SEJUP: Reports on Forest Destruction
11/20/97
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Headline: SEJUP: Reports on Forest Destruction
Source: Servico Brasileiro de Justica
Date: 11/20/97
=================================================================
NEWS FROM BRAZIL supplied by SEJUP (Servico Brasileiro de Justica
e Paz).
Number 293, November 20, 1997.
=================================================================
ECOLOGY
- Lumber merchants need to be controlled alerts ecologist.
On November 09, the 'Folha de Sao Paulo' published an
interview with the director general of the WWF, Claude Martin. In
the interview Dr. Martin called special attention to the activity
of Asian lumber companies in the Amazonian region. Referring to
well-known tactics of such companies in other parts of the world,
Dr. Martin said that they ''buy a Brazilian lumber company and
put it in somebody else's name - at times in the name of another
foreigner or even of a Brazilian. It is what we have witnessed in
Africa .... Some of these companies work very quickly. They clear
the forest and disappear''.
A recent study of the WWF showed that Brazil is the country
where the largest areas of forest clearance take place. This
amounts to approximately 30 thousand square kms each year. Half
of this takes place in the Amazon and the other half in the
savannah areas (cerrado) and in the Atlantic Rainforest. "Taking
into account all the tropical forests in the world, the annual
rate of deforestation is 170 thousand square kms. Brazil is
responsible for between a fifth and a sixth of this
deforestation'' commented Dr. Martin.
The head of IBAMA (the Brazilian federal environmental
agency), Eduardo Martins, commented in the same edition of the
'Folha' that he knew eight Brazilian companies with foreign
capital involved in deforestation in the Amazonian region. He
admitted that the reputation of these companies ''is not good''
and that '' everything is being done to control them, including
fines''. However Mr. Martins criticized the WWF report saying
that it is not correct to use the total area deforested to
measure forest devastation instead of using the relative area of
destruction of the forests, that is the percentage of the area
cleared in relation to the area of forest still intact. According
to IBAMA's calculations approximately 600 thousand cubic meters
of timber which was illegally cut will have been confiscated by
the end of 1997 - 5 times more than the amount confiscated during
1996. The head of IBAMA estimates that 80% of the timber cut in
the Amazonian region is taken out illegally.
- Amazon burning
We share two newspaper articles with you which we received
from the Environmental Defense Fund in recent days.
New York Times, International
November 2, 1997
More Fires by Farmers Raise Threat to Amazon
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- In Porto Velho in western Brazil,
thick clouds of black smoke have forced airports and schools to
shut down. In southern Para state near the Amazon frontier,
people gasping for air have collapsed and ended up in hospitals.
In the city of Manaus, the sun has disappeared for days at a
time.
Twenty years after the goal of rescuing the Amazon rain
forest first captured world attention, becoming the pet cause of
celebrities and a regular topic in children's schoolbooks,
deforestation and the burning of vast territories are again
climbing.
Data in recent weeks suggest that the burning going on in
Brazil this year is greater than what has occurred in Indonesia,
where major cities have been smothered under blankets of smoke
that spread to other countries.
Despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars have
been spent to save the rain forest, burnings in the Amazon region
are up 28 percent over last year, according to satellite data,
and 1994 deforestation figures, the most recent available, show a
34 percent increase since 1991.
"Deforestation has done nothing but go up," said Stephen
Schwartzman of the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit group
based in Washington. "Where the most money has gone is where the
fires have increased the most." The group noted that half the
fires recorded this year were in Mato Grosso, where the World
Bank lent $205 million to save the rain forest in a natural
resource management program.
Roughly a fifth of the fires that rage annually between June
and October cause new deforestation, and another tenth is burning
of ground cover in virgin forests. Scientists say that the
Amazon rain forest may be reaching a critical level of dryness,
in which standing forest could catch fire and burn out of
control.
A report by the Environmental Defense Fund warned the Amazon
"may be edging closer to catastrophic fire events," and predicted
"potentially enormous global consequences."
The World Wildlife Fund found that 93 percent of the
original Atlantic rain forest in the northeast had disappeared
over the centuries, and some 12 to 15 percent of the Amazon rain
forest. The report said that Brazil was losing more rain forest
each year than any other country on the planet. In addition to
the 5,800 square miles a year that satellite images show are
deforested each year, the Woods Hole Research Institute estimates
that another 4,200 are thinned through logging beneath the forest
canopy.
Eduardo Martins, the president of the Brazilian federal
environmental agency, said in an interview that the increase in
fires, while worrisome, did not result in an increase in
deforestation, although the two problems have risen in tandem.
He contended that most fires were set by small farmers who would
starve if they could not clear land for planting, and that the
environmental damage paled next to fossil fuel emissions in the
United States.
Beneath the noxious haze covering much of Brazil every
burning season is an opaque, often contradictory, government
policy toward the environment. "Properly speaking, we still
don't have a policy, but we have a start," Martins told a
Brazilian news magazine earlier this year.
Lacking enforcement muscle, the government environmental
agency ultimately collects only 6.5 percent of the fines it
imposes. The rest are thrown out in court.
In a recent interview, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso
acknowledged that the agency needed more money and muscle. A
bill to strengthen it, stalled in Congress since 1991, passed the
Senate this year. It is now idling in the House, where the
Federation of Industries is lobbying against it on the ground
that threats of cash fines and prison will open the way for
corruption.
For now, not surprisingly, the agency is usually ignored by
the people it is supposed to monitor. While permits are required
for burning, the agency has reportedly issued licenses to clear a
total of only about 24,700 acres this year -- an area seemingly
far smaller than what would produce the dense clouds of smoke
that have appeared over several states. Martins disputed that
permits were issued for only such an area, but his office
declined to provide another figure, or the number of permits
issued last year.
While even poorly enforced measures and licensing procedures
are intended to deter deforestation, until recently other
government statutes deemed cleared forest to be "an improvement
on the land," which meant it was less likely to be considered
unproductive and seized for agrarian reform. If the owner sold
it for government redistribution to peasants, burning and
planting paid off in higher compensation. Martins said that is
changing now.
But the pace of destruction appears to be dictated more by
the marketplace than by any government measure. The demand in
Europe and the United States for hardwoods like mahogany, used
for furniture, has ushered in large illegal logging operations
throughout the Amazon. And a report by the federal secretary of
strategic affairs, recently disclosed in the Brazilian press,
said that 80 percent of all logging in the Amazon is illegal.
The government appears caught between largely international
pressure to reduce the amount of burning and deforestation, and
powerful domestic lobbies from the logging industry, farmers and
large landholders. It is building several major roads that will
cut into the Amazon, and a $1.2 billion state-of-the-art
surveillance project will soon locate minerals, ores, and other
natural resources hidden beneath the forest canopy.
The Amazon surveillance project could also provide current
information on deforestation, but ecologists are wary, for the
Brazilian government has been in no hurry to analyze the data it
has already. After years of saying that deforestation was on the
decline, last year the government released deforestation figures
for the first time in four years -- showing the 34 percent
increase.
The government tried to diminish criticism by announcing
measures to reverse the trend. It increased the share that each
landowner in the rain forest was barred from burning from 50 to
80 percent, and announced a moratorium on new licenses for
logging mahogany and another hardwood, virola.
But field reviews by the environmental monitoring agency
show that the conditions of its permits are routinely ignored.
And once again, the figures of deforestation since 1994 are late.
"The scene in general is one of rampant illegal logging,"
said Robert J. Buschbacher, conservation director of the World
Wildlife Fund- Brazil.
The government has also fought successfully to keep mahogany
off a list that would have subjected the licenses for logging it
to outside monitoring and established targets to reduce exports.
It argued that globally mahogany is not an endangered species,
even though domestically it is considered one.
Martins said his government opposed the move because it was
sponsored by the United States, which he considered
"hypocritical," since America provides much of the market for
hardwood furniture. He said that Brazil had seized hundreds of
thousands of illegally cut logs, which he said the government
plans to use for low-income housing and public buildings.
A recent study by the Amazon Environmental Research
Institute estimated that for every acre that shows up as cleared
and burned in satellite images, another partly burned or logged
acre goes undetected beneath the forest canopy.
Daniel C. Nepstad, president of the Amazon institute and a
scientist at the Woods Hole Research Institute, said such burning
and logging make the forest more vulnerable to fire and means a
50 percent greater likelihood of deforestation.
For the first time in 14 years, as part of his research, he
was able to set fire to virgin rain forest, he said. Though he
quickly extinguished it, the lesson was important: Until now, a
moist root system and dense vegetation had made it virtually
impossible to set fire to a standing primary forest.
"With logging it becomes more flammable," said Philip M.
Fearnside, an ecology professor at the National Institute for
Research in the Amazon. "So the fires can escape and go into the
forest."
Miami Herald
Published: Saturday, October 25, 1997 Section: Living Page: 1G
GREEN DREAMS: WHAT'S GONE WRONG? POLITICS SLOW EFFORTS TO
PRESERVE BRAZIL'S AMAZON RAIN FOREST
By KATHERINE ELLISON And GEORGIA TASKER , Herald Staff Writers
Back when President Clinton was planning his South America
trip, his aides thought of including a ``green'' moment in
Brazil. There was talk of a stop in the Amazon, the world's
largest remaining rain forest. There was a short-lived plan to
visit Foz do Iguacu, the site of South America's most magnificent
waterfalls.
Instead, Clinton opted for private time in Argentina's lake
district last weekend, and though he told reporters the United
States ``shares Brazil's determination to preserve the Amazon,''
environmentalists were disappointed.
They had dreamed of Clinton flying over the rain forest,
bearing witness to fires that are destroying more trees this
season than ever before. They had pictured him standing at the
site of a proposed international waterway that could flood the
world's most important remaining wetlands.
They had hoped, in short, that Clinton would have put some
high- profile pressure on President Fernando Henrique Cardoso,
who they say is yielding to loggers and developers and slashing
government funds for the environment at a time of unprecedented
burnings in Brazil's forests.
The pressure would have been timely: The United States and
other industrialized nations that give money to protect the
Amazon forest are meeting in the port city of Manaus on Monday to
evaluate the impact of their contributions. But ``green'' themes
slipped down the priority list on Clinton's trip, as they have in
Brazil during Cardoso's term.
``Brazil's `determination to preserve the Amazon' is a
dubious proposition at best,'' said Stephan Schwartzman, an
Amazon expert with the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington.
New, urgent reasons
Activists say there are new and urgent reasons to lean on
Brazil to work harder to preserve resources whose destruction has
a global impact:
Amazon burnings are on the upswing. A Brazilian government
analysis released last year showed forest clearing increased
about 34 percent between 1991 and 1994, reaching nearly 10,000
square miles a year. But an estimate, released late last month
and based on satellite data by the Environmental Defense Fund,
indicates burning increased some 28 percent more just in the past
two years -- the only evaluation to date of deforestation during
Cardoso's presidency.
Even that pace is likely to pick up, environmentalists fear,
with the accelerated growth expected as Brazil's 3-year-old
economic stabilization plan takes hold, and, more immediately,
due to exceptionally dry weather brought on by El Nino.
In the face of these growing threats, Brazil's government
has been lethargic at best, critics charge. It has not updated
its 1994 data, despite a public promise that it would do so by
the end of last year. In the late 1980s and early 1990s such data
was released annually.
Asked about the burnings, at an interview with U.S.
reporters earlier this month, Cardoso said, ``I don't know yet
what happens in the Amazon. I have asked a committee to inform
me.'' He added that his ``initial information'' was that the
burning was near but not actually in the rain forest, a theory
environmentalists reject.
Increasing development
Complicating the Amazon scenario of fires set by settlers
and ranchers clearing land is an increased rate of industrial
development in the area. Half a dozen big Asian logging firms,
some of which have bad environmental track records in Borneo,
Thailand and Malaysia, have been buying up land at prices as low
as $3 an acre, while government infrastructure projects,
including highways and dams, are proceeding apace, easing access
to the forest.
``In the next two years, we think we'll have all the
[timber- producing] companies coming for exploration, which will
change the whole scenario in Brazil,'' said Carlos Castro, an
aide to Brazilian congressman Gilney Viana. ``The strategy [of
Malaysian companies] is to buy up Brazilian companies, remodel
the factories and do logging on a much larger scale.''
Legal loopholes
Brazilian officials have said they are monitoring the
situation, but their capacity is limited. Ibama, an environmental
watchdog group, has only a few hundred poorly paid inspectors
policing an area larger than Western Europe -- a situation even
Cardoso called ``ridiculous.'' And when Ibama does manage to
catch illegal loggers or miners and levies fines, most are thrown
out of court due to a legal loophole that Cardoso's government
has tried, so far in vain, to close. One recent Brazilian
government report estimated that 80 percent of timber produced in
the Amazon is extracted illegally.
``We still don't really have an environmental policy,'' the
head of Ibama, Eduardo Martins, told Veja magazine last July.
``There are good intentions and little effective action.''
Cardoso's harshest critics doubt even his intentions,
charging that he's forsaking the environment in favor of fiscal
reforms and political alliances he needs to be reelected next
year. The clearest sign of this, they say, is the resignation
earlier this month of environmental firebrand Aspasia Camargo as
executive secretary of the Ministry of the Environment.
Budgets slashed
Camargo had fought a losing battle against the siphoning off
of funds for environmental protection to irrigation projects in
drought- plagued northern Brazil. To her distress, Cardoso had
placed the heavily politicized irrigation issues under the
environmental ministry at the start of his term, naming as
minister a politician from a right-wing party with a strong base
in the north. The president, whose own centrist party has a
minority in Brazil's chamber of deputies, has made a tactical
alliance with conservatives, on whom he depends for passage of
his economic reforms.
Subsequently, Camargo watched all of her programs' budgets
get slashed, leaving them, as she said, ``paralyzed.'' The budget
for environmental protection is scheduled to fall even more --
from $492 million to $367 million -- in next year's budget.
At the same time, Camargo said her pleadings with Cardoso to
pay for a SWAT team to attend to illegal fires were ignored.
``All we need are four or five planes in a critical area,''
she said. ``It wouldn't be that expensive. But without it, we're
simply incompetent.''
In an interview with The Herald, Camargo, who has taken a
post in the Foreign Ministry, said she understood Cardoso's
dilemma -- namely, a tougher reelection battle than most imagine
-- but added, ``I'm very much afraid'' for the future of her
former ministry.
Brazil's civil activists, she said, are ``fragile babies,''
lacking such simple organizational skills as keeping track of
government budgets, and overwhelmed and out-organized by pro-
development lobbies.
``Brazil has the greatest stock of biodiversity on the
planet,'' Camargo said. ``It would be the height of
irresponsibility if we didn't make preservation an absolute
priority.''
Beyond Brazil
Cardoso contends the responsibility is not exclusively
Brazil's. After the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, he said,
industrialized nations promised to contribute $1.5 billion for
forest conservation over five years, money that hasn't been
forthcoming.
According to Schwartzman, at the Environmental Defense Fund,
however, the G7 nations have in fact committed only $250 million,
only 30 percent of which Brazil has used. At the same time, the
rate of deforestation has increased. government makes believe it's
protecting the Amazon, and the rich countries pretend they're supporting
it,'' he said.
Schwartzman and other environmentalists agree with Cardoso
that industrialized nations should take more responsibility for
guarding a resource of vital global importance.
But that shouldn't keep the United States silent, they add,
in the face of a critically deteriorating situation. ``Brazil is
aspiring to superpower status,'' said Barbara Bramble of the
National Wildlife Federation. ``It should be held to a standard
of laws.''
=================================================================
The reproduction of this material is permitted as long as the
source is cited. If you wish to contact us or receive NEWS FROM
BRAZIL free of charge by e-mail send a message to
sejup@ax.apc.org
=================================================================