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WORLDWIDE
FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS
Brazil's
Environment Chief Vows Tight Rein for Foreign Loggers
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Forest
Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises
9/22/96
OVERVIEW
& SOURCE by EE
Responding
to mounting concern over the motiviation of three large new
industrial
loggers in the Amazon, Brazil's head environment offical has
struck
a defiant posture, stating that Brazil would "keep a tight rein on"
logging
companies. The companies now entering
the Amazon have a history of
highly
destructive industrial forestry exploitation in Sarawak, Malaysia,
as well
as elsewhere. If these companies are
able to gain a toehold in the
Amazon,
where they will continue to capitalize and habituate communities to
fast
money from a once over harvest, it is highly unlikely that the Amazon
will
remain a contiguous rainforest wilderness for very long. This item is
a
photocopy of a Reuters article.
g.b.
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RELAYED
TEXT STARTS HERE:
Brazil
eco-chief vows tight rein for foreign loggers
9/22/96
Copyright
1996 by Reuters
NEW
YORK (Reuter) - Brazil's top environmental official, saying the Latin
American
nation was no "banana republic," vowed to keep a tight rein on
Asian
logging companies moving into the vast Amazon rain forest.
At the
start of a $250 million private fundraising effort to preserve
tracts
of the Amazon, Environment Minister Gustavo Krause told Reuters late
Saturday
Malaysian and other loggers would be welcome only if they acted
within
the law.
"If
the Malaysians don't leave our forests in peace, we won't leave the
Malaysians
in peace," he said as T-shirted Amazon Indian chiefs and rubber
tappers
mingled with men and women in evening dress.
"For
them to come (to Brazil) acting as if it's a banana republic, why,
then,
they are going to have a very rough time of it," he said.
The
recent arrival in the Amazon River basin of three Asian logging
companies,
including Malaysia's WTK Group, one of the world's biggest
timber
companies, has heightened environmentalists' fears about the
devastation
of one of the last great wildernesses on Earth.
Data
from Brazil's environmental protection agency Ibama show that 11
percent
of Brazil's Amazon forest has been cleared and the rate is speeding
up.
During 1994, 5,750 square miles were cut down, up from 4,300 square
miles
in 1993.
WTK and
Malaysia's Samling Corp have heavily logged in Malaysia's Sarawak
region,
where critics say serious ecological damage has been done to
tropical
forests.
The
companies have been joined by Fortune Timber, owned by the Chinese
government
and Hong Kong investors, in buying out bankrupt Brazilian
companies.
Ibama says the three own 11.1 million acres of Amazon timber
land.
Krause
rejected what he called "the scientific and political idiocy" of the
idea
that the Amazon region and its countless species belonged to the world
at
large and not Brazil.
"What
belongs to mankind is (the Amazon's) genetic diversity," he said.
"That
is something we can exploit ... while limiting ill-effects."
Brazil
only has about 80 environmental inspectors in the Amazon, an almost-
roadless
area the size of Western Europe. Krause said Brazil would monitor
its
notoriously negligent timber industry more and more by satellite, a
method
that also would limit official corruption.
Krause
spoke at a $1,000-a-person reception and concert at a Lincoln Center
concert
hall launching the seventh in an annual series of seminars and
presentations
about the Amazon.
The
series is run by the non-profit Amanaka'a Amazon Network and marks the
start
of an effort to raise $250 million to preserve 123 million acres of
tropical
forest, an area bigger than the state of California.
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