Brazil: President Bolsonaro attempts to instrumentalise war in Ukraine to justify exploitation of indigenous lands
"Brazil: Bolsonaro uses Ukraine war to support extraction on indigenous land", 02 March 2022
...Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro went to Twitter on Wednesday to justify the extraction of resources from indigenous land in the Amazon by pointing to scarcities caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
"With the war between Russia and Ukraine, we now run the risk of running out of potassium or of its price increasing," Boslonaro said.
He used this to back a draft law from 2020 that would allow the government to permit the "extraction of minerals, water and organic resources from indigenous land"...
"Our food security and agrobusiness require measures that allow us to not depend on external sources for something we have in abundance," Bolsonaro tweeted.
Data from the Logcomex platform show that Russia was the main provider of potassium chloride — a major fertilizer — to Brazil in 2021...
The Brazilian president wrote that he had previously identified "three problems" regarding his country's dependence on foreign sources of fertilizer: environmental legislation, indigenous people and rights of exploration in the Rio Madeira basin...