Brazil Gambles on Monitoring of Amazon Loggers

[n2doc]

This is very bad, folks. The "monitoring" process will be worthless, IMHO, because of corruption and intimidation. This is going to be an ecological disaster of the first magnitude.


A lone Brazil nut tree remains in a deforested area of the Amazon, which loses an area the size of New Jersey to clear-cutting and timbering every year


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.

Residents of the settlement of Realidade, along Highway BR-319. Settlers are expected to monitor forests, but they do not have a phone. More Photos »
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 says they will be closely monitored and will pay a royalty on their activities.

The architects of the plan say it will also help reduce tensions over land ownership in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical forest, which loses an area the size of New Jersey 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 called-for monitoring of the 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 to corruption.

Further, the new system assumes that the world community will also play a part and buy timber only from merchants who are properly licensed and will avoid unscrupulous dealers.

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 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 added, “everything is going to depend on how it is done and whether the financial and human resources are there to make it work.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/world/americas/14amazon.html


The government recently introduced a plan to monitor logging in the rain forest. But in the small rural settlement of Realidade, resources do not yet exist and residents found they had to be monitors themselves.


A cattle farm in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. The needs of such ranches often conflict with efforts to preserve forests.


In theory, 70 percent of the jungle is public land, but miners, ranchers and loggers have felt free to establish themselves in unpoliced areas.