Brazil & Greenpeace Plan Crackdown on Amazon Logging
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6/2/99
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Title: Brazil & Greenpeace Plan Crackdown on Amazon Logging
Source: Environment News Service
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: June 2, 1999
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, June 2, 1999 (ENS) - To mark World
Environment Day, June 5, Greenpeace has launched a campaign to save
the Amazon rainforest with the cooperation of the government of
Brazil. Thilo Bode, executive director of Greenpeace International
told reporters in Rio Friday, "The fight against the destruction of
the Amazon rainforest will be one of Greenpeace's top priorities
going into the next Millennium."
According to the Brazilian government 80 percent of all logged timber
in the Amazon is illegal.
On Tuesday, Bode met with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and
Jose Sarney Filho, the recently named Minister of Environment, in the
federal capital Brasilia.
Sarney detailed government plans to send army, navy and air force
units into the Amazon River rainforest this week in its most
aggressive attack yet on illegal loggers.
Sarney's presentation, complete with maps and slides, was showed to
reporters and the Greenpeace visiting group.
The move comes as Brazilian officials predict a 20 percent increase
this year in deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.
As recently as 1970, 99 percent of the Amazon remained intact. Today,
the Brazilian government estimates that 14 percent of the Brazilian
Amazon, an area about the size of France has been deforested. During
the last four years, an area the size of the Netherlands, Belgium and
Luxembourg combined has been lost.
Today, Bode and the Greenpeace group travel go to the interior city
of Manaus to meet with Greenpeace staff working in the Amazon.
In the new report "Facing Destruction: A Greenpeace Briefing on the
Timber Industry in the Brazilian Amazon," 2,500 logging companies and
sawmills in the Amazon have been identified.
The report identifies 26 foreign owned transnational companies which
are now operating in the Amazon.
Besides protesting against the destructive logging, the Greenpeace
campaign will also seek economic alternatives for the Amazonian
people. "We want people to look at the forest as an opportunity for
development, not as an obstacle to it," said Roberto Kishinami,
executive director of Greenpeace Brazil.
The campaign will focus on finding sustainable economic alternatives
such as rubber tapping or marketing of fruits and plants from the
forest for the 20 million people who live in the Amazon region.
"The time to look at the Amazon as a "park" is gone. It is obvious
that any effort to save the forest must address the question of a
sustainable economic development," said Kishinami.
Greenpeace wants the network of forest areas protected as ecological
reserves to be increased. Logging should only be allowed in specified
areas in accordance with strict ecological and social criteria,
through certified operations, the group says.
The reserve areas in the rainforest for rubber-tapping and other non-
wood-production activities should be expanded, Greenpeace says. The
group will also work towards "a proper demarcation of all indigenous
lands."
With the depletion of Southeast Asian and Central African Forests,
the Amazon is being targeted by transnational companies as the
essential source of tropical timber in the future. Greenpeace warns
that roads built by the logging industry provide access for other
forms of destructive forest use such as cattle ranching or soy
plantations.