Government Hides Deforestation Data for FHC UK Trip, Kyoto
12/2/97
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Headline: Government Hides Deforestation Data for FHC UK Trip, Kyoto
Source: Stephan Schwartzman
Environmental Defense Fund
1875 Connecticut Avenue N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20009
Tel.: 202 387 3500
Fax: 202 234 6049
steves@edf.org
Date: 12/2/97
Brazil's most prestigious newsweekly, Veja magazine, reports
that Brazil has decided to hold the release of National
Institute for Space Research (INPE) analysis of Landsat
images of deforestation for 1995 and 1996 until after
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's return from a state
visit to the UK next week. (Veja, 3 de dezembro, 1997, p.
41) The analysis, promised since last year's release of
deforestation data for 1992- 1994 and reiterated at the G7
Pilot Program meeting in October in Manaus, shows increased
deforestation from 1994-1995, and a decline from 1995-1996.
The delay will also avoid putting the deforestation data,
key to understanding Brazil's CO2 and other greenhouse gas
emissions, on the table during the Kyoto climate
negotiations.
The PR ploy, according to journalist Expedito Filho, is only
one of several signs of the low priority FHC's government
places on environmental concerns. Environment Minister
Gustavo Krause is widely regarded as uninterested in the
environment and incompetent. Of a R$1.8 billion budget only
R$8 million were allocated to the secretariat for the Legal
Amazon. The megaproject for law enforcement in the Amazon
announced with the deforestation data last year was stopped
in September because the 8 million reais promised never
arrived, according to the article. Illegal logging,
deforestation and burning continued unabated. Veja further
claims that IBAMA aerial photos show that all 22 foreign
loggers, including the recently installed Asian firms, are
involved in illegal timber sales. Of critical importance to
any effort toward sustainability in the region, the proposed
Environmental Crimes Act continues stalled in the Chamber of
Deputies, having passed the Senate in July. Unless this law
passes the Congress, the Brazilian environmental agency,
IBAMA, will continue to lack any statutory authority to
enforce existing environmental legislation.
Thelma Kruge, coordinator of the Earth Observatory at INPE,
responsible for the deforestation data, in a separate report
said, "We received no orientation whatsoever from the
government to suspend the publication of the deforestation
numbers. It was all a great coincidence." (Correio
Brasiliense, 02/12/97, p. 7)
Not reported in the article, and by all indications
unassimilated by the governmental environmental agencies, is
the new research data showing that selective logging, ground
fires and drought in the Amazon are qualitatively changing
the process of destruction, such that the possibility of
large expanses of intact, closed forest catching fire is
real for the first time. Since at least half of the fires
are accidental, costly to large and small farmers alike and
benefit no one, this too could be addressed, with minimal
political will on the part of the government. The new
research, by the Woods Hole Research Center and the
Institute for Amazonian Environmental Research, was carried
out under the government's G7-funded program for the
conservation of Brazilian tropical forest.