Brazil's Catholic bishops have condemned the government for its failure to address deforestation in the Amazon. The government was "absent' in combating "predatory development' in the world's largest rainforests, notes a media statement issued by the Brazilian National Bishops' Council.

Concerned over the increasing soybean farming in the region, the bishops conducted a debate in the last week of February during their annual fraternity campaign. The campaign is a "call for state and society to stop financing and tolerating a predatory model of development', said the council. During the three-day campaign, the bishops also criticised the government's recent plans which allow large-scale monitored harvesting of the Amazon rainforest and called on the government to control farmland expansion.

Separately, a bishop from Bahia state, Dom Luiz Flavio Cappio, who staged an 11-day hunger strike in 2005 over the government's controversial plans to change the course of the river Sao Francisco, handed a letter to the president calling for a public debate on the irrigation project.