Brazil opens heart of Amazon to controlled logging

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Brazil opens heart of Amazon to controlled logging
By Larry Rohter Published: January 14, 2007

REALIDADE, Brazil: A Brazilian government plan set to go into effect this year will bring large-scale logging deep into the heart of the Amazon rain forest for the first time, in a calculated gamble that new monitoring efforts can offset any danger of increased devastation.

The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in an attempt to create Brazil's first coherent, effective forest policy, is to begin auctioning off timber rights to large tracts of the rain forest. The winning bidders will not have title to the land or the right to exploit resources other than timber, and the government said they would be closely monitored and would pay a royalty on their activities.

The architects of the plan said it would also help reduce tensions over land ownership in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest, which loses an area the size of Israel every year to clear-cutting and timbering.

In theory, 70 percent of the jungle is public land, but miners, ranchers and especially loggers have felt free to establish themselves in unpoliced areas, strip the land of valuable resources and then move on, mostly in the so-called arc of destruction on the eastern and southern fringes of the jungle.

But the program for monitoring loggers allowed into the rain forest's largely untouched center will come from a new, untested Forest Service with only 150 employees and from state and municipal governments. That concerns environmental and civic groups because local officials are more vulnerable to the pressures of powerful economic interests and susceptible to corruption.

The plan "can be a good idea in places where the situation is already chaotic," said Philip Fearnside, a researcher at the National Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus who recently visited this remote area. "But it's a different story in areas where hardly any logging or deforestation has taken place, where you are actually going to be encouraging the introduction of predatory forces that don't exist there now."

On paper and in principle, said Stephan Schwartzman, an Amazon specialist at Environmental Defense, an advocacy group in Washington, "I think everyone agrees that this system is an improvement over the current situation, which is totally out of control."

But in the end, he said, "everything is going to depend on how it is done and whether the financial and human resources are there to make it work."

Here in this small settlement called Reality, along the rutted Highway BR-319, those resources do not yet exist, as residents have discovered. When outsiders recently appeared to fish out of season, wiping out protected species and killing three manatees, the peasants here went to the authorities looking for help, only to be turned away.

"They told us that we had to be the monitors ourselves, but we don't have the ability to do that," said Antonio Marfoni, a settler. "There's no working phone here, and we don't have the money or the time to be able to take the bus into town to denounce violations."

Last October, during the final debate of the presidential campaign, the opposition candidate, Geraldo Alckmin, called the plan "irresponsible," accused da Silva of wanting to "privatize the Amazon" and added, "If today there is no supervision, imagine what will happen if you hand it over to the private sector."

Though the environmental movement was one of the founding constituencies of da Silva's Workers' Party, he made it clear after being re-elected to a second four-year term that his main goal was to get the Brazilian economy growing at 5 percent a year.

In November, da Silva complained of "all the obstacles I have with the environment" and with "the Indian question," which he claimed were hindering Brazilian development.

The proposal's supporters dismiss criticisms as unfounded. Jorge Viana, who is a member of da Silva's party and was governor of the Amazon state of Acre until Jan. 1, contends that "this is one of the most important initiatives that Brazil has ever adopted in the Amazon precisely because you are bringing the forest under state control, not privatizing it."

"This is a battle Brazil has to win," he added. "There's only one way to save the forest, and that is by using it, responsibly and rationally."

Cláudio Langone, executive secretary of the Environment Ministry, said by telephone from Brasilia: "Brazil today is losing money due to the illegal exploitation of timber. With this new dynamic of management, legal deforestation and sustainable development, we want to create barriers to predatory advancement and increase the value of the forest."

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But some here fear that increased value will bring with it the kind of violence that has struck other, more developed, areas of the Amazon.

Ivonete Aparecida Paes, a Roman Catholic nun who is the coordinator of the church's Justice and Peace Commission in this area, said, "Since none of the settlers already here have titles to their tracts, that creates the possibility of greater conflicts over land ownership."

After much debate, it was decided that the leases would run for 30 years. But Paulo Adário, director of Greenpeace's Amazon campaign, said that "some species need 45 years or more to regenerate" and that loggers might thus lack an economic incentive to care properly for a tract that would no longer be theirs when the trees they replaced reached harvestable size.

Already, there are signs of logging interests establishing themselves here.

A sawmill opened just down the highway in mid-2005 and was operating at capacity during a recent visit. Along the highway itself, there is now a clearing in which logs are piled haphazardly.

"No one has the authorization to cut so much wood, even with a forest management plan," said Leila Mattos, the director of Pacto Amazônico, an environmental group based in Humaitá, the closest town of any size. "I came by here at the beginning of November, and none of this was here. This is more than a year's worth of timber."

During an interview in Humaitá, Francisco Araújo, the director of the regional office of the governmental environmental agency, said that no matter who ended up in charge of supervising the timber extraction plan, the task would be hard. He complained of a shortage of gasoline and personnel and a lack of police protection for his agents.

Rescue teams search crater

Rescue crews aided by dogs searched into the night Saturday for occupants of a minibus and other possible victims feared buried in a huge crater after the earth gave way at a construction site for a new subway station, The Associated Press reported from São Paulo.

Witnesses told the police that a minibus with a driver, fare collector and two passengers fell into the crater when an 80-meter-wide, or 260-foot-wide, circular hole lined with concrete walls at the site collapsed Friday, said Etrusco Juarez, a spokesman for São Paulo State's public security department.

Two pedestrians and a truck driver who was working at the construction site were also missing and could be buried under the rubble, the governmental news agency Agência Brasil said.

The search effort continued after night fell Saturday, and authorities said it was possible there were still survivors more than 24 hours after the accident. But rescuers had not found any sign of the minibus or possible victims by late Saturday night.

"We're making every possible effort in the search for the people who disappeared," Governor José Serra of São Paulo State said at the site.

The hole at the construction site collapsed without warning Friday, creating a crater about 260 feet wide

and 125 feet deep. It swallowed cars and dump trucks along one of the busiest traffic corridors in South America's largest city.

The cause of the collapse was under investigation, but the consortium of Brazilian companies building the subway station said in a statement that heavy tropical rains may have contributed by softening the ground there.