More Fires by Farmers Raise Threat to Amazon
11/28/97
OVERVIEW, SOURCE & COMMENTARY by EE
Following is a few week old article from the New York Times which
details the continued degradation of the Amazon. The interesting
points are made that many of the fires in the region are set by small
farmers, but that the forest is more easily ignited following logging.
LIST NOTE:
The Gaia Forest Conservation Archives web site at has new discussion bulletin boards regarding forest conservation. If
you wish to comment on this piece, or generally to discuss Amazonian
forest conservation issues, check out the Amazon Raiforest Web
discussion space at http://forests.org/amazonweb/
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: More Fires by Farmers Raise Threat to Amazon
Source: The New York Times Company
Status: Copyright 1997, contact Source for reprint permissions
Date: November 2, 1997
Byline: 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."