Politics Slow Efforts to Preserve Brazil's Amazon Rain Forest
10/25/97
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Headline: Politics Slow Efforts to Preserve Brazil's Amazon Rain Forest
Source: Miami Herald
Date: 10/25/97
Authors: Katherine Ellison and Georgia Tasker, Herald Staff Writers
GREEN DREAMS: WHAT'S GONE WRONG? POLITICS SLOW EFFORTS TO
PRESERVE BRAZIL'S AMAZON RAIN FOREST
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.''