.org interview. “Maybe we could call it best practices.” These became her eight design principles present in successful “institutions” and missing from unsuccessful ones.
The design principles include allowing the people most invested in the resource to both make and modify the rules of use; having clear, agreed-upon rules that outside authorities respect and that do not conflict with other levels of governance; allowing the users of a resource to monitor its use; having a system of graduated sanctions; and cheap, accessible means of conflict resolution. In the words of Tore Ellingsen of the Economics Nobel Committee, “successful groups are relatively democratic.”
“When rules are created and enforced by outside authorities, groups often fail to utilize resources efficiently,” added Ellingsen. “In part, such outside interventions fail because the interventions pay inadequate attention to local conditions.”
As Ostrom teased out her design principles from thousands of studies, including her own, she wanted to test what she saw in a simplified lab setting. “I was very fortunate that [IU Economics professor] Jimmy Walker came to Bloomington just as I was getting hungry for [asking], how would we ever put these things in a carefully developed laboratory experiment?,” she said in a 2009 interview with the Annual Review of Political Science. “It’s enabled us to take things that I observed in the field, then … go to the lab and test [it]. Was this just an unusual set of things that I saw in the field, or would you find it repeated under situations that were very carefully designed?”
Not Just Cheap Talk
As it turns out, Ostrom’s real-world observations matched what she and her colleagues found in their social science lab experiments beginning in the 1980s: communication completely changed the classic game theory predictions that the optimal behavior was to act selfishly or “cheat” rather than cooperate. In each experiment, eight people sat at computers and had the ability to “invest” either in a commonly shared resource, or in a private fund. The commons paid better – up to a point – just like a pasture that is vulnerable to overcrowding, or a forest that can be used sustainably or overharvested.
“When subjects … couldn’t communicate, the theory was right. They overharvested even worse than predicted,” Ostrom describes in her Nobel lecture. “However, when they could communicate face to face, theory was wrong.” Trust could be achieved through simple communication. It was a radical breakthrough: the commons need not be a tragedy.
Unlike a prisoners’ dilemma (as John Nash’s theory was often modeled), where people are, well, in prison, they often hold the power to change their circumstances in the real world. Ostrom boldly challenged the longstanding theories depicting people as always trapped or “rationally” self-interested – and with sarcasm to boot. “[T]hose attempting to use these models as a basis for policy prescription frequently have achieved little more than a metaphorical use of the models,” she writes in Governing the Commons. She calls such models “dangerous” when used as a foundation for policy because they assume “all users of natural resources are similarly incapable of changing their constraints.”
With characteristic optimism Ostrom concludes, “I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedies.”
And who better to change the rules of the game than the people most invested in a resource? “Here we had this notion that rational individuals were ‘trapped’,” said Ostrom in her Nobel lecture. “Us theorists were supposed to come up with the optimal solution, give it to a public official and they’d impose it. And there were only two solutions: government or private ownership.”
Why did experts and authorities have solutions but ordinary citizens didn’t? It defied what she’d seen around the world. Even Hardin himself later admitted his theory of tragedy only applied to “Unmanaged Commons.”
Design for a Sustainable World
Methodist Primary School building. Elinor Ostrom standing in a school room with one teacher and one student posing in front of the blackboard. Photo under the Digital Library of the Commons.
As Ostrom became more involved in ecology and forestry research in the 1990s, the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) came to her, wanting systematic information on global forests and the people depending on them. She founded the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research network, still the only interdisciplinary, long-term research program focusing on both forests and social-ecological conditions. Researchers in the 15 centers around the world – including Tanzania, Uganda, Bolivia, Nepal, and India – use a common set of research protocols to facilitate global research.
In the last decade of her life, Ostrom became increasingly vocal about how her findings applied to climate negotiations, particularly REDD+ policies, which many indigenous groups oppose. REDD is a “market” mechanism, which compensates landowners either to maintain existing forest or plant new trees, but indigenous and locals relying on forests fear it may concentrate wealth in the hands of a few and cause conflict among neighbors. Also, many indigenous and local forest dwellers do not have formal tenure rights to the land they live on and use, which REDD requires; international markets are unable to compensate people who do not have secure land ownership, which offers no guarantee forests will remain intact.
Having seen how powerful governments and, environmental groups have at times trampled the rights of locals and indigenous groups, Ostrom was concerned. “I hope in our negotiations that … we are very, very careful to be sure that the rights of indigenous people and local owners that have not been recognized in the past are recognized, protected, and that they’re given a chance to get technical advice,” she said at COP15.
At the time, REDD policies were still being negotiated, and since the Warsaw framework for REDD+ was passed in November 2013, such projects have started around the world. But Ostrom’s research suggests that if REDD+ policies are merely designed by top-level authorities, without involvement of the local people who use the forests, the policies will fail to create the trust necessary for sustainable community-managed forests, and could instead lead to forest degradation and loss.
Ostrom had strong views on REDD, but according to her colleagues she was not anti-market, despite what some detractors have claimed. Neither is she anti-state, although her work has been both praised and criticized by people of varying political bents.
“Lin’s work has been misunderstood and misrepresented by advocates on both the left and the right,” explains McGinnis. “I vividly recall one day shortly after she received the Nobel when she came down from her office really frustrated because she had just completed two phone interviews. In one the reporter asked her why she was so vehemently anti-market, and in the very next interview she was asked why she was so vehemently anti-state. Her findings never fit neatly within the dominant left-right political discourse in the U.S., and she was very comfortable with that lack of fit.”
The Test of Time
Framed pencil drawing of Elinor Ostrom that hang at the University of Mande Bukari. Photo under the Digital Library of the Commons.
Since they were first published in 1990, Ostrom’s design principles have stood the test of time. “Pretty much all [the design principles] have some degree of support,” says IU Anthropology professor Catherine Tucker, and also a Workshop member. “Some are harder to examine because they’re harder to find in the modern world, such as the lack of state intervention. The freedom to design institutions without interference from the state – that’s one that’s problematic [to test].”
Too often, though, top-down governments interfere with the solutions locals have crafted, as happens when governments evict indigenous people from their homelands, or government corruption wreaks havoc on local projects. Local projects can succeed even if higher governments are not supporting them, so long as they do not interfere.
One design principle with very strong empirical support is having locals monitor the use of a resource. “In sustainable forests around the world, the users are the active monitors of the level of harvest occurring in the forests,” Ostrom explained in her Nobel lecture. But the effectiveness of the monitoring depends on who does it. “Users monitoring forests is more [effective] than when government does it.” Also, as Ostrom saw in Nepal, resource users sanction others, but in a graduated way for repeat offenses. Draconian punishment for first-time infractions ends up causing mistrust and resentment, leading to less willingness to cooperate, she found.
Having outlined her big-picture design principles, Ostrom also identified the factors influencing whether people will cooperate and trust. “Field and lab experiments found that communication among participants, the reputation of participants being known, high marginal return, a longer time horizon so if [people] cooperate [they] really have a chance of gaining the benefits over time, [and] an agreed upon sanctioning mechanism,” as well as entry and exit capability (the ability of resource users to begin or end their participation), “are the factors that we repeatedly find have a strong impact on levels of cooperation.”
Eye to the Future
“A lot of people are now waiting for international negotiations to solve [the climate crisis],” she said, responding to a journalist’s question about the implications of her work in a recorded interview after the Nobel announcement. “That’s again this presumption that there are public officials who are genius and the rest of us are not. It is going to be important that there is an international agreement, but we can be taking steps at family level, community level, regional level, provincial, state, national, and there are many steps that have already been taken that are not going to solve it themselves but cumulatively can make a big difference.”
Indiana University-Blooomington Professors Mike McGinnis and Burnell Fischer near the Ostrom Room inside the The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis on campus. Photo (c) copyright 2014 Wendee Nicole.
For example, even without federal emissions-reductions targets, at least 30 U.S. states have developed climate action plans and more than 1,000 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. Individuals, communities, and groups can also take action.
Ostrom’s stance hails from her discovery that “polycentric” governance is the most effective way to govern – a concept first developed by Vincent in the 1960s. Polycentricity refers to having multiple levels of governance in place; for example, local people solve dilemmas while interacting in a cooperative manner with laws and regulations at regional, national and sometimes international levels. In an article written in the days leading up to the 2012 UN Rio 20+ Summit and published on the date of her death, Ostrom wrote, “Inaction in Rio would be disastrous, but a single international agreement would be a grave mistake… Decades of research demonstrate that a variety of overlapping policies at city, subnational, national, and international levels is more likely to succeed than are single, overarching binding agreements.”
Academics continue Ostrom’s research, but whether her findings get incorporated into policy in time to solve some of the world’s pressing issues remains to be seen. The morning Ostrom died, IU President Michael A. McRobbie called her “an irreplaceable and magnificent treasure,” and George Mason University professor of Economics and Philosophy Pete Boettke posted a fitting tribute to her legacy for the scholars who have studied under her, alongside her, and who continue the research she began. “Lin leaves behind a tremendous intellectual legacy,” Boettke wrote. “We have much work to do, and we will honor her by getting on with that task…Think about how much can be accomplished when the very best of us exhibit such traits and set the example for all the rest of us to strive to emulate.”
Rio Violence Spikes Ahead of World Cup. In the months before the World Cup, violence in Rio has spiked despite pacification tactics that have drawn criticism from some who live in the favelas. Credit Ana Carolina Fernandes for The New York Times; Video by Nadia Sussman
RIO DE JANEIRO — Alda Rafael Castilho dreamed of being a psychologist, and joined the police force to pay for her studies. Her dream ended at age 27 when gunmen stormed the outpost where she was on duty in Complexo do Alemão, a sprawling patchwork of slums. A bullet pierced her abdomen, and she bled to death.
“They left her there to squirm on the ground like some sort of animal,” said her mother, Maria Rosalina Rafael Castilho, 59, a maid who lives in the gritty outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. “The politicians talk about the pride of hosting the World Cup, but that is an insult,” she said. “They can’t even protect their own police, much less the visitors to Rio.”
With the start of the global soccer tournament in Brazil less than two weeks away, a crime wave is setting nerves on edge across Rio de Janeiro, which is expecting nearly 900,000 visitors. A security overhaul was supposed to showcase a safer Rio on the global stage, but muggings are surging, homicides are climbing, and there has been a spike in shootings of police officers.
Maria Rosalina Rafael Castilho holding a picture of her daughter Alda Rafael Castilho, a police officer who was shot and killed in Rio de Janeiro in February.CreditAna Carolina Fernandes for The New York Times
At least 110 officers have been shot in Rio so far this year, an increase of nearly 40 percent from the same period last year, according to figures compiled independently by the Brazilian journalist Roberta Trindade with the help of police officers. Most of the episodes involved on-duty officers, but in some cases, off-duty officers were shot in assaults when they were identified as police.
In one bloody 16-day stretch in May, Ms. Trindade recorded 14 shootings of police officers, including two who were killed. Altogether, at least 30 on-duty and off-duty police officers have been shot dead this year, she said, including Ms. Castilho, the aspiring psychologist.
The security forces have been trying to reclaim territory in the city from the control of heavily armed drug gangs, and until recently, the deployment of special teams called Pacifying Police Units in dozens of favelas was viewed as a major achievement. But the officers have come under increasing attack in these “pacified” favelas, and the security gains are eroding.
Effectively acknowledging that Rio’s stretched police force cannot guarantee security for the World Cup, state officials have turned to the national government for help, asking for 5,300 troops from the armed forces to help patrol city streets, the way troops did for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012.
Officials contend that Rio is still safer than it used to be, despite the setbacks and the request for troops, and they point out that other Latin American cities like Caracas, Venezuela, or Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and even some Brazilian cities like Salvador, have higher homicide rates. In Rio, the rate was 20.5 per 100,000 residents last year, well below the rate of 37.8 per 100,000 recorded in 2007 before the security push into the favelas. During that time, the number of police officers in the city and the surrounding state rose to 47,710 from 37,950.
“We’re still distant from the earlier levels of criminality,” said Roberto Sá, a senior security official of the state government. “There are areas where an actual war had to be waged just for the police to enter. Now the police can do so without so many personnel because drug traffickers are losing their territorial bases.”
Contending that the new crime wave is an anomaly, Mr. Sá pointed to the state’s measure of armed attacks on the police, which is limited to officers killed on duty: seven so far this year. While that figure was regrettable, he said, the killings often get little notice in the Brazilian news media, while in many other countries, “the people who die become heroes.”
“I know it is undesirable, but we live in this kind of culture in Latin America, one of violence and criminality,” he said. “We have to understand that this is the reality.”
The challenge facing the police here was thrown into sharp relief in February when the commander of Rio’s “pacification” police forces, Col. Frederico Caldas, was caught in a gun battle in Rocinha, one of Rio’s largest slums. He dove to the ground to avoid a spray of bullets, and wound up having to undergo surgery to remove fragments of rock and plastic from one of his eyes.
Homicides rose 17 percent last year in Rio de Janeiro State, the first increase since 2010. The state recorded 4,761 homicides, with 1,323 of them in the city; by contrast, New York City, with a larger population than Rio, recorded 333 homicides in the same period.
A Pacifying Police Unit officer in Rio de Janeiro. At least 110 officers have been shot so far this year, an increase of nearly 40 percent from the same period last year.CreditMario Tama/Getty Images
A surge in street crime is also jolting residents. Street robberies and vehicle thefts increased sharply this year to levels higher than when the favela pacification program began in 2008, according to official figures. There were 20,252 reported muggings of pedestrians in the first quarter this year, up 46.5 percent from a year earlier.
On Rio’s streets, on television and across social media in Brazil, the crime wave is playing out in ways that are at once surreal and horrific.
A crew from the television network Globo recently interviewed a woman near Rio’s old center on the subject of crime, and in the middle of the interview, an assailant tried to rip a necklace from her neck.
In another episode that tested some residents’ faith in the Rio police, a driver recorded video footage on his smartphone showing the body of a woman hanging out of a police vehicle and being dragged along the pavement through traffic.
The police officers in the vehicle claimed they were taking the woman, a 38-year-old favela resident from the northern part of the city, to a hospital after she suffered gunshot wounds. They said they had not noticed that her body was dangling from the rear of their vehicle. However, an investigation concluded that the woman had been shot and killed by two of the officers, though not intentionally.
Military police officers stood during a presentation of troops that are responsible for security ahead of the World Cup in Rio de Janeiro.CreditPilar Olivares/Reuters
“The legitimacy of the police is at a disturbingly low point,” said Luiz Eduardo Soares, a former top security official in Rio. “The pacification process simply shifted crime to other parts of Rio’s metropolitan area. Now we’re seeing the police coming under attack even in the favelas, which they are calling pacified.”
Security experts attribute some of the animosity toward the police to the resilience of drug gangs like Comando Vermelho, which originated in a Rio prison in the 1970s, and the growth of smaller criminal groups like Terceiro Comando Puro, formed after a split from Comando Vermelho in the 1980s.
Police officers say their jobs are made harder by inadequate training and low pay. But at the same time, the persistence of brutal police tactics, involving the abduction and torture of some residents, contributes to the anger against the police in some communities.
In Rocinha, the hillside favela overlooking some of Rio’s most exclusive residential districts, the disappearance last year of Amarildo de Souza, a 42-year-old construction worker, set off street protests. Investigators found that he was given electric shocks and asphyxiated with a plastic bag after police officers detained him in during a sweep of drug-trafficking suspects.
To the further outrage of many here, investigators said Maj. Edson Santos, the police commander in Rocinha at the time, bribed two witnesses in the case to say that drug traffickers were to blame for what happened to Mr. de Souza.
“This honeymoon within a large part of Rio’s population and the media was deeply shaken,” said Julita Lemgruber, a former director of Rio’s penitentiary system, referring to the hopes raised by security gains in recent years. “The case of Amarildo was a turning point.”
Brazilians angry at their government and FIFA could turn this giant soccer tournament into a tipping point. Are these corrupt, elitist spectacles worth it?
The world’s “beautiful game” is about to stage its biggest tournament in the country that is its spiritual home. The realities on the ground in Brazil, however, are far different from how its ringmasters had envisioned. Stadiums haven’t been completed; roads and airports not built. Ten thousand visiting journalists may find themselves unable to make deadlines due to poor Internet and mobile service.
More ominously, there is a rising tide of discontent that threatens to turn the streets into war zones. History may well record the World Cup in Brazil as the tipping point where the costs meant the party just wasn’t worth it anymore.Nao Vai Ter Copa has become a national rallying cry. There Will Be No World Cup. People want bread, not circuses. It’s OK to love the game, but hate the event. The governing body of the game, FIFA, is not amused.
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Events like World Cup and the Olympics have become obscenely expensive, with few trickle-down rewards to the citizens who bear the brunt of the costs for the benefit of the few. The people of South America’s largest country were promised the dawn of a new age of prosperity that these mega-events heralded. In a country where corruption is insidious, all-encompassing, and a virus that suffocates all semblance of progress, it is bricks, steel, and mortar that the people see, not new hospitals, schools, or public transport. Even then, Itaquerao stadium, as an example, won’t be ready in time for the opening kickoff in São Paulo on June 12. “Is this what we get for $11 billion?” the people are asking. It is a fair question.
A new type of democracy has sprung up as a result; a unity of thought and expression that is uniquely Brazilian. Citizen collectives with names like Direitos Urbanos (Urban Rights) and the Landless Workers Movement (MTST) were formed to create avenues of options for people who have had to make way forordem e progresso—the national motto of Brazil inscribed on the flag. Order and Progress.
“The calls for protest aim to highlight the pain as well as show the world who is behind the curtain, pulling the strings,” he said. “There is a highly sophisticated plan that just as the government’s World Cup plans for Brazil are designed for international consumption, there is also an unprecedented global spotlight. The great journalist Eduardo Galeano once wrote, ‘There are visible and invisible dictators. The power structure of world football is monarchical. It’s the most secret kingdom in the world. Protesters aim to drag FIFA from the shadows and into the light. If they are successful, it will leave a legacy that will last longer than the spectacle itself.’”
During a congressional hearing by Brazil’s tourism and sports commission this year, former FIFA World Player of the Year and 1994 World Cup winner Romario, now a popular politician and member of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, was quoted as saying, “We can’t expect anything from FIFA, where we have a blackmailer called [General Secretary Jerome] Valcke and a corrupt thief and son-of-a-bitch called [President Sepp] Blatter.”
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Yan Boechat writes for the top news magazine in Brazil, Revista Istoe. Among his previous assignments were stints in war zones like Afghanistan and the Congo. He will be covering the action on the streets during the World Cup.
“A lot of money was spent on construction of things we don’t really need,” Boechat said. “There’s a big stadium in Manaus, a place without a football culture and not even a team in the first or second division. The government removed hundreds of thousands of poor people from their houses to make space for stadiums, roads to lead to them, and other construction projects. Most of these people were sent to places far away from the city centers.”
Photojournalist Ana Lira is from the northeastern city of Recife and a founding member of Urban Rights. She has meticulously documented the bulldozing and burning of poor neighborhoods and the infamous favelas, the shantytowns that dot the hills of Rio and streets of São Paulo.
“So far 27 people have died in the protests, with more than 300 wounded since last year,” she said. “In this number, there are two professional photographers and a journalist who was blinded after being hit in the eye deliberately by the police. They used rubber bullets. Some other professionals were hit or arrested in areas near the protests just because the police wanted someone to pay for the protests.”
“If Brazil does well on the field, then perhaps people will be happy and not protest as much. But if Brazil fails, they will be much larger. There will be violence.”
“We are now seeing a new wave of protesters coming to the streets,” Boechat added. “Teachers, street cleaners, police officers, unions, a movement for affordable housing—all those people are going to be on the streets during the World Cup. They see this as the right moment to fight for their interests. Those groups do not traditionally mix with the anarchists and anti-capitalists.”
This week that number included about 3,000 indigenous peoples in tribal dress, gathering in front of the new stadium in the nation’s capital, Brasilia.
“For whom does our government work?” one of the indigenous leaders, Lindomar Terena, asked the crowd. “Instead of the government standing for the federal constitution and finally ending the demarcation of indigenous lands, it is investing billions in an event that lasts for a month, prioritizing big businesses over ancestral peoples’ rights.”
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A new anti-terror law has been rushed through the Brazilian congress to deal with the protesters. It has been nicknamed Bill A1-5, a takeoff on the 1968 AI-5 Act, which gave extraordinary powers to the military junta and suspended key civil and constitutional guarantees for more than 20 years. The implementation of such a law opened old wounds. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was a member of a Marxist revolutionary group after the 1964 military coup d’état in Brazil. She was captured, imprisoned for two years, and reportedly tortured. It is a very important narrative for Brazilians. Her complicity in allowing the World Cup to proceed at the expense of the Brazilian poor is seen as a sellout of the poor to the rich.
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At the vanguard of the protests has been the galvanizing effect of social media. Websites like Portal Popular da Copa e das Olympiadas, and by citizen-journalist movements like Midia Ninja, a Portuguese acronym for “independent narratives, journalism and action,” created to spark disparate movements across the country.
“We’ll be on the streets, covering all political and cultural movements, the passion for football and this new moment of political unrest,” says Rafael Vilela, a founder of the Midia Ninja collective. Their hub is an aggregate of photographs and eyewitness reports taken by hundreds of collectives. The portal will have a system of simultaneous translation in three languages including English.
Midia Ninja and Fora do Eixo (Outside the Axis), a music and cultural collective, have created a community called Cinelandiain downtown Rio, where people can come in, play music, debate, write their blogs, and edit cellphone videos and post them online. There are edit suites mounted on shopping carts, and portable generators to power them. The protests can be seen live on the Internet via Twittercast.
“We’ve managed to do a lot with very few resources except our creativity and collaboration,” says Felipe Altenfelder, a founder of the FDE collective. “Never before has our generation been more prepared in terms of social technology and social knowledge. What we are doing is totally new in Latin America. The various collectives across Brazil have a structure of sharing food, money, even clothes, so even the poorest people can work within our groups and not just survive—but participate in actions against social injustices 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Director Spike Lee has been in Brazil working on a documentary, Go Brazil Go, in which Felipe, Rafael and other members of Midia Ninja figure prominently.
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There are 170,000 or more security troops assigned to the World Cup—not to protect the thousands of tourists who will be coming to Brazil to watch the matches, but to quell dissent. Among them are a group of 40 FBI agents, part of an “anti-terror” unit. In January, French riot police were brought in to train their Brazilian counterparts. There are several Israeli drones, the ones used to chase down suspects in the West Bank, as well as 50 robotic bomb-disposal units most recently used by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. There are also facial-recognition goggles that police can use to spot 400 faces a second and match them against a database of 13 million. But there won’t be that many tourists, so exactly whom, people want to know, are the police checking? At a cost of nearly $1 billion, the international composition of the security measures is not only a contentious issue among Brazilians, but a cruel irony given FIFA’s mandate of bringing the world together through football.
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“If Brazil does well on the field, then perhaps people will be happy and not protest as much,” said Boechat. “But if Brazil loses, there will be big problems and civil unrest. I think the way we play the World Cup will define a lot of things that will happen outside the stadia. We’re going to have protests; that’s for sure. But if Brazil fails, they will be much larger. There will be violence.”
As the Roman emperors knew during the staging of the gladiator games at the Coliseum, so FIFA knows now: The mob must be appeased. Remember when South Korea beat Italy in the 2002 World Cup and the Ecuadorian referee later admitted taking money from South Korean officials? Or the most dubious of all: Argentina’s win over Peru by six goals in the 1978 World Cup, the exact margin required to proceed in the tournament. The chiefs of the military junta had gathered in Buenos Aires to watch and a Peruvian goalkeeper of Argentinian extraction duly had a nightmare evening. Corrupt to the core.
FIFA wants a show, not protests. They know Brazil has to win to keep people quiet. President Rousseff knows that with an election coming up later in the year, her chances of winning would be a lot better with a sixth Brazilian World Cup win.
In the end, there is always the financial aspect of the biggest show on earth. Goldman Sachs strategist Peter Oppenheimer said the company’s analysts have found that, according to past history, the winning country’s equity markets outperform global stocks by 3.5 percent on average in the first month after winning, “although the outperformance fades significantly after three months.”
Brazil will beat Argentina 3-1 in the final after they see off Germany and Spain in their respective semifinals, Goldman analysts including Jan Hatzius and Sven Jari Stehn said in a report. The host nation has a 48.5 percent probability of winning the FIFA tournament, followed by Argentina at 14.1 percent and Germany at 11.4 percent.
These are bankers, not bookies.
A report like this can lead the mind to extreme cynicism about how and why games are determined.
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Unlike in the U.S., where soccer is a game of the middle classes, the roots offootball are firmly entrenched in the working-class neighborhoods and slums of places like Buenos Aires, Lagos, Rio, and, at its birth, in the towns and cities of Industrial Revolution-era Britain. The qualities of energy, zest, improvisation and enterprise needed to survive in such environments created a cauldron of bubbling passion for the game. It’s only soccer, but it is also about liberation. Former Manchester United star Eric Cantona was in Rio filming his seventh documentary, which will be screened at the first-ever Amnesty Football Film Festival in the U.K. In an interview with Amnesty in Paris, the always-outspoken Frenchman lamented the possibility of Brazilian football losing its greatest legacy of all.
“I have been in Maracanã [in Rio, site of the final] before, and I loved Maracanã. But now it is just a stadium like the Emirates Stadium [in London] or Stade de France. And they say, ‘It’s a revolution for us, we have to educate the people to sit.’ But they don’t want to sit, they just want to stand up and sing and dance.” Those who want to sing and dance can’t afford to go anymore, he says. But it is a shame because it’s these kinds of fans who created football and it’s these kind of fans who have a child who will play football,” said Cantona. “Because most of the people, most of the players come from poor areas. To be a footballer, you need to train every day when you are a kid, you need to go in the street and play in the street every day.”
So as the clock winds down to the opening kickoff on June 12 when Brazil will play Croatia, there is a profound melancholy that permeates the emotions of soccer fans. We love the game. We love the World Cup. We love the way it was.
“I love its drama,” wrote the great Manchester United manager Sir Matt Busby, “its smooth playing skills, its carelessly laid rhythms, and the added flavor of contrasting styles. Its great occasions are, for me at any rate, unequalled in the world of sport. I feel a sense of romance, wonder, and mystery, a sense of beauty and a sense of poetry. On such occasions, the game has the timeless, magical qualities of legend.”
Some of my greatest life memories come from the World Cup, but there also comes a time when the massive show, fueled by corporate might, is overshadowed by the engine of social and political change. Brazil was under a military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985. Democracy is relatively new. What is beginning to emerge is Brazil at an adolescent stage as part of a national rite of passage. The World Cup may yet precipitate the maturing of a nation. In spite of FIFA’s best efforts to act as a shadow government.
Ação humana sobre a natureza é tão destruidora quanto o fenômeno que causou o fim dos dinossauros
A ação humana acelerou em mil vezes a extinção de espécies, de acordo com um estudo publicado esta semana na revista “Science”. Novas tecnologias para mapear o desmatamento e a destruição de habitats permitiram uma revisão dos números que serviam como base para encontros internacionais, como a Convenção sobre Diversidade Biológica (CBD).
Se não houver ações urgentes, o impacto provocado pelo homem no meio ambiente causaria a sexta maior extinção em massa da História do planeta – uma das anteriores foi o desaparecimento dos dinossauros.
Não é simples estimar quantas espécies foram extintas desde o início do século XX, já que, segundo estimativas, apenas 3,6% delas são conhecidas pelos cientistas. Para calcular a velocidade das extinções, os cientistas criaram um modelo matemático levando em conta o percentual de desaparição das espécies conhecidas em relação a sua população total e extrapolaram os resultados.
O estudo defende que a Lista Vermelha de Espécies Ameaçadas seja radicalmente ampliada – a publicação abrigaria 160 mil espécies que correm o risco de extinção, em vez de 70 mil, como ocorre hoje. Esta atualização da listagem pode levar à criação de novas políticas de conservação ambiental.
– Hoje temos novas tecnologias para detectar o desmatamento e analisar o deslocamento de cada espécie – avalia Clinton Jones, coautor do estudo e pesquisador do Instituto de Pesquisas Ecológicas do Brasil (Ipê). – A maioria vive fora das áreas protegidas, por isso a compreensão da mudança de seus ecossistemas é vital. É uma oportunidade para atualizar mapas sobre os impactos e as ameaças a cada área.
Coautor do levantamento, Stuart Limm, professor de Ecologia de Conservação da Universidade de Duke (EUA), ressalta que ainda existe uma “cratera” entre o que os pesquisadores sabem e o que ignoram sobre a biodiversidade do planeta. A tecnologia, no entanto, está preenchendo este espaço, além de estender o acesso a dados científicos para amadores. Bancos de dados on-line e até aplicativos de smartphones facilitam a identificação de espécies.
– Quando combinamos informações sobre o uso da terra com as observações de milhões de cientistas amadores, conseguimos acompanhar melhor a biodiversidade e suas ameaças – assinala. – No entanto, precisamos desenvolver tecnologias ainda mais sofisticadas para sabermos qual é a taxa de extinção das espécies.
Espaço restrito
O homem eliminou os principais predadores e outras grandes espécies. As savanas africanas, por exemplo, já cobriram 13,5 milhões de km². Agora, os leões dispõem de somente 1 milhão de km². Trata-se de um exemplo de como a restrição do espaço colabora para as extinções.
– Sabemos que muitas espécies terrestres ocupam pequenas áreas, algumas menores do que o Estado do Rio. – alerta Jones. – Espécies distribuídas em pequenas regiões estão mais vulneráveis à extinção. Precisamos concentrar nossos projetos de conservação nestes locais.
Um dos pontos mais críticos é a Mata Atlântica, uma das 34 regiões do planeta onde há maior número de espécies exclusivas – ou seja, aquelas que só ocorrem naquele local – enfrentando risco de extinção.
– A floresta remanescente está degradada e há muitas espécies exclusivas em todos os seus ambientes, do solo às montanhas – destaca Jones. – Sua preservação deve ser uma prioridade mundial.
Os oceanos são ainda menos preservados. Somente 2% de suas espécies seriam conhecidas.
Na Argentina, elas foram reprimidas por baionetas quando indagaram, em 1977, pelos filhos presos. Os generais golpistas debocharam: “son las locas de Plaza de Mayo“. Obstinadas, não desistiram. Desafiaram o terror e continuaram ocupando a Praça de Maio, desfilando o seu protesto semanal diante da Casa Rosada e da catedral até que, finamente, reconhecidas pela sociedade, contribuíram para o fim da ditadura e a prisão dos torturadores.
Todo o processo de alfabetização ocorreu num clima que iniciou com a narração oral das historias e continuou com a criação dos desenhos, a leitura dos desenhos, a discussão sobre eles e, finalmente, com a escrita alfabética.
A lista é longa, os mortos têm nomes, mas às vezes são identificados pelo laço de parentesco: “a filha de Sabe que mora no Mrebsna Mudî, dois tios de Mário Paruwé, o pai de Wome, uma filha de Antônio”, etc. O relatório se refere ao“desaparecimento de mais de 2.000 Waimiri-Atroari em apenas dez anos”. Na área onde se localiza hoje a Mineradora Taboca (Paranapanema) desapareceram pelo menos nove aldeias aerofotografadas pelo padre Calleri, em 1968, em sobrevoos a serviço da FUNAI. Os alunos da aldeia Yawará desenharam casas e escreveram ao lado frases como:
O relatório informa que “as festas que reuniam periodicamente os Waimiri-Atroari foram aproveitadas pelo PARASAR para o aniquilamento dos índios”. Conta detalhes. Registra ainda o desaparecimento de índios que se aproximaram, em agosto de 1985, do canteiro de obras da hidrelétrica do Pitinga, então em construção:
Ostrom’s famous smile. Photo courtesy of the International Land Coalition under a Creative Commons license from Flickr.com.
Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Founded The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in the 1970s, where Lin co-directed it until her death in 2012. It is housed in an old house on the Indiana University-Bloomington campus, and Workshop members (professors, graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scholars) have offices in this as well as two neighboring buildings. Photo (c) copyright 2014 Wendee Nicole.
A portrait of Ostrom at the conference with the laureates of the memorial prize in economic sciences in 2009. Photo courtesy of Holger Motzkau 2010, under a 
Batwa men and women in Uganda’s Makongoro village process reeds from the forest to weave baskets which they sell to make money for their families and communities. Now conservation refugees evicted from their traditional forest home, now they must receive permits from the Ugandan government to harvest forest products, but most are not educated and need assistance to fill out forms and paperwork. In contrast with Ostrom’s design principles, the government did not actively consult the Batwa when evicting them from the forest but chased them out with guns, giving no land or resources to establish new lives. Photo (c) copyright 2014 Wendee Nicole.
Uma (in)certa antropologia 
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