Alto Jequitinhonha, Brazil — No photographs remain of João Gomes de Azevedo’s village before eucalyptus plantations radically transformed it. Instead, fragments of its past live on in a song that Seu João, as he’s better known, composed to remember what life was like in Poço de Água, a small rural village in the Alto Jequitinhonha Valley, an 11-hour drive from Belo Horizonte, the capital of Brazil’s Minas Gerais state. Fifty years ago, João and hundreds of other farming families could freely graze their livestock amid lush vegetation and abundant water resources. That changed in the mid-1970s, when Brazil’s military dictatorship launched a massive industrialization plan to accelerate economic development in the country’s poorest regions, including the Alto Jequitinhonha Valley. Under this initiative, in 1976, almost 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of land, some occupied by local farmers but legally owned by the state, were handed over to the state-owned steel company, back then known as Acesita. Over time, 60% of the native vegetation in this expanse of Cerrado savanna was replaced by sprawling plantations of eucalyptus trees, which in turn were cut down to produce charcoal. Acesita was privatized in 1992, and in 2011 the company and its plantations came under the control of Europe-based Aperam. Experts warn that these vast plantations have drained much of the water resources that once sustained the Alto Jequitinhonha Valley’s most marginalized communities, including quilombos, settlements established by formerly enslaved Africans. While hundreds of quilombola families struggle to secure water for farming and daily needs…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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