A post is being shared on social media that compares a lush green valley with a barren land, alleging it to be from Manipur. Additionally, the post claims that the Kuki community transformed the once lush green land into a barren area upon their arrival. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: The green landscape was there before the Kuki community came to the Manipur hills, while the barren land shows what happened to the green landscape after their settlement.
Fact: The images are from the state of Minas Gerais located in Brazil. A photojournalist Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado and his wife Lélia replanted a wasteland with 2 million trees and turned it into a tropical forest in 20 years. Sebastião Salgado established the nonprofit organization Instituto Terra in 1998 and initiated a tree-planting campaign known as Instituto Terra’s Reforestation Project. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
On performing a reverse image search of the viral images, we found a Russian newspaper publishing an article with this image in 2020. The article stated that in the state of Minas Gerais located in Brazil, photojournalist Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado and his wife Lélia replanted a wasteland with 2 million trees and turned it into a tropical forest.
Subsequent search led us to other news reports comparing both the images in the viral post. As per reports, nearly 30 years ago, Salgado returned to his native Brazil to manage his family’s ranch in the Minas Gerais region after documenting the tragic genocide in Rwanda. Now, two decades later, the 1,754-acre land has transformed into a lush and vibrant forest (here and here).
In a Forbes article dated 25 January 2008, it was noted that Sebastião Salgado established the nonprofit organization Instituto Terra in 1998 and initiated a tree-planting campaign known as Instituto Terra’s Reforestation Project. The article documented the advancements achieved over the past years of the reforestation effort. This was also reported by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
Further, we verified the location of Instituto Terra on Google Maps and Google Earth and found that the location matched the viral images. A comparison between both can be seen below.
To sum up, the images of a restored tropical forest from Brazil are being shared as a forest turned into a wasteland in Manipur by the Kuki community.
