Skeptics Wary of Amazon Initiative

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

http://forests.org/

5/3/98

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE

Brazil's recent announcement that protected areas will be tripled in

size is being met with cautious optimism and healthy skepticism. The

list of past grandiose announcements that have not been met is long.

Applaud but verify!

g.b.

For more information: http://forests.org/forests/brazil.html

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Title: Skeptics wary of Amazon initiative

Source: United Press International Science News

Date: Wednesday April 29, 1998

Byline: Elizabeth Manning

WASHINGTON, April 29 (UPI) Environmental watch groups say they remain

unconvinced that Brazil is truly serious this time about protecting

its Amazon rainforests.

Environmental Defense Fund's Steve Schwartzman told United Press

International he "was so disappointed" after Brazil's "grandiose

gestures" that turned empty after the 1992 Earth Summit that he

stopped keeping records of similar pronouncements for awhile.

Schwartzman says President Cardoso's commitment Wednesday to triple

his country's protected rainforest by the year 2000 may indeed signal

a new awareness in Brazil that the Amazon is globally significant.

He calls it "a good-faith start" but remains wary of what he calls

Brazil's track record of "playing to the public."

Some examples:

* In July 1996, Cardoso signed a two-year moratorium on logging of

mahogany and virola, another increasingly scarce hardwood. Meanwhile,

a federal bill empowering Brazil's environmental agency to enforce

such laws had languished in Congress for five years, and would for

another 18 months. Without criminal penalties, the environmental

agency could only impose fines. Of those, it managed to collect only 6

percent. Furthermore, a federal report found that 80 percent of all

logging in the Amazon rainforests was illegal, and thus beyond the

influence of a moratorium.

* Brazil promised at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that it

would regularly publish up-to-date satellite data that could track

fires and deforestation. The images have appeared only once since,

however, in 1996. The director of the Brazilian space agency said he

was unable to meet the commitment because the government stopped

allocating the $500,000 required per year to continue the study.

That 1996 data revealed deforestation had increased 34 percent in the

1990s _ after years of government assurances the destruction was

dropping.

* Schwartzman says Brazil also promised to publish a deforestation map

of the Amazon region, which "has yet to appear."

* Since 1989, the administration has consistently announced plans to

aggressively address the fires that rage through the forest during

each dry season. Figures released by the government last January,

however, show that deforestation nearly tripled in the burning

seasons between 1990 and 1995. This year, so far marks the worst

destruction on record, and environmental predict there's more to come.

In the agreement President Cardoso announced Wednesday with the World

Wildlife Fund and the World Bank, the international lending

organization has committed at least $30 million to help set up the new

conservation parks.

Francis Sullivan, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Forest-for-

Life program, says the agreement today "is not a compensation deal."

He says, "The politics of rainforest conservation have been turned

upside down. Before, it was countries like the United States imploring

for the commitments of protection. This time, the (Brazilian)

administration is fully behind the effort."

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