Brazil Auctions Off Jungle
8/17/97
OVERVIEW, SOURCE & COMMENTARY by EE
Following is additional coverage of Brazil's plan to auction off
logging rights in National Parks. Is there a future for undisturbed
tropical wildernesses, or will all areas of the remaining rainforests
be taken under some degree of management? What is the likelihood that
intensive forestry management will lead to continued ecological
decline?
g.b.
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Green groups frown as Brazil auctions off jungle
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyright 1997 by Reuters
Date: August 4, 1997
Byline: Michael Christie
BRASILIA (Reuter) - The Brazilian government Monday published rules
for the auction of a chunk of Amazon rainforest in an effort to
promote sustainable exploitation which environmental groups greeted
with caution.
The federal environmental agency Ibama said a decree issued in the
government's Official Journal opened bidding to manage and extract
timber from 2,471 acres of jungle in the Tapajos National Park in the
northern state of Para.
"It's the first time we are auctioning off a piece of the Amazon for
sustainable development. It's in many ways experimental ... but if
we're satisfied, we might auction off more," Ibama president Eduardo
Martins told Reuters.
Brasilia hopes to collect $266,000 from the Tapajos concession, which
will be followed by the auction of another 9,884 acres over the next
four years.
Ecological watchdogs Greenpeace and the Worldwide Fund for Nature,
also known as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), reacted with skepticism
to the auction plan.
"We don't understand why the government has to open up a new area of
the Amazon to exploitation when they can't control logging where it's
already taking place," said a Greenpeace spokesman.
The spokesman said recent studies showed 70 percent of all tropical
timber felled in the Amazon was illegally cut and that Ibama was
incapable of doing anything about it.
As proof of Ibama's inability to supervise timber firms, he said only
0.2 percent of fines slapped on loggers in 1996 for illegal logging
had actually been collected.
Paulo Lyra of the Brasilia branch of the WWF welcomed the plan "in
principle." But he also harbored some doubts.
"From an economic point of view, it makes sense. We don't yet know
whether it makes sense ecologically," Lyra said.
The Tapajos concession, which will give the successful bidder the
right to cut various types of tropical timber over 30 years, is part
of a project backed by the International Tropical Timber Organization
(ITTO).
Ibama president Martins said criticism by the ecological groups was
partly justified but he appealed for patience.
"We know things can go wrong," he told Reuters.
Martins said he believed supervision of logging would be much easier
in a controlled concession zone, and that establishing cooperation
with "nice" timber firms would help Ibama's fight against loggers who
bend the law or break it.
Also, he hoped the concession mechanism and guarantees of origin would
give Brasilia greater control over prices in the $20 billion a year
international tropical timber market, where the Amazon countries hold
two-thirds of the world's supply.
The Tapajos concession holds an estimated 270,000 square yards of
tropical timber.