BlackRock’s Amazon mining links highlight urgent need for indigenous rights policy
Report by indigenous federation and NGO exposes the investors behind the companies which have applied to mine indigenous land in Brazil
This time last year I wrote an article for Mongabay echoing calls by a Brazilian indigenous federation for the world’s largest asset manager, the US-based BlackRock, to adopt an indigenous peoples’ rights policy. The most salient reasons: the routine violation of indigenous rights by governments and companies, the companies that BlackRock has been investing in, the asset manager’s own bottom-line and reputation, and, last but not least, its attempt to position itself as a global financial leader on climate change, sustainability and going “net zero.” How far does it think it’s going to get with any of the latter if, among other things, it doesn’t explicitly commit to respecting indigenous rights?
I wrote that article partly because of my own experiences across Latin America hearing from indigenous communities struggling in some way against a company in which BlackRock was an investor, and partly because that Brazilian indigenous federation, the Articulacao dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil (APIB), had written to BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink two months beforehand. The previous year, APIB, together with the US NGO Amazon Watch, had published a stinging report titled Complicity in Destruction III: How Global Corporations Enable Violations of Indigenous Peoples' Rights in The Brazilian Amazon, which had a great deal to say about BlackRock. Among other things, it alleged that the New York-headquartered asset manager had been “financially enabling at least nine companies directly or indirectly implicated in land grabbing and other abuses of Indigenous peoples’ land rights in the Amazon”, as APIB’s letter to Fink put it.
Now APIB and Amazon Watch have just followed that up with another incendiary report: Complicity in Destruction IV: How Mining Companies and International Investors Drive Indigenous Rights Violations and Threaten the Future of the Amazon. The focus is on the history and dangers of mining in the Brazilian Amazon, the number of existing applications to Brazil’s National Mining Agency (ANM) that would impact titled indigenous lands, the most significant companies behind those applications, such as Brazil’s Vale, the UK’s Anglo-American, Canada’s Belo Sun, Glencore, AngloGold Ashanti and Rio Tinto, and the financial institutions, including BlackRock, the Capital Group and Vanguard, invested in those companies.
The figures are startling. As of November 2021, APIB and Amazon Watch’s partner InfoAmazonia had identified almost 2,500 active mining applications made by 570 companies overlapping more than 250 titled indigenous lands, totalling just over 10 million hectares, or almost 25 million acres. BlackRock, the report states, is one of the top five investors in the most significant companies, with more than $US6 billion in shares.
What makes this particularly startling is that mining in titled indigenous lands in Brazil is not permitted unless granted specific authorisation by Congress - what some researchers have called a “Constitutional shield” - although a highly controversial bill, the 191/2020, would overturn that by explicitly allowing mining. Given that it is currently effectively illegal to operate in such lands, why have the ANM even been accepting such applications, and why have the mining companies been making them?
“Despite being illegal, the ANM receives, records, and maintains the applications for mineral research and prospective mining in its systems originating from large, medium, and small mining companies, consortiums, and business people interested in exploiting Indigenous lands,” APIB and Amazon Watch state in their report. “The damage caused by ANM’s leniency, permitting these applications to be filed, has already been the subject of numerous complaints by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office.”
Complicity in Destruction IV ends with 20 recommendations for the mining companies, financial institutions, Brazil’s government and the international community. Those made to BlackRock et al include publicly opposing Bill 191/2020, reportedly due to be fast-tracked by the government and currently the target of protests in Brasilia, and committing to “zero deforestation policies and policies guaranteeing respect for Indigenous and human rights, with verifiable targets and progress reports made publicly available”, as well as requiring companies that they invest in to adopt similar policies and excluding them if they refuse.
APIB’s Dinamam Tuxá describes their new report as “one more piece of evidence, of many, that Blackrock must urgently adopt an indigenous rights policy and commit to actual change in order to stop mining’s destructive trail.”
“Asset managers still believe that investing in mining is “good” for business, ignoring the extensive history of violations and impacts caused by this industry,” Tuxá tells me. “BlackRock’s investments have an impact on our lives and our communities, and the company’s leadership, therefore, has a responsibility for our future. If mining on Indigenous lands is allowed, the Amazon and Indigenous territories will reach an unprecedented level of destruction. If the Amazon is destroyed, the future of the entire planet is at risk.”
Tuxá emphasises that indigenous lands “are not available for mineral exploration.”
“Nor should they be,” he says, “because there must be respect for our Constitutional right to self-determination as Indigenous peoples, and because of our lands’ importance in combating climate change and guaranteeing life on the planet. BlackRock needs to use its role as the largest asset manager in the world to press for the guarantee of the rights of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities, recognized under national and international law.”
Such calls echo others made last year in a letter to BlackRock by more than 80 indigenous people and other grassroots activists from 27 countries, and last month by BlackRock’s Big Problem (BBP), a global network of NGOs of which Amazon Watch is a member. The asset manager “must adopt a policy on Indigenous and community rights that outlines, among other things, what protections BlackRock requires for Indigenous peoples and forest communities, and what BlackRock will do if companies don’t provide these disclosures, or if disclosures reveal companies aren’t respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples and other communities,” BBP stated in an analysis of BlackRock’s latest client letter.
As another just-published report on institutional investors, titled Cashing in on Crisis, by Friends of the Earth-US and The Transnational Institute, acknowledges, BlackRock and others have now become “targets of aggressive campaigns demanding they divest from fossil fuels, defund deforestation, and respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.”
So is BlackRock getting the message, and has it made any progress towards adopting an indigenous rights policy?
A spokesperson wouldn’t answer that question, but instead directed me to three of its commentaries from last month on their “five engagement priorities” and approaches to “engagement with companies on their human rights impacts” and “natural capital.” The first includes “company impacts on people” but makes no mention of indigenous peoples specifically, while the other two say exactly the same thing as commentaries from last year - no apparent progress at all, then. While the one on “natural capital” may sound vaguely encouraging because it states BlackRock “believes it is important for companies to obtain the free, prior, and informed consent [FPIC] of indigenous peoples” for initiatives affecting them, it doesn’t say FPIC should be mandatory and arguably gives the impression one of the main reasons for doing that is for the sake of companies’ own reputations, rather than out of concern for indigenous peoples and communities themselves.