Nemus Earth told to stop selling NFTs in Brazil

Nemus Earth is a company that issues Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) that it claims will help save the Amazon rainforest. The company’s website explains how this is supposed to work:

“Nemus acquires at-risk land in the rainforest and creates a series of collectible NFTs, each tied to a unique geolocation within the land. A portion of sales from NFTs pays for operations and the purchase of the land, while the remaining proceeds are stored in the Nemus Treasury. With the help of the Nemus DAO, the Treasury then funds economic and social activity on the land.”

In a March 2022 press release, Nemus claimed that,

“Nemus has secured 41,000 hectares of actual at-risk land in the Amazon rainforest. An additional 6.1 million hectares (~15 million acres) is currently under negotiation.”

Nemus calls the buyers of its NFTs “guardians”. The NFTs correspond to specific areas of land, but the “guardians” do not actually own the territory. The idea is that money from the NFTs will support local “economic activity”, including logging, and the forest will generate carbon credits.

Flávio de Meira Penna, the founder and CEO of Nemus, told Vice that local communities were responsible for deforestation and that crypto financing was the solution:

“It’s sort of a vicious process of gradual destruction, that’s very difficult for you to revert unless it’s done dramatically, with a significant alternative, and viable economic solution. If I can implement real-life businesses and leverage this with social media and the financial potential of crypto, it’s a home run.”

Nemus has sold 1,500 NFTs but has still not bought any land.

The company managed to do all of this without the free, prior and informed consent of the Indigenous People who live on the land.

July 2022: Prosecutors’ notice

Nemus ran into difficulties in July 2022 when Brazil’s Federal Prosecution Office (MPF) issued a notice stating that it had given Nemus 15 days to prove that the company actually owns the land that it claims to be buying.

The MPF notice states that,

“The sale of NFTs corresponding to forest areas in Pauini was reported to the MPF by leaders of the Apurinã indigenous people, who traditionally occupy the claimed indigenous territory of Baixo Seruini/Baixo Tumiã.”

The prosecutors’ notice followed a complaint from the Apurinã people, who accused the company of pressuring them to sign documents that they could not understand. They also stated that the land Nemus wanted to buy is Indigenous territory.

December 2022: Another prosecutors’ notice

In December 2022, Thomson Reuters Foundation reported that Brazilian prosecutors had told Nemus to stop NFT sales and not “contact or co-opt” Apurinã leaders or to do anything related to the land that is in breach of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (International Labour Organisation Convention 169).

Federal prosecutor Fernando Merlotto Soave told Thomson Reuters Foundation in December 2022, that Nemus had 10 days to outline its compliance measures and that failure to do so would result in legal action.

Obede Bandeira de Souza, an Apurinã leader, told Thomson Reuters Foundation that the prosecutors’ recommendations to Nemus are important for the future of his people and their struggle for recognition. “Our ancestors are buried on those lands, it is a lack of respect from people who live in another country to call us invaders,” he said. “We are human beings and want to be consulted.”

The Apurinã people have been trying to get their land recognised as Apurinã ancestral land under a government process that started in 2012. Makupanari Apurinã told Vice that,

“We had achieved a very strong social organization in the Seruiní but from the moment Nemus arrived, it started to divide people again. They say they are bringing people together but it is a lie, they are actually dividing us apart.”

Penna, the CEO of Nemus, told Thomson Reuters Foundation that the company was complying with the prosecutors’ recommendations and had already stopped selling NFTs.

However, Penna also said that Nemus wanted to arrange a “mega-meeting” with the Apurinã people and suggested that he hoped to restart selling NFTs in the second half of 2023. Penna told Vice that,

“I am convinced that as we progress with our discussions and negotiations with local communities, NGOs and government entities, the true purpose of Nemus will become very clear, and hopefully we will have them as our true ambassadors and greatest fans.”

Nemus: “an interesting but anxiety inducing project”

Nemus claims to have a sales agreement for the land with a now bankrupt logging company called Madeireira Nacional SA, Manasa. Funai, the National Indian Foundation, gave Manasa permission to log the Apurinã’s territory in the 1970s during the military dictatorship.

But the Amazonas State Secretariat of Cities and Territories told Thomson Reuters Foundation that it had concluded that the land that Nemus says it has agreed to buy is public state land.

The Missionary Council for Indigenous Peoples (CIMI) has been working with the Apurinã people. Queops Silva de Melo, regional coordinator of CIMI told Thomson Reuters Foundation that,

“We became concerned after we saw that the company is making money over an area it had not even really bought. It seems to me that the region is coveted for being very distant and isolated … especially (by) technology companies.”

Vice spoke to Jillian Crandall, an architect and urban theorist who describes her work as “investigating digital/physical infrastructures and their socio-technical relationships”.

Crandall describes the Nemus project as “an interesting yet anxiety inducing project.” She is particularly concerned about the huge areas of rainforest that Nemus is proposing to buy. “It sounds like they really want to become… not necessarily landlords of the rainforest but, yeah, owning the rainforest,” she told Vice.

Nemus has published a litepaper that includes a map of a vast “protective belt” that the company hopes to buy:

While Nemus CEO Penna says that decisions about the land will be taken through a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, or DAO, it’s far from clear that the Indigenous Peoples living in the Amazon will have much control through the DAO.

In any case, as Crandall points out,

“If [Nemus] owns the land, the ultimate power and control goes to them. At the end of the day, they can just shut the DAO down. They own the land. They can either stay true to their word or get rid of it.”

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