Copyright © The Age Company Ltd 2001
August 20, 2001
By JOHN VIDAL

In 1976, an aeroplane crashed 11 kilometres from the centre of Manaus, the largest town in the Amazon forest. People saw where it fell, but it took rescuers 10 days to find the wreckage. Today, you could get in a car and reach the crash site in 15 minutes.

The jungle that was there is now a suburb, with paved roads, and from being a remote frontier town of about 50,000 people, Manaus is now Brazil's eighth largest city. The sprawling settlement on the north bank of the world's greatest river has sprouted high-tech assembly plants, along with slums, drugs and various social problems.

The aeroplane story was told recently by William Laurance, a Smithsonian Institute researcher based at the National Institute for Amazonian research in Manaus, to illustrate how rapidly the world's greatest forest can be transformed.

He and an international team of scientists have been trying to predict what the Amazon will look like in a generation's time. They spent months examining a $US40 billion ($A76 billion) tidal wave of major government-backed projects - including 10,000 kilometres of highways, dams, power lines, mines, gas and oilfields, canals, ports and logging concessions - lined up for the Brazilian Amazon.

Under a project called Avanca Brasil (Advance Brazil), these are being fast-tracked through parliament without much consultation. Critics, including the WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature), fear that it will be the "final and definitive assault" on the forest.

The scientists have used the past to predict the future, feeding into a super-computer gigabytes of satellite studies and historical data about how deforestation has always followed Amazonian developments. They hit the button, and the results - recently published in the journal Science - were shocking.

Two-fifths of the world's remaining tropical rainforest is in Brazil and only 14 per cent has been felled in the past century. But Dr Laurance and his team believe that within 20 years only 5 per cent of it might remain in its wild state. A further 42 per cent, they say, could be totally denuded or heavily degraded.

In effect, after 20,000 years of barely being touched and even less understood, the world's greatest forest would be transformed in a quarter of a single Western lifetime.

Even under the team's alternative, more optimistic view, Dr Laurance predicts that well over half the forest in Brazil would no longer be in a pristine state within a generation and about 30 per cent would have been lost forever.

There was more. Unstated but implicit in the findings was the warning that such developments could provoke an ecological change that could affect billions of people as far away as Europe.

The Amazon ecosystem, straddling the equator, is one of the great generators of world climate. Large-scale deforestation, say Dr Laurance and other scientists, could lead to up to 20 per cent less rainfall in the region by decreasing evapo-transpiration and solar energy absorption - the two main ingredients of cloud formation. It would feed into and further exacerbate global warming by releasing vast amounts of carbon. Severe, though unpredictable, consequences could follow for much of the world.

When Dr Laurance's paper was published, the Brazilian Government fiercely disputed some of the data. Dr Laurance's team then spent 10days triple-checking their facts. If anything, they found their forecasts had been conservative.

"We were shocked and very surprised at the results," says Dr Laurance. "We were not being alarmist. This was solid, empirical data."

The present government, like others before it, has never quite known what to do with the Amazon forest except to "develop" it. In the past, it has barely had the means to do this, but now, international finance is widely available and pressure is mounting from giant agribusiness.

The authorities say the motor for Brazil's "infrastructural development" of the Amazon will be the 10,000 kilometres of new or upgraded "superhighways" planned to crisscross the region in place of dirt tracks built in the 1970s.

However, history shows that when all-weather roads are built, they open a Pandora's box of ecological, geopolitical and social change. Dr Laurance predicts 100-kilometre corridors of deforestation, farming and settlements along the roads.

The most controversial development is the BR-163, a proposed 960-kilometre road from Cuiaba north to the Amazon port of Santarem. The town's vice-mayor, Alexander Wanghon, favors the new road because it will bring economic and political benefit.

Speculators from all over Brazil are already buying up land along its route and oiling the chainsaws, says Mr Wanghon. A dozen or more global companies have bid to build a new port terminal in Santarem and the contract has gone to Cargill, the world's largest soya exporter. ADM, another major agribusiness, is building storage facilities and forest is being cleared for more farmland.

A fierce debate has recently broken out over the scale of the plans, with the government on the defensive. Meanwhile, groups including environmentalists and indigenous people's support organisations have begun an international campaign to get the government to mitigate the potential destruction.

At stake, says Dr Laurance, is nothing less than the fate of the greatest rainforest on earth. Error: Unable to read footer file.