More Fires by Farmers Raise Threat to Amazon
11/2/97
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Headline: More Fires by Farmers Raise Threat to Amazon
Source: New York Times
Date: 11/2/97
Author: Diana Jean Schemo
Copyright 1997: The New York Times
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- In Porto Velho in western Brazil, thick clouds of
black smoke have forced airports and schools to shut down. In southern Para
state near the Amazon frontier, people gasping for air have collapsed and
ended up in hospitals. In the city of Manaus, the sun has disappeared for days
at a time.
Twenty years after the goal of rescuing the Amazon rain forest first
captured world attention, becoming the pet cause of celebrities and a regular
topic in children's schoolbooks, deforestation and the burning of vast
territories are again climbing.
Data in recent weeks suggest that the burning going on in Brazil this year
is greater than what has occurred in Indonesia, where major cities have been
smothered under blankets of smoke that spread to other countries.
Despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to
save the rain forest, burnings in the Amazon region are up 28 percent over
last year, according to satellite data, and 1994 deforestation figures, the
most recent available, show a 34 percent increase since 1991.
"Deforestation has done nothing but go up," said Stephen Schwartzman of the
Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit group based in Washington. "Where the
most money has gone is where the fires have increased the most." The group
noted that half the fires recorded this year were in Mato Grosso, where the
World Bank lent $205 million to save the rain forest in a natural resource
management program.
Roughly a fifth of the fires that rage annually between June and October
cause new deforestation, and another tenth is burning of ground cover in
virgin forests. Scientists say that the Amazon rain forest may be reaching a
critical level of dryness, in which standing forest could catch fire and burn
out of control.
A report by the Environmental Defense Fund warned the Amazon "may be edging
closer to catastrophic fire events," and predicted "potentially enormous
global consequences."
The World Wildlife Fund found that 93 percent of the original Atlantic rain
forest in the northeast had disappeared over the centuries, and some 12 to 15
percent of the Amazon rain forest. The report said that Brazil was losing more
rain forest each year than any other country on the planet. In addition to the
5,800 square miles a year that satellite images show are deforested each year,
the Woods Hole Research Institute estimates that another 4,200 are thinned
through logging beneath the forest canopy.
Eduardo Martins, the president of the Brazilian federal environmental
agency, said in an interview that the increase in fires, while worrisome, did
not result in an increase in deforestation, although the two problems have
risen in tandem. He contended that most fires were set by small farmers who
would starve if they could not clear land for planting, and that the
environmental damage paled next to fossil fuel emissions in the United States.
Beneath the noxious haze covering much of Brazil every burning season is an
opaque, often contradictory, government policy toward the environment.
"Properly speaking, we still don't have a policy, but we have a start,"
Martins told a Brazilian news magazine earlier this year.
Lacking enforcement muscle, the government environmental agency ultimately
collects only 6.5 percent of the fines it imposes. The rest are thrown out in
court.
In a recent interview, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso acknowledged that
the agency needed more money and muscle. A bill to strengthen it, stalled in
Congress since 1991, passed the Senate this year. It is now idling in the
House, where the Federation of Industries is lobbying against it on the ground
that threats of cash fines and prison will open the way for corruption.
For now, not surprisingly, the agency is usually ignored by the people it is
supposed to monitor. While permits are required for burning, the agency has
reportedly issued licenses to clear a total of only about 24,700 acres this
year -- an area seemingly far smaller than what would produce the dense clouds
of smoke that have appeared over several states. Martins disputed that permits
were issued for only such an area, but his office declined to provide another
figure, or the number of permits issued last year.
While even poorly enforced measures and licensing procedures are intended to
deter deforestation, until recently other government statutes deemed cleared
forest to be "an improvement on the land," which meant it was less likely to
be considered unproductive and seized for agrarian reform. If the owner sold
it for government redistribution to peasants, burning and planting paid off in
higher compensation. Martins said that is changing now.
But the pace of destruction appears to be dictated more by the marketplace
than by any government measure. The demand in Europe and the United States for
hardwoods like mahogany, used for furniture, has ushered in large illegal
logging operations throughout the Amazon. And a report by the federal
secretary of strategic affairs, recently disclosed in the Brazilian press,
said that 80 percent of all logging in the Amazon is illegal.
The government appears caught between largely international pressure to
reduce the amount of burning and deforestation, and powerful domestic lobbies
from the logging industry, farmers and large landholders. It is building
several major roads that will cut into the Amazon, and a $1.2 billion state-
of-the-art surveillance project will soon locate minerals, ores, and other
natural resources hidden beneath the forest canopy.
The Amazon surveillance project could also provide current information on
deforestation, but ecologists are wary, for the Brazilian government has been
in no hurry to analyze the data it has already. After years of saying that
deforestation was on the decline, last year the government released
deforestation figures for the first time in four years -- showing the 34
percent increase.
The government tried to diminish criticism by announcing measures to reverse
the trend. It increased the share that each landowner in the rain forest was
barred from burning from 50 to 80 percent, and announced a moratorium on new
licenses for logging mahogany and another hardwood, virola.
But field reviews by the environmental monitoring agency show that the
conditions of its permits are routinely ignored. And once again, the figures
of deforestation since 1994 are late.
"The scene in general is one of rampant illegal logging," said Robert J.
Buschbacher, conservation director of the World Wildlife Fund-Brazil.
The government has also fought successfully to keep mahogany off a list that
would have subjected the licenses for logging it to outside monitoring and
established targets to reduce exports. It argued that globally mahogany is not
an endangered species, even though domestically it is considered one.
Martins said his government opposed the move because it was sponsored by the
United States, which he considered "hypocritical," since America provides much
of the market for hardwood furniture. He said that Brazil had seized hundreds
of thousands of illegally cut logs, which he said the government plans to use
for low-income housing and public buildings.
A recent study by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute estimated that
for every acre that shows up as cleared and burned in satellite images,
another partly burned or logged acre goes undetected beneath the forest
canopy.
Daniel C. Nepstad, president of the Amazon institute and a scientist at the
Woods Hole Research Institute, said such burning and logging make the forest
more vulnerable to fire and means a 50 percent greater likelihood of
deforestation.
For the first time in 14 years, as part of his research, he was able to set
fire to virgin rain forest, he said. Though he quickly extinguished it, the
lesson was important: Until now, a moist root system and dense vegetation had
made it virtually impossible to set fire to a standing primary forest.
"With logging it becomes more flammable," said Philip M. Fearnside, an
ecology professor at the National Institute for Research in the Amazon. "So
the fires can escape and go into the forest."