04/12/00--Amazonian Deforestation Continues--is Certified Logging the Answer?

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

Amazonian Deforestation Continues--is Certified Logging the Answer?

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04/12/00

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY

The newest deforestation report by the Brazilian government indicates

that from 1998-99 illegal logging and farming destroyed 16,926 square

km (6,347 square mile) of rainforest. This remains roughly constant

with the 1997-98 deforestation rates. Despite strengthened police

presence in threatened areas, there seems to have been little effect.

However hard the Brazilian government tries to present the fact that

the figures have not increased as being good news, the fact remains

that huge areas of the Amazon are being lost, and no one really knows

what it is going to take to stop this and other tropical rainforest

deforestation.

The second item highlights one potentially positive effort to address

tropical deforestation, the certification of timbers as having come

from well-managed forests. Such environmentally friendly logging

accepts the reality that local peoples and economies have reasonable

development needs, and seeks to minimize outright deforestation and

ensure continued native forest presence. The problem here is that

there is still no mechanism to determine for a particular forest

ecosystem or landscape when it is best to log, albeit in a certified

environmentally more benign manner, and when the area should be

preserved or left intact for non-logging alternative development.

Despite best intentions, environmental groups working hard for

certified forestry might be laying the policy framework that ensures

all or most remaining rainforest wildernesses are logged rather than

protected. Environmental groups, while engaging the certification

efforts, must be more concerned with certified logging's scale,

relation to protected areas, and defining conditions when certified

logging is not appropriate. Otherwise essentially all remaining

wildernesses will be logged using standards that should have been

observed all along-and the word certified timber will have little

meaning.

g.b.

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ITEM #1

Title: Amazon tree loss continues

There are plenty more logs where these came from . . . for

now

Source: BBC News Online

Date: April 12, 2000

Byline: Alex Kirby, environment correspondent

Brazil says the rate at which its Amazon rainforest is being

destroyed is continuing unchanged.

A government report said that in 1998-99 illegal logging and farming

destroyed forest totalling 130 kilometres by 130 km in area.

Satellite imagery revealed the 16,926 square km (6,347 square mile)

loss, with only a 3% margin of error.

This compares with a loss of 17,383 sq km in 1997-98. The area of

forest lost during that year was almost a third more than in the year

before. Until then, the rate had been falling since its peak in 1995

and there were hopes that conservation measures were working.

This past year there has been a strengthened police presence in

threatened areas, though it seems to have had little deterrent

effect.

But the Brazilian Government took comfort in the fact that the rate

of loss had not increased again.

The Environment Minister, Jose Sarney Filho, said: "The tendency to

an increase in deforestation has been controlled."

Dr Norman Myers, of Green College, Oxford, told BBC News Online:

"It's a worrying trend. "Fifteen years ago, the rate of loss in

Amazonia was about half what it is today, assuming the figures are

accurate. "If it goes on doubling like this, we could be in a lot of

trouble before long. "It's good news that the rate hasn't increased,

but I suspect that may have less to do with enforcement than with the

downturn in the Brazilian economy."

Roberto Smeraldi, head of the Amazon protection programme at Friends

of the Earth Amazonia, said a recent devaluation could mean more

rapid loss if loggers sought increased profits.

His organisation has helped, with the World Wide Fund for Nature

(WWF), to establish a group of 42 Brazilian timber companies

committed to obtaining wood from well-managed forests.

The group, Compradores de Madeira Certificada, uses at least half a

million cubic metres of timber annually. Dr Steve Howard, director of

WWF's global forest and trade initiative, told BBC News Online: "The

companies involved use less than 3% of the wood from Amazonia.

"It's a very small start. But it is enough in financial terms to

provide an incentive that could encourage responsible forest use.

"In a year or 18 months from now, we need to have not 42 companies

involved, but 200 to 300."

ITEM #2

Title: Protecting Amazon As Market Strategy

Source: Associated Press

Date: April 11, 2000

Byline: STAN LEHMAN, Associated Press Writer

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) - A top government official praised a

private-sector initiative launched Tuesday to certify

``environmentally correct'' timber as a way of curbing destruction in

the Amazon rain forest.

``Initiatives like this one show that economic alternatives are an

important way to contribute to the preservation of the Amazon,'' said

Mary Allegretti, the Environment Ministry's secretary for Amazon

issues.

Allegretti also confirmed official figures, released in Brasilia

Tuesday, estimating 6,800 square miles of Amazon rain forest were

destroyed last year, much of it through illegal logging.

About 12 percent of the 2-million-square-mile wilderness already is

gone. About 40 companies from the furniture, packaging, printing,

flooring and other industries have signed on to the Brazilian Buyers'

Group of Certified Timber, pledging to use only wood ``from forests

planned and managed in an environmentally sustainable fashion,'' said

Roberto Smeraldi, executive director of Friends of the Earth, which

put the group together.

While buyers' groups already exist in the United States, Canada,

Australia and in seven European countries, this is believed to be the

first in a developing nation.

Other consumer-oriented campaigns tried mainly to curb exports of

lumber, ignoring the fact that Brazil is the world's largest consumer

market for tropical timber, Smeraldi said.

Each year, about 840 million cubic feet of tropical wood are consumed

in Brazil. ``And about 80 percent of the trees that provide this wood

are cut down illegally, with no concern for the environment,'' he

said.

``If we create a bigger demand for certified timber, logging

companies eventually will have to provide it,'' he added.

To make sure they do, Friends of the Earth and other local

environmental groups have joined forces with the Mexico-based Forest

Stewardship Council, an international non-governmental organization

that identifies well-managed forests and certifies they are

acceptable sources of forest products.

The FSC also tracks the timber from the forest to the end product,

making sure that non-certified wood is not added along the way.

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