Over four hard, hectic and intensely stimulating weeks the participants of the Brazilian Amazon Youth Exchange ’98 will be engaged in a serious adventure to explore the debates and the impact of sustainable development on the Amazon and Brazil. Key to achieving this task are our youth partner groups. They will give us the real grassroots picture of how sustainable development affects people in the Amazon. Using these and our own experiences we will attempt to unravel and evaluate the conflicting arguments made for and against sustainable development.

Throughout this exciting period we will journey on planes, boats, by coach, by rail and by foot; through three time zones; from sub tropical regions to tropical and back again–a total of over 10,000 kilometres. We will be travelling from our starting point in Rio de Janeiro, through four Amazon states, to Brazil’s capital, Brasília and finally back to Rio de Janeiro.
At these locations we will meet and talk to peasant farmers, rubber tappers, Indians, environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs), cattle ranchers, dam builders, miners, the media and politicians, in order to discover the various opinions on development in the Amazon. They will help us to explore how sustainable development has affected and changed the lives of people in the Amazon and Brazil.
1998 is a good year for us to visit Brazil. When we touch down in Brazil in July it will be the beginning of the election campaigns for the presidency, state governors, the senate, the federal chamber and legislative assemblies. The country will be alive with heated debates on the future of development for Brazil. The election period is the cut-off point for the completion of many of the projects making up Brazil on the Move. 1998 will also be the tenth anniversary of the assassination of Francisco ‘Chico’ Mendes, the rubber tapper, trade union activist and world renowned ‘eco-martyr’ from the Amazon. This anniversary will focus the attention of the world’s media on the issue of development in the Amazon region.
We will be making our visit in July and August. This is the ‘burning season’ in the Amazon when areas of the forest are burnt in preparation for the planting of pasture and crops. Reports in 1997 claim these burnings are on the increase. With the images and stories of the forest burnings in Asia and with the related debate about the impact of the natural phenomenon, El Niño, the Amazon burning season of 1998 is sure to be the focus of considerable global attention.