InfoTrac Web: Expanded Academic ASAP.
Source: The Economist (US),
Title: Managing the rainforests; Conservation in
rainforest.(Science and Technology)(efforts to save the rapidly
diminishing rainforest)
Subjects:
Rain
forest ecology -
Locations:
Electronic Collection:
A74450347
RN: A74450347
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2001 Economist Newspaper Ltd.
EMPTY fields, as far as the eye can see, line the highway
for most of the
300km (186 miles) from
timber-cutting town of
1970s most of the trees in a broad strip beside the road
have been cut-not
just to extract timber, but to clear pasture for
cattle-raising, encouraged by
subsidies and tax incentives. Now, though, most of the
fields lie empty and
are becoming overgrown with scrub. Cows are seen so
infrequently that they
might be imagined to be an endangered species.
The deforestation, mostly in the past 30 years, of 14% of
the Brazilian part
of
over the border in other countries) has been as much an
economic as an
environmental disaster. The usable timber would be ripped
out of a stretch of
forest and the rest would then be burned, because the land
would often be
worth more when cleared than it had been as untouched
forest. This value,
however, was due partly to excessive optimism over the
region's agricultural
potential, and partly to a set of economically perverse
incentives provided by
the government. When farming was actually tried, it was
frequently found to be
unprofitable. And many did not even bother to try. Some
chopped down the
trees, grabbed the grants and then abandoned the land.
Others used the "farms"
they carved out of the jungle to disguise (highly taxed)
profits on other
businesses as farming profits (which used to be tax-free).
As a result, there
are now about 165,000kmA[superscript two] of abandoned land
in Brazilian
In recent years, the handouts and tax breaks that promoted
deforestation have
been reduced. As a result, good-quality forested land can be
worth as much as
40% more than cleared land. A law passed in 1998 introduced
stiff penalties
for cutting trees without permission from
environmental-protection agency. Though deforestation seems
to have slowed
since the mid-1990s (see chart), new figures due shortly
will show that last
year's deforestation was little different from that in 1998
and 1999, and
about % of the forest was chopped.
Besides the cleared forest that shows up on the satellite
pictures, each year
a further, unmeasured amount (at least 10,000kmA[superscript
two], according
to a study carried out in 1999) has its most valuable trees
ripped out and is
then abandoned. The big holes in forest cover caused by this
reckless
extraction make the area drier and thus vulnerable to fires.
And if the forest
does grow back, it grows differently, with fewer species,
and choked by thick
creepers that Amazonians call cipo. Though most of the
rainforest remains
intact-in contrast to the gloomiest predictions of the
1980s, which predicted
it would be almost gone by now-it continues to be hacked
away at a rate that
will see it wiped out within the next 200 years.
Fortunately, there are stronger grounds than ever for hoping
that this will
not happen. Belatedly, in parts of
local forest is either razed or damaged, timber firms are
coming to see
unharmed woodland as an asset that, properly managed, can
yield a good income
forever. Their enthusiasm has been bolstered by studies
showing that
"sustainable management" of forests, also known as
"reduced-impact logging" (
RIL ), can be more profitable than the reckless conventional
methods of timber
extraction. One such study, conducted near Paragominas,
found that RIL was 12%
cheaper than conventional logging.
In RIL schemes, the area to be exploited is divided into
perhaps 30 blocks,
one of which has timber extracted each year, before being
left alone for 29
years. This is enough for the forest to regenerate
successfully, because in
addition to rotation, the schemes take care to leave the
oldest specimens of
the exploited species standing. As well as providing cover
from the tropical
sun, the spreading branches of these tall trees re-seed the
block with new
specimens. In haphazard, conventional logging, such trees
are usually hacked
down and, because their trunks are often hollow or damaged,
then abandoned-a
waste of time and money for the lumberjacks, as well as
maiming the forest.
RIL reduces the damage further by plotting the position of
each block's
valuable trees on a computer, which then works out the
shortest set of access
roads that needs to be carved out to remove the felled
trees. Lumberjacks are
also taught ways of felling trees that avoid damaging those
around them.
With planning, the forest's animals, as well as its plants,
can be preserved,
according to Adalberto Verissimo of Imazon, a local environmental-research
group.
about 500kmA[superscript two] of forest to form a viable
population of 50
cats. Though a typical managed-forestry scheme is only about
a fifth of this
size, by ensuring that at least "corridors" of
forest are maintained between
neighbouring schemes, the big cats and all the other animal
species below them
in the food chain can, it is hoped, survive reasonably well.
It should, in
other words, be possible for a stretch of forest to provide
an endless supply
of tropical hardwood but still suffer a minimal impact on
its ecosystem.
Sustainable forestry of this sort has been talked about in
least the 1980s, but started taking off only in the
mid-1990s. Across the
country, including areas outside
10,000kmA[superscript two] of forest under sustainable
management. Foreign
consumers of tropical hardwoods-furniture makers and
sellers, for instance-are
increasingly asking for timber that has been independently
certified as coming
from well-run RIL schemes, so that they can promise their
environment-conscious customers that they are not
contributing to the
destruction of the rainforest.
The Rosa Group, a big timber firm in Paragominas, started
using RIL in 1998,
and is now applying for certification by the Forest
Stewardship Council ( FSC
), an international agency that sets standards for
sustainable forestry.
Antonio Rosa, the firm's boss, sees certification as key to
his plan to expand
its exports to
prepared to pay extra for certified timber, making it even
more attractive.
But most timber felled in
sustainable forestry-and the decline of reckless
chopping-will depend on how
quickly Brazilian consumers switch to demanding certified
timber. There are
signs that this is starting to happen. In 2000, 40 Brazilian
firms, including
Tok & Stok, a big furniture retailer, formed a
"buyers' group" to coordinate
their purchases of certified wood, and jointly pledged to
stop using
uncertified timber by 2005. By creating a growing market for
certified timber,
it is hoped, supply will grow too. Imazon is conducting what
it believes is
the first-ever study of who distributes and buys timber in
ways of accelerating the switch to sustainable forestry.
Since much of the rainforest is still untouched and unclaimed,
and thus public
property according to
could accelerate the move to sustainability by declaring it
all a national
park and then licensing timber firms to run RIL schemes in
selected parts of
it. A study by Mr Verissimo and others for the environment
ministry concluded
that just 10% of the remaining forest, managed sustainably,
could meet all the
existing demand for tropical hardwood. Much of the rest
might then be declared
untouchable.
In practice, policing such a huge preservation area against
illegal logging
would be an immense task. A national park that existed only
on paper would not
be worthy of the name. And Ibama, whose job it would be to
patrol this park,
has a reputation for inefficiency and corruption. It seems
to be improving,
but slowly. Timber firms in Paragominas say the local branch
that inspects
them is now doing a reasonable job, but they complain of
"unfair competition"
from surrounding regions where the agency is ineffective.
Some environmentalists say the answer is to take the job
away from Ibama
(whose broad remit includes dealing with everything from oil
slicks to urban
noise) and create a specialised body similar to
Raimundo Deusdara, an environment-ministry official
responsible for forest
preservation, agrees that the idea is worth considering. In
the meantime, he
hopes that a new environment tax, to be introduced soon,
will at least double
Ibama's budget, and thus make it more effective.
Another hindrance to the effort to control illegal logging
has been that,
since
owned forest. Only now has the federal government launched a
campaign to seize
back the vast tracts of
creating a land register has been passed, and the government
hopes the
register will be compiled by 2003.
Combined with better land registration, improved satellite
imaging should help
to monitor, and thus prevent, deforestation.
INPE, currently produces its deforestation figures annually,
but the
Chinese-Brazilian CBERS satellite it uses scans
so it is studying whether it could produce figures more
frequently. Mato
Grosso state, which includes a small slice of Amazonian
forest, is already
doing this on its own. A state laboratory is downloading
satellite images and
comparing them with a computerised land register to spot
breaches of the
often-flouted national forest code, which allows landowners
in
deforest only 20% of their property, and even then, only
with permission.
In theory, real-time detection of deforestation could be
done for all of
in 2004, of a Brazilian satellite that will provide images
every two hours.
brought into service. Though its main role is in defence,
and to monitor the
traffic in illegal drugs, it could also be used to detect
loggers' activities.
But collecting and processing such masses of data would be
expensive. And, of
course, it would only be worthwhile if there were an
effective forest service
which had enough wardens with boats, planes and helicopters
to rush them to
remote areas where illegal logging had been spotted.
Encouraging sustainable timber extraction, and suppressing
illegal logging,
are only part of what must be done to stop the rainforest
being degraded and
destroyed. The other big threat is population pressure. Last
year's census
found that about 12m people live in
increasing by 3.7% a year. So there is a growing need to
find people ways of
making a living without despoiling the forest.
This was one of the objectives of the Pilot Programme to
Conserve the
Group of Seven rich countries-hence its nickname, PPG7. All
sorts of projects
were created to help forest dwellers make a living from such
things as
collecting fruits and plants. But, as an independent review
concluded last
year, progress has been very slow. Much of the $88m spent so
far has been
swallowed up by bureaucracy, and many projects have not got
beyond being
experiments (though PPG7 does pay for Mato Grosso's
satellite-based
enforcement system, which has already resulted in the
jailing of 50
landowners).
One reason for the poor results, the report concluded, is
that the scheme has
done little to involve the private sector in creating
forest-friendly
businesses. But, here and there, independently of the PPG7,
this is beginning
to happen. In the Ilha de Marajo, an island twice the size
of
mouth of the Amazon, Muana Alimentos, a food-processing
company, is working
with the local authorities to persuade the growing numbers
of ribeirinhos
(riverbank dwellers) to cultivate the acai palms that grow
abundantly in the
swampy land around their wooden huts. The company wants to
expand the supply
of the two products it sells: palm heart, the soft inner
stem at the tree top,
from which the fronds sprout, which is pickled and used in
salads and pies;
and the pulp of the acaA- fruit, which is served as a
delicious sorbet on
Arriving in the settlement of Piria, Georges Schnyder,
director of Muana
Alimentos, accompanies a state official on a boat trip to
try to interest the
ribeirinhos in taking a short course in cultivating the
trees to maximise
yields of fruit and palm hearts. "You could be earning
8,000 reais (about
$4,000) a year from this plot," Mr Schnyder tells
Raimundo and Rubens, a
father and son who live nearby. The two smile politely but
disbelievingly-incredulous that what is a small fortune by
local standards
might be within their grasp. The company already owns and
tends its own plots
of land on the island, but Mr Schnyder says he would rather
leave the
cultivation and processing to the locals and stick to being
a distributor.
Like the lumberjacks in Paragominas, Mr Schnyder is seeking
the FSC 's
certificate of sustainability, seeing it as a way to add
value to his
products. Despite the PPG7 's poor progress, Mr Schnyder believes
such schemes
to find sustainable livings for forest dwellers can be made
to work. But, he
grumbles, environmental groups could do more to help: they
seem keener on
sitting in their offices writing damning reports than on
setting up local
branches in forest villages to foster sustainable
development by offering
training and advice.
Politicians must change their ways too. Though many of the
incentives that led
to chopping have gone, some persist. Amazonia's state
governors opposed the
recent decision by Brazil's president, Fernando Henrique
Cardoso, to abolish
Sudam, a corruption-riddled Amazonian
"development" agency, whose handouts
have sponsored much futile forest clearance.
The military dictators who ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985 were
obsessed with
populating and developing Amazonia, convinced that otherwise
another power
might seize it. Such paranoia has died down (though many
Amazonians believe
that America is plotting to invade on the pretext of saving
the trees) but
Advance Brazil, the government's 776 billion reais
economic-development plan,
still assumes that Amazonia needs to be opened up with new
roads and
waterways. Yet a study published by William Laurence of the
Smithsonian
Tropical Research Institute, and his colleagues, in Science
in January, argued
that such transport links, when built near forests in the
past, triggered
massive deforestation. Extrapolating from past patterns to
forecast the
effects of the proposed roads and highways, the study said,
at worst, only 5%
of Amazonia might remain as pristine forest in 2020, with a
further 24% being
lightly degraded and the rest badly damaged or gone.
There are good reasons for hoping that things will not turn
out so badly.
Brazil's growing fiscal prudence may mean not all of Advance
Brazil advances.
It may also lead to further cuts in the remaining incentives
to chop trees.
Past deforestation may not be a guide to the future, because
it was mostly in
the drier fringes of Amazonia rather than the really rainy
rainforest, where
agriculture would be even harder. The government has stopped
settling landless
peasants in forested areas, which until recently had been a
smaller but
significant cause of deforestation. And the reaction in
Brazil and around the
world to the Science paper helped, by forcing the government
to submit Advance
Brazil to an independent environmental-impact assessment.
Dr Laurence agrees that things may not turn out as badly as
the paper's
bleakest prognostications. But, he argues, it is not so much
Advance Brazil
that threatens the forest as the thinking behind the
project. It assumes that
economic development depends on "extensifying",
ie, extending the amount of
land in economic use, rather than intensifying the use of
land already
exploited. Maybe so, says Raul Jungmann, Brazil's
land-reform minister, but
the
trouble is that extensifying is cheaper and simpler than
intensifying. If
richer countries want the Amazon rainforest saved (and, he
correctly points
out, they are lecturing Brazil on preserving its forests
after destroying much
of their own and their colonies'), they could offer more
technology and
capital to intensify the return on Brazil's existing
agricultural land.
Though economic development has often been depicted as the
environment's
enemy, the richer a country gets, the more its people tend
to worry about
environmental matters. It is encouraging that it was mainly
Brazilian greens,
not foreign ones, who successfully campaigned last year
against a plot by the
big landowners' lobby in Congress to weaken the forest code,
and are
mobilising against a similar attempt this year.
Brazil has already lost one tropical forest: the Mata
Atlantica, which used to
run all the way down the country's southern coast, but of
which only 7% now
remains, and that divided into small fragments. It is too
early to guarantee
the survival of the bigger, more famous one in Amazonia.
Much more needs to be
done to stop it being eaten away by % or so each year. But
its chances are
improving, especially now it is increasingly being seen as a
valuable economic
asset, something that could produce returns forever.
-- End --