Asian Loggers Put Brazil on Alert Over Amazon

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

9/18/96

OVERVIEW & SOURCE by EE

Coverage of the increased industrial forestry threat to remaining

rainforests from a handful of Asian (mostly Malaysian) timber companies

continues to spiral. For example, Malaysia's WTK Group is completing

purchase of 741,300 acres of forest near the city of Manaus in the

Brazilian Amazon. Reuters reports on the increased threat to the Amazon

from large scale Asian multinational loggers.

g.b.

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Asian loggers put Brazil on alert over Amazon

9/18/96

BRASILIA (Reuter) - Three multinational logging companies from Asia have

moved into the Brazilian Amazon, raising fears that the already growing

rate of deforestation in the planet's largest rainforest may be about to

speed up.

Malaysia's WTK Group, one of the world's biggest timber firms, is

completing its purchase of 741,300 acres of forest up the remote, winding

Tapua River, seven days by boat from the city of Manaus. An official said

the firm was also doubling capacity at a Manaus sawmill it owns.

"We are very hurt by the criticism. We haven't cut down a single tree yet,"

said WTK representative Tu Twang Hing in response to claims that his and

other Asian firms plan to log on a scale not yet seen in Brazil.

Environmentalists say the arrival of the multinationals, combined with

government plans to pave a highway to Venezuela to bring goods to the

Caribbean and overseas markets, shows development of the Amazon is shifting

into top gear.

"This is test of the government," said Carlos Miller of the environment

group Vitoria Amazonica. "Brazil must advance with sustainable development

and strengthen its regulatory ability."

Logging is a major force driving destruction of the Amazon. Eleven percent

of Brazil's Western Europe-sized chunk of the forest has been cleared and

the rate is speeding up. During 1994, 5,750 square miles were cut down, up

from 4,298 square miles in 1991.

The government's Environmental Institute (Ibama) admits its efforts to

control the notoriously negligent local timber industry have been flawed. A

recent survey of 34 logging sites in Paragominas, the Amazon's biggest

timber center, found that not one met requirements of the International

Tropical Timber Organization, to which Brazil has agreed to comply by 2000.

A swoop this year by Ibama found 31,000 cubic yards of illegally felled

timber floating down the Purus River towards waiting sawmills.

"Multi-million-dollar investments in the Amazonian logging industry would

spell disaster as things stand," Ibama chief Eduardo Martins said. "We

don't want that kind of invesment."

Martins said that as well as WTK, Samling Corporation also of Malaysia, and

Fortune Timber, owned by the Chinese government and Hong Kong investors,

have bought bankrupt local companies. Other deals have been stalled when

the would-be buyers discovered they were being offered Indian lands.

An Ibama document put at 11.1 million acres the amount of Amazon land now

owned by the multinationals and said the Asians' upgrading of local

sawmills would lead to a five-fold jump in timber felled to produce

plywood.

"We're extremely worried because (the Asians) work with very powerful

technology," Miller of Vitoria Amazonica said.

WTK and Samling have logged massively in Malaysia's Sarawak region where

critics say massive ecological damage has been inflicted on tropical

forests. Both have concessions across the Far East. But, as Asian

governments tighten their forestry laws and local forest resources dwindle,

the multinationals have inevitably turned to the Amazon rainforest, which

is estimated to hold a third of the world's tropical timber but accounts

for only two percent of the international tropical timber trade.

The World Resources Institute, a New York policy research center, warned in

1995 that concessions offered to Asian loggers in Surinam, on Brazil's

northern border, meant between 25 and 40 percent of that nation's land

could be logged. The report said Surinam risked losing "its forests and

getting shattered biodiversity, ruined fisheries, eroded soil, displaced

populations and perhaps ethnic strife in return."

Richard Bruce, a forest economist hired by WTK to draw up its application

to log Jurua, argued the levels of concern caused in Brazil over the

arrival of the Asian logging firms might lead to improvement in enforcement

of forestry rules. "You'd be crazy to think we won't have government

inspectors all over us after all the uproar," he said.

And that is precisely what the government intends to do, Martins of Ibama

said. Every existing logging permit-holder in the Amazon region is being

checked to see if their timber really does come from areas authorized for

logging and not from protected Indian lands. So far, 80 percent of permits

have been found to be "irregular."

Martins pledged that timber produced by the Asians would be inspected. He

also said stricter new laws on forest clearing, combined with a two-year

ban on new projects to fell rare mahogany and virola trees, would slow

deforestation.

But environmentalists said they were waiting to see if the government lives

up to its promises to get tough with loggers.

"The problem is a lack of enforcement," said Garo Batmanian, head of the

World Wildlife Fund in Brazil. "Just changing the law without a systematic

and comprehensive strategy will simply not work."

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