Law of the Jungle

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

Law of the Jungle

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Forest Networking a Project of forests.org

http://forests.org/ -- Forest Conservation Archives

http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest Conservation

10/31/99

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY

Saving the Amazon is going to mean having enough rangers to better

control the rampant illegal activities that are occurring. In ten

years, the budget of the agency responsible for patrolling the Amazon

went from $20 million to $3 million. Money that was given by the

International community to rainforest conservation has been caught up

in red tape, and has not made it down to this critical on the ground

work. This is the sort of thing that for which International grant

funding should be ideal.

g.b.

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Title: Law of the Jungle

Source: Newsweek International

Date: November 25, 1999

Byline: Mac Margolis

A visit to the front lines of the world's wildest environmental

battleground - the Amazon rain forest, where the government's

parkrangers carry machine guns

Rodolfo Lobo is not the sort of guy anyone would want as an enemy.

He carries a 9-millimeter HK machine gun to work. His tool kit also

includes a .45 pistol and enough plastic explosives to demolish a

bridge big enough to support a 20-ton truckload. He's a skilled hand

with all those weapons. He needs to be. Lobo is Brazil's top field

commander in the fight to save the Amazon rain forest.

It's hardly a job for an ordinary forest ranger. As chief inspector

for IBAMA, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable

Natural Resources, Lobo oversees 1,168 environmental officers

responsible for patrolling and policing the country's entire area of

8.5 million square kilometers. None of those inspectors has a more

crucial assignment - or a more hazardous one - than the 400 or so

who must cover all of Amazonia's 5.3 million square kilometers. "We

lose two agents a year," Lobo told NEWSWEEK last week. He was on

patrol in the often trigger-happy central Amazonian state of Para,

and he wasn't talking about inspectors who take early retirement.

"Nobody likes us."

They are heroes nonetheless. For much of what's left of the

continent-size rain forest, IBAMA has been the last defense. The

agency stands its ground, seizing illegal timber, arresting

poachers, dousing slash-and-burn fires and trying to bring the

offenders to justice. But IBAMA's efforts are dwarfed by the

colossal scale of Amazonia's destruction.

There's no such thing as a routine assignment in this untamed place.

Even so, the mission Lobo directed last week near the Pichacha River

was typical enough. The objective was to retrieve a stash of

mahogany, valued at about $1 million, which was illegally cut down

on the lands of the Kayapo Indians. On the way, some seven IBAMA

agents in three vehicles sped through the smoke of numerous illegal

slash-and-burn fires and past gaping craters left by hundreds of

wildcat gold prospectors. Lobo's team was too late to catch the

timber rustlers with the goods, but the agents combed the woods for

stragglers. The outlaws had built a 25-meter bridge to get their

logging trucks onto Kayapo territory. Lobo and his men destroyed it

with plastic explosives - for the second time in three weeks. They

could only wonder how soon they would have to come back and demolish

it again.

The thanklessness of the job doesn't stop there. The loggers often

buy off tribal leaders with token payments and a sprinkling of

favors and gifts. Such arrangements, totally illegal, are almost

always a bad bargain for the indigenous owners. Still, IBAMA has

learned the perils of intervention. Earlier this year in Redenco, a

logging town in eastern Amazonia, a band of angry Kayapo - with the

loggers' blessings - held three IBAMA officials hostage for three

days after inspectors blew the whistle on illegal logging. Jose

Sales de Souza, director of the National Park of Amazonia, says he

receives so many death threats he often leaves the phone off the

hook - and he has taught his wife to shoot. "We show up in town, and

suddenly there are no hotel vacancies and no food at the

restaurants," says Edson Cruz, another agent. The pay for such

hazardous duty: $450 a month.

Few wilderness areas on earth can match Amazonia's tangle of

man-made troubles. On any given day, they may be tracking

clandestine loggers, catching endangered-species traffickers or

chasing gold prospectors off protected tribal lands. Often they must

spend months at a time living out of jungle camps, where the routine

dangers range from clouds of malarial mosquitoes to 9-meter

anacondas and the occasional hungry jaguar - not to mention the

whole alphabet of hepatitis, from A to G.

Not so long ago, before the swarms of celebrity activists moved on

to embrace other fashionable causes, rescuing the Amazon was an

international crusade. Worldwide enthusiasm reached a peak in 1992,

when Brazil proudly played host to the Earth Summit, and the

threatened rain forest was the gathering's centerpiece. Everyone was

promising to help, from Greenpeace to the G7. The region's fortunes

appeared to have turned. The frenzy of clear-cutting began to slow,

and in burning seasons the pall of smoke across the country was

thinning out.

That brief surge of hope has passed. Settlers, ranchers and

lumbermen are once again pouring onto the frontier, felling and

burning acre after virgin acre. The settlers are trapped in a

ruinous cycle. They strip away the forest and plant their crops. In

a few years the land wears out, and poverty drives the people to

move on to repeat the process elsewhere. Brazil's recently stable

economy and strong currency, along with new advances in

tropical-farming techniques, have encouraged the spreading

environmental disaster. Back-to-back droughts caused by El Nino only

worsened the flames. In 1997, some 16,000 square kilometers went up

in smoke; last year an additional 18,000 square kilometers were lost

- approximately the area of Israel. Satellite photos suggest that

1999's record will be no better.

Lobo insists the destruction can be curbed. "But only if we have

more manpower, the proper technology and funding at the right time,"

he adds. Up to now IBAMA has come up short on all counts. Ten years

ago, in greener times, the agency's budget for inspection and

enforcement was $20 million. This year the sum was slashed to $3

million. Foreign donors have sent some assistance - such as the $340

million pledged by G-7, and administered by the World Bank - but

that money is lost in a jungle of red tape.

Illegal loggers may be the agency's toughest foes. Amazonia is the

world's No. 1 producer of tropical hardwood, yielding some 30

million cubic meters a year, worth around $1 billion. Only 14

percent of that harvest is exported. But IBAMA says 80 percent of

the timber is illegally cut and then "laundered" - that is, sold to

logging companies with certified operations, who then repackage the

clandestine lumber as part of their legal harvest. It is IBAMA's job

to stop this black-market traffic, but that would require watching

more than 4,000 sawmills and tens of thousands of trucks and boats

threading their way through the jungle. Until recently, the maximum

fine for violators was a trifling $2,500.

Now IBAMA seems to be getting a bit of help. Last month the

Brazilian Congress passed a new environmental law, making

unauthorized deforestation a jailable offense and raising the

maximum fine to $25 million. "We're never going to stop illegal

logging," says Edson Cruz. "But we can sure make life for the

outlaws more difficult, and a lot more expensive." The lumber

companies seem to be getting the message. Some 30 of them are

working to earn certification from the international Forestry

Stewardship Council, a sort of green seal for non-predatory wood

cutting.

The loggers have strong reasons to go green. Old-fashioned

clear-cutting is not only destructive, it's inefficient. And

customers are beginning to stir. "We were getting increasing

pressure from green groups and from our buyers," says Bruno Stern,

president of Gerthal, an Amazonian plywood company with many

European clients. Andre Guimares, an economist at the World Bank,

says sooner or later all loggers will be forced to change their

ways. "In another five or 10 years wood that doesn't bear a green

seal will not find a market," he predicts. No one is sure Lobo and

his rangers can hold the line that long. But they intend to try.

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