A weak environmental regime in Brazil allows free rein to Asian logging companies to plunder through the Amazon forests
Hackers' paradise
THE Amazon region in SouthAmerica is being invaded inhordes by huge Asian loggingcompaniesscaring environmentalists and local loggingoutfits. ProceedingfromMyanmarIndonesiaMalaysiaPhilippines and Korea -where they have already devastated more than 50 per cent ofthe original wood areas -these companies are said tohave bought at least 1.5 million ha of forest lands in theBrazilian state of Amazonas.According to Brazilian environmental organisationstheyplan to buy and log in theshort-termanother 7.5 million ha of aforest known worldwide as having theworld's largest biodiversity resources onearth. The target of these companies is abillion-dollar market for precious andendangered species such as mahogany(Swietnia macrophyla king) and ferrule(Virola surinamensis warb).
According to SOS Atlantic Rainforest, a Brazilian NGO the tactics of the foreign logging industry is first to buy lands and obtain exploitation licenses in countries which have both huge wood areas and common borders with Brazil. The next step - logging in Brazil -coincides with their offer of a hundred new jobs thereby putting pressure on the local governments and in doing so gaining political support for the devastation.
Brazil is the most targeted country in Latin America for having relatively low levels of forest devastation serious deficiencies in environmental control and in some of its state seven economic and legal incentives for the logging industry. What scares ecologists is the anti - environmental curriculum of the wood dealers who have Chinese Japanese and Korean backing the world's biggest wood customers. In Indonesia which originally had 116 million ha of woodlands (the world's second largest wood area after the Amazon region) these companies exploited in less than two decades 62per cent of the productive potential of the forests.
These are data regarding only one of
the 28 Brazilian states. But the Amazon
forest has a huge area of approximately
5.3 million sq km and embraces the
states of Acre, Amapa, Para, Roraima
and part of the states of Goias,
Maranhao and Tocantins. As a whole,
the Amazon forest means 63.85 per cent
of the Brazilian territory.
Asian logging industries have the same
modus operandi. Both SOS Atlantic
Rainforest and Ronaldo Bonfim stress
that the logging companies buy farms
and sawmills in precarious economic
conditions and begin to operate with
the erstwhile owner's logging license. As
Brazilian legislation does not impose
any restriction to the amount of land
bought by foreign companies, the logging industry is free to buy as much land
as they wish.
The criteria used in an environmental impact study - needed to obtain the
logging license - is also the same for
national and foreign companies. Once
the logging industries fill all legal
requirements, nothing can be done to
impede the authorisations. Unofficial
data, put forth by NGOs, estimate
that the logging industry has already
invested us $350 million and have
other us $650 million to buy land and
equipment in Brazil.
The strong reaction of environmentalists and local communities managed
to temporarily block the action of
the logging industry in Guyana. In
Suriname, the government temporarily
suspended the concession of new logging licenses, in spite of the fact that the
logging industry investment would create hundreds of new jobs which the
Surinamese are much in need of.
Pressed by public opinion, the Congress
and local groups, the Brazilian government announced on July 25 this year a
two-year moratorium on the mahogany
and ferrule logging. Old logging licenses,
however, are still valid. Brazil exports 40
per cent of its mahogany production -
in 1995, 98,000 cu m - mainly to
United States and England. Brazilian
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso
also agreed that by the end of September
every old authorisation for logging the
two species must be revised.
Logging control can hardly be
implemented by official agencies, say
Brazilian ecologists. lbama, the
Brazilian environmental agency, has
only 650 technicians, 120 vehicles and
30 boats to oversee the Amazon forests,
an area equivalent to the whole of
western Europe. President Cardoso
altered the Brazilian Forest Code (a
legislation which was valid since 1964)
and increased from 50 per cent to 80 per
cent, the minimum area of each
Amazon property, which must consist
of typical vegetation and where logging
is not allowed. In the same series of
environmental acts, he forbid new conversion of current native wood areas
in to agricultural areas in properties
already deforested.
Officially, the coming of Asian
logging industries did not provoke
Cardoso's acts. The argument that based
the presidential measures was induced
by official satellite surveys which pointed
out that deforestation in the Amazon
region increased from 11,130 sq km in
1991 to 14,896 sq km in 1994. However,
at the signing ceremony, minister
of environment, Gustavo Krause, an
ecoliberal economist who pledges for the
total absence of legal regulations in every
field, attacked what he called "economic delinquency" in Amazon.
The presidential acts caused a controversy among environmentalists. On the one hand Greenpeace-Brazil which has been campaigning against the logging industry for the last four years and had managed to interrupt the operation of a mahogany sawmill, sent a letter to Cardoso cheering the official measures. To Greenpeace now "its crucial to identify and label the existing stocks already cut and to make an inventory of the areas of occurrence of these timber in order to guarantee the success of the presidential act".
On the other Roberto Smeraldi, president, Friends of Earth (FOE) an international NGO said that "the series of acts goes in the right direction but in a confused and contradictory way". Smeraldi stressed that the aerial survey by satellites is not sufficient to identify the effects of the selective wood cut. "It can only register deforestation as a whole which is not uncommon in certain areas of the Amazon region."
He also criticises the government for not having included data regarding the1995 logging. "Exactly in this year illegal logging became more intense. More recent data would have pointed to a much more critical situation." A study conducted by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) shows that the total area deforested between 1992 and 1995 may have reached 59,584 sq km a region as big as Belgium. FOE which has partner organisations based in areas being deforested also points out that the presidential act is unfair. "The measures" says FOE do not differentiate
small from huge properties and may
intensify the mobility of small farmers
in the frontiers of colonisation and,
consequently, contribute even more to
deforestation.
European and us governments have
expressed in different opportunities
their concern" over the destiny of Brazilian Amazon. But in spite of the so-called concerns all G-7 countries failed to live up to the promise firmed during the Rio Summit of sending to Brazil us $1.5 billion in financial and technological aid to support environmental protection policies. Only us $20 million in such partnerships has come into Brazil.
Carlos Tautz is a freelance journalist based in Rio de JaneiroBrazil
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