Law of the Jungle
10/31/99
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY
Saving the Amazon is going to mean having enough rangers to better
control the rampant illegal activities that are occurring. In ten
years, the budget of the agency responsible for patrolling the Amazon
went from $20 million to $3 million. Money that was given by the
International community to rainforest conservation has been caught up
in red tape, and has not made it down to this critical on the ground
work. This is the sort of thing that for which International grant
funding should be ideal.
g.b.
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Title: Law of the Jungle
Source: Newsweek International
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: November 25, 1999
Byline: Mac Margolis
A visit to the front lines of the world's wildest environmental
battleground - the Amazon rain forest, where the government's
parkrangers carry machine guns
Rodolfo Lobo is not the sort of guy anyone would want as an enemy.
He carries a 9-millimeter HK machine gun to work. His tool kit also
includes a .45 pistol and enough plastic explosives to demolish a
bridge big enough to support a 20-ton truckload. He's a skilled hand
with all those weapons. He needs to be. Lobo is Brazil's top field
commander in the fight to save the Amazon rain forest.
It's hardly a job for an ordinary forest ranger. As chief inspector
for IBAMA, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable
Natural Resources, Lobo oversees 1,168 environmental officers
responsible for patrolling and policing the country's entire area of
8.5 million square kilometers. None of those inspectors has a more
crucial assignment - or a more hazardous one - than the 400 or so
who must cover all of Amazonia's 5.3 million square kilometers. "We
lose two agents a year," Lobo told NEWSWEEK last week. He was on
patrol in the often trigger-happy central Amazonian state of Para,
and he wasn't talking about inspectors who take early retirement.
"Nobody likes us."
They are heroes nonetheless. For much of what's left of the
continent-size rain forest, IBAMA has been the last defense. The
agency stands its ground, seizing illegal timber, arresting
poachers, dousing slash-and-burn fires and trying to bring the
offenders to justice. But IBAMA's efforts are dwarfed by the
colossal scale of Amazonia's destruction.
There's no such thing as a routine assignment in this untamed place.
Even so, the mission Lobo directed last week near the Pichacha River
was typical enough. The objective was to retrieve a stash of
mahogany, valued at about $1 million, which was illegally cut down
on the lands of the Kayapo Indians. On the way, some seven IBAMA
agents in three vehicles sped through the smoke of numerous illegal
slash-and-burn fires and past gaping craters left by hundreds of
wildcat gold prospectors. Lobo's team was too late to catch the
timber rustlers with the goods, but the agents combed the woods for
stragglers. The outlaws had built a 25-meter bridge to get their
logging trucks onto Kayapo territory. Lobo and his men destroyed it
with plastic explosives - for the second time in three weeks. They
could only wonder how soon they would have to come back and demolish
it again.
The thanklessness of the job doesn't stop there. The loggers often
buy off tribal leaders with token payments and a sprinkling of
favors and gifts. Such arrangements, totally illegal, are almost
always a bad bargain for the indigenous owners. Still, IBAMA has
learned the perils of intervention. Earlier this year in Redenco, a
logging town in eastern Amazonia, a band of angry Kayapo - with the
loggers' blessings - held three IBAMA officials hostage for three
days after inspectors blew the whistle on illegal logging. Jose
Sales de Souza, director of the National Park of Amazonia, says he
receives so many death threats he often leaves the phone off the
hook - and he has taught his wife to shoot. "We show up in town, and
suddenly there are no hotel vacancies and no food at the
restaurants," says Edson Cruz, another agent. The pay for such
hazardous duty: $450 a month.
Few wilderness areas on earth can match Amazonia's tangle of
man-made troubles. On any given day, they may be tracking
clandestine loggers, catching endangered-species traffickers or
chasing gold prospectors off protected tribal lands. Often they must
spend months at a time living out of jungle camps, where the routine
dangers range from clouds of malarial mosquitoes to 9-meter
anacondas and the occasional hungry jaguar - not to mention the
whole alphabet of hepatitis, from A to G.
Not so long ago, before the swarms of celebrity activists moved on
to embrace other fashionable causes, rescuing the Amazon was an
international crusade. Worldwide enthusiasm reached a peak in 1992,
when Brazil proudly played host to the Earth Summit, and the
threatened rain forest was the gathering's centerpiece. Everyone was
promising to help, from Greenpeace to the G7. The region's fortunes
appeared to have turned. The frenzy of clear-cutting began to slow,
and in burning seasons the pall of smoke across the country was
thinning out.
That brief surge of hope has passed. Settlers, ranchers and
lumbermen are once again pouring onto the frontier, felling and
burning acre after virgin acre. The settlers are trapped in a
ruinous cycle. They strip away the forest and plant their crops. In
a few years the land wears out, and poverty drives the people to
move on to repeat the process elsewhere. Brazil's recently stable
economy and strong currency, along with new advances in
tropical-farming techniques, have encouraged the spreading
environmental disaster. Back-to-back droughts caused by El Nino only
worsened the flames. In 1997, some 16,000 square kilometers went up
in smoke; last year an additional 18,000 square kilometers were lost
- approximately the area of Israel. Satellite photos suggest that
1999's record will be no better.
Lobo insists the destruction can be curbed. "But only if we have
more manpower, the proper technology and funding at the right time,"
he adds. Up to now IBAMA has come up short on all counts. Ten years
ago, in greener times, the agency's budget for inspection and
enforcement was $20 million. This year the sum was slashed to $3
million. Foreign donors have sent some assistance - such as the $340
million pledged by G-7, and administered by the World Bank - but
that money is lost in a jungle of red tape.
Illegal loggers may be the agency's toughest foes. Amazonia is the
world's No. 1 producer of tropical hardwood, yielding some 30
million cubic meters a year, worth around $1 billion. Only 14
percent of that harvest is exported. But IBAMA says 80 percent of
the timber is illegally cut and then "laundered" - that is, sold to
logging companies with certified operations, who then repackage the
clandestine lumber as part of their legal harvest. It is IBAMA's job
to stop this black-market traffic, but that would require watching
more than 4,000 sawmills and tens of thousands of trucks and boats
threading their way through the jungle. Until recently, the maximum
fine for violators was a trifling $2,500.
Now IBAMA seems to be getting a bit of help. Last month the
Brazilian Congress passed a new environmental law, making
unauthorized deforestation a jailable offense and raising the
maximum fine to $25 million. "We're never going to stop illegal
logging," says Edson Cruz. "But we can sure make life for the
outlaws more difficult, and a lot more expensive." The lumber
companies seem to be getting the message. Some 30 of them are
working to earn certification from the international Forestry
Stewardship Council, a sort of green seal for non-predatory wood
cutting.
The loggers have strong reasons to go green. Old-fashioned
clear-cutting is not only destructive, it's inefficient. And
customers are beginning to stir. "We were getting increasing
pressure from green groups and from our buyers," says Bruno Stern,
president of Gerthal, an Amazonian plywood company with many
European clients. Andre Guimares, an economist at the World Bank,
says sooner or later all loggers will be forced to change their
ways. "In another five or 10 years wood that doesn't bear a green
seal will not find a market," he predicts. No one is sure Lobo and
his rangers can hold the line that long. But they intend to try.