Skeptics Wary of Amazon Initiative
5/3/98
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE
Brazil's recent announcement that protected areas will be tripled in
size is being met with cautious optimism and healthy skepticism. The
list of past grandiose announcements that have not been met is long.
Applaud but verify!
g.b.
For more information: http://forests.org/forests/brazil.html
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Title: Skeptics wary of Amazon initiative
Source: United Press International Science News
Status: Copyright 1998, contact source for reprint permissions
Date: Wednesday April 29, 1998
Byline: Elizabeth Manning
WASHINGTON, April 29 (UPI) Environmental watch groups say they remain
unconvinced that Brazil is truly serious this time about protecting
its Amazon rainforests.
Environmental Defense Fund's Steve Schwartzman told United Press
International he "was so disappointed" after Brazil's "grandiose
gestures" that turned empty after the 1992 Earth Summit that he
stopped keeping records of similar pronouncements for awhile.
Schwartzman says President Cardoso's commitment Wednesday to triple
his country's protected rainforest by the year 2000 may indeed signal
a new awareness in Brazil that the Amazon is globally significant.
He calls it "a good-faith start" but remains wary of what he calls
Brazil's track record of "playing to the public."
Some examples:
* In July 1996, Cardoso signed a two-year moratorium on logging of
mahogany and virola, another increasingly scarce hardwood. Meanwhile,
a federal bill empowering Brazil's environmental agency to enforce
such laws had languished in Congress for five years, and would for
another 18 months. Without criminal penalties, the environmental
agency could only impose fines. Of those, it managed to collect only 6
percent. Furthermore, a federal report found that 80 percent of all
logging in the Amazon rainforests was illegal, and thus beyond the
influence of a moratorium.
* Brazil promised at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that it
would regularly publish up-to-date satellite data that could track
fires and deforestation. The images have appeared only once since,
however, in 1996. The director of the Brazilian space agency said he
was unable to meet the commitment because the government stopped
allocating the $500,000 required per year to continue the study.
That 1996 data revealed deforestation had increased 34 percent in the
1990s _ after years of government assurances the destruction was
dropping.
* Schwartzman says Brazil also promised to publish a deforestation map
of the Amazon region, which "has yet to appear."
* Since 1989, the administration has consistently announced plans to
aggressively address the fires that rage through the forest during
each dry season. Figures released by the government last January,
however, show that deforestation nearly tripled in the burning
seasons between 1990 and 1995. This year, so far marks the worst
destruction on record, and environmental predict there's more to come.
In the agreement President Cardoso announced Wednesday with the World
Wildlife Fund and the World Bank, the international lending
organization has committed at least $30 million to help set up the new
conservation parks.
Francis Sullivan, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Forest-for-
Life program, says the agreement today "is not a compensation deal."
He says, "The politics of rainforest conservation have been turned
upside down. Before, it was countries like the United States imploring
for the commitments of protection. This time, the (Brazilian)
administration is fully behind the effort."