A bird’s-eye view of deforestation
in Amazonia.
Brazilian public opinion,
which is now in tune with what many international bodies and organizations have been
advocating for years, has switched as a result of the economic disaster of unregulated
logging
Reducing the rainforest to
ashes to make way for cattle ranchers.
The nine states making up the
Amazon, which spans 5.5 million km2. |
For the first time, the Brazilian
public has joined the ecological campaign to save the rainforest
 Brazil’s ecologists and rural landowners
will remember 2000 as the year of confrontation. Both wanted to decide the future
of the world’s biggest biological reserve. A mass petition, protest demonstrations
and a torrent of 20,000 e-mail messages supported the country’s non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and blocked an amendment to the national forestry regulations
that would have increased by a quarter the number of trees that could be legally
felled in the Amazon region, which lost an estimated 532,000 sq km of forest between
1978 and 1997.
At the height of the confrontation last May, a public opinion poll showed that 88
percent of the electorate would vote against parliamentary candidates who backed
the amendment. Ninety-three percent of those
questioned said protecting the environment did not hinder the country’s development,
while 90 percent believed that cutting down more trees would not help reduce hunger.
Even more important was the finding that in a country where few people read newspapers,
63 percent said they had closely followed the debate, mostly through radio and television
reports.
The financial press was firmly against the amendment too. “There is not a single
argument that can justify this disastrous measure,” said the influential newspaper
Gazeta Mercantil. “Brazil has plenty of fertile land. There are more than 100 million
hectares of unused land alone in the sertão,” the scrubland that covers a
quarter of the country. Amazonia has lost 60 percent of its original vegetation through
the spread of soybean farming and especially pasture land for cattle.
Another major Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de São Paulo, summed up the worries
about the future with a headline that asked: “What kind of air are we going to breathe?”
The popularity of the ecologists’ campaign could be seen through the fact that characters
in the cartoon strip Mónica, which appears in dozens of newspapers, were dressed
in mourning clothes as a sign of protest.
“For the first time Brazilian society is reacting, organizing itself and getting
results through a major campaign that started inside the country,” says Eduardo Martins,
until last year head of the federal environment agency, IBAMA. “In Amazonia, the
proposed amendment was de-nounced by sectors that have never stirred before, such
as the middle class and the local media,” declares biologist Adalberto Veríssimo,
a researcher with the Institute of People and the Environment in Amazonia, IMAZON,
one of the region’s most respected NGOs. “Everyone understood that a public resource
was about to be destroyed without generating any kind of development.”
Brazilian public opinion, which is now in tune with what many international bodies
and organizations have been advocating for years, has switched as a result of the
economic disaster of unregulated logging. Most of the destroyed forest areas have
become pasture land or soybean, palm, coffee and black pepper plantations. These
foreign crops, which are ill-suited to poor soil and heavy rains, have had a hard
time growing over two-thirds of the deforested area. Half the 20 million hectares
of pasture are also in a miserable state.
Low yields made farmers look for new land, causing deforestation to increase year
after year–always in vain, however, because 78 percent of the soil was too acidic
and had little natural fertility. Along with this vicious circle, there were transport
problems. It takes several days by river to get from the ranches deep in the jungle
to a port from where crops can be sent out to domestic and foreign markets.
So although 14 percent of Amazonia’s virgin forest has been destroyed, it is still
a poor area and its 20 million inhabitants–three-quarters of whom live in towns–only
produce seven percent of the country’s GDP. Per capita income there is below the
national average, while the region’s main export, Brazil nuts, is only worth about
$3 million, far behind the $230 million earned from the urban production of syrups
for soft drinks.
The waste
of sawmills and the defiance of loggers
A recent survey carried
out by IMAZON for the World Bank showed why farming in the region is so difficult.
It noted that 18 percent of the Brazilian part of the Amazon was given over to cattle-raising.
That area, in the far south of the Amazon, is the most deforested part and has a
low annual rainfall of 1,800 mm. To the north is a mixed zone that has a little more
rain and where farming is still feasible, despite a host of insects and plant diseases.
In the remaining 45 percent of Brazilian Amazonia, where heavy rain falls each day,
the only viable large-scale economic activity is forestry. “Here and in the mixed
zone, logging is as profitable as agriculture,” says Veríssimo, one of the
experts involved in the survey. “That shows forestry is the best thing for Amazonia.”
But the timber industry has not managed to make use of this natural resource without
destroying it. Nearly three years ago a European Commission report blamed the industry
for 72 percent of deforestation, and said its activities were much more harmful to
the forests than felling by farmers or ranchers. The sawmills also waste an enormous
amount of timber, sometimes as much as two-thirds of the trees felled. Even worse,
most timber firms do not obey the law. “The strategic affairs ministry says about
80 percent of the timber is illegally chopped down in the region and forest management
schemes are mostly ignored,” says a survey put together by Greenpeace.
What are these schemes? First, there is the battle to keep current forestry regulations
on the books and strictly enforce them. During the 1960s, each landowner was required
to preserve 50 percent of the forests on his land. As deforestation sped up, parliament
decreed in 1996 that 80 percent must be preserved. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso
sided with the ecologists, saying that “forestry regulations are needed to ensure
the survival of Amazonia, which belongs to Brazilians but also to humanity as a whole.”
A haven for
biodiversity is the last farming frontier
Brazil contains the planet’s richest biodiversity and the widest range of plant species.
A sixth of all the world’s birds live there, an eighth of all amphibians, one in
every 11 mammals and a 15th of the world’s reptiles. Five thousand different kinds
of trees grow in the Amazon, against North America’s 650.
Another scheme currently on the books is the Pilot Programme to Preserve Tropical
Forests, funded by the G7 countries, the European Union and the Brazilian government,
which have together contributed $280 million to support sustainable use of the forests.
The programme is the biggest multilateral investment in the environment ever made
in a single country.
As well as these schemes, there is the Amazon Region Protected Areas Programme, backed
by Brazil, the World Bank and other international bodies, such as the World Wildlife
Fund and the World Bank Forest Alliance Programme. It aims to convert 10 percent
of Amazonia into protected areas. Twelve million hectares are already protected,
and the goal is to increase that to 37 million hectares–an area the size of Germany.
All these conservation measures are opposed in varying degrees by Amazonian landowners,
who see the region’s 5.1 million sq kms as the last agricultural frontier, with unlimited
possibilities for growth. They say society owes them something for having stopped
felling on part of their lands to help safeguard the environment, and are demanding
monetary compensation.
An all-party parliamentary commission, headed by the pro-government centre-right
deputy Mosir Micheletto, tabled a draft law at the end of 1999 to allow a very flexible
interpretation of the forestry regulations. Micheletto’s bill stipulated that half
of Amazonia’s ranchland should remain uncleared, but that Amazonian state governments
would be able to grant special logging concessions on a case by case basis. Estates
of less than 25 hectares, meanwhile, would be exempted from all conservation regulations.
During a demonstration in favour of the new proposal last February, 600 members of
the National Agricultural Federation made a nationalistic protest against what they
called “the harmful interference of national and foreign ecological organizations
in drafting punitive laws which hinder national development.”
Environment Minister José Sarney Filho, the National Environment Council (CONAMA)
and the NGOs responded by pointing out the need to continue preserving 80 percent
of the Amazonian forest. For six months, they organized public debates all over Brazil.
Battles
among the region’s shareholders
The ecologists overwhelmingly
support the government’s stand. Their main criticism is that the scrubland areas
of the Amazon must also be safeguarded, since–contrary to most people’s beliefs–jungle
is not the only native vegetation in the Amazon. Environmental NGOs say it is not
enough to leave only 35 percent of the ranchland in this ecosystem untouched, as
CONAMA proposes, let alone descend to the 20 percent threshold in the Micheletto
proposal. Either way, it would seem hard to ignore Brazilian public opinion, which
now broadly agrees with arguments that until recently were dismissed as unpatriotic
and slavish to foreign interests.
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