Brazil Rainforests Face New Legislative Threat
12/7/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: BRAZIL RAINFORESTS FACE NEW THREAT PROPOSED LAW WOULD LET
LANDOWNERS SKIRT CUTTING RESTRICTIONS
Source: Chicago Tribune Article
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 7, 1999
Byline: Laurie Goering
RIO DE JANEIRO -- A bill that would allow landowners to cut the Amazon
rainforest and replant the land with eucalyptus while continuing to
count it as forest "reserve" is expected to come to a vote this week
in Brasilia, environmentalists said Monday.
The measure, if passed, would represent the strongest effort yet to
undercut Brazil's tough new environmental crimes law, which went into
effect in September.
That law, passed in February 1998, has for the first time allowed
IBAMA, Brazil's leading environmental agency, to collect fines against
powerful landowners who illegally cut the Amazon or coastal Atlantic
rainforest.
Those landowners, who have strong political ties in Brazil's Congress,
have struck back, demanding the passage of the new law, which would
cancel fines for past forest destruction and allow conversion of
privately-held native forest to working eucalyptus and pine farms.
"If this law passes, it will change the entire environmental legal
framework and expose all remaining Brazilian forests to massive
deforestation, as it prioritizes land conversion into agriculture
above all," warned Robert Buschbacher, the World Wildlife Fund's
conservation director in Brasilia.
The forestry bill, created through the National Council for
Agriculture, has raised hackles among environmentalists in Brazil, in
part because it bypassed a congressional commission set up to revamp
the country's outdated 1965 forest laws.
That commission, known as CONAMA, or the National Council for the
Environment, incorporates businessmen, government representatives and
non-government organizations.
"Everybody agrees the forest code is old and needs to be reformed. But
(CONAMA) is the forum where that's supposed to happen," said Stephen
Schwartzman, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund in
Washington. "The problem is the large landowners don't want to discuss
this there. There want to bypass all the public mechanisms that have
been set up to discuss these issues."
The bill, which is expected to come up for a vote Tuesday or Wednesday
in Brasilia, is not certain to pass, though representatives of the
National Council for Agriculture reportedly believe it could win
significant government backing as a payback for earlier rural votes on
government-sponsored bills.
Jose Sarney Filho, Brazil's minister of the environment, has said he
does not back the bill, and a variety of opposition environmentalist
legislators, led by Acre state Sen. Marina Silva, are now working to
halt its passage.
The proposal comes after the collection of record fines for
deforestation in Brazil by IBAMA, an agency that until September had
no authorization to collect the fines it had issued.
Last year, before the law went into effect, IBAMA issued $11 million
in fines but collected only 6 percent.
This year collections are up sharply, environmental officials say,
though final numbers have not been released.
Under the proposed law, the landowners would be allowed to convert
privately held rainforest- which constitutes much of the Amazon--into
eucalyptus and pine plantations without government permits.
Small landowners also would be allowed to count such plantations as
forest set-asides, potentially dramatically reducing the amount of
protected Amazon rainforest.
"Environmental law enforcement in Brazil was starting to work,"
Schwartzman said. Now "this new bill could open up a very large amount
of forest to completely uncontrolled legal deforestation."
In a study earlier this year, Daniel Nepstad, an ecologist with the
Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, estimated that 16 percent
of the Amazon has been lost to deforestation and logging. The
Brazilian government puts the loss at 13 percent