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FOREST CONSERVATION NEWS TODAY

Amazon Rainforest Faces Final Assault

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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org, Inc.

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

http://forests.org/links/ -- Forest Conservation Links

06/18/01

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by Forests.org

A "final and definitive assault" is being launched on the Amazon's

rainforests. A tidal wave of major government-backed projects are

being fast-tracked through Brazil's parliament without much

consultation - including 10,000km (6,200 miles) of highways, dams,

power lines, mines, gas and oilfields, canals, ports, logging

concessions and other developments. The massive 40 billion dollar

"Advance Brazil" program gives little or no thought to sustainable

development of the Amazon.

The latest scientific studies indicate that over the next twenty

years - a quarter of a single western lifetime - only 5% of the

Amazon is likely to remain in its wild state. These predictions were

made in a rigorous, data-intensive study published in Science

Magazine earlier in the year. The article, entitled "The Future of

the Brazilian Amazon", is made available on the Internet exclusively

at http://forests.org/ (featured link in middle of page).

The Earth and its life are maintained through the sum of its

ecosystems. The final loss of the World's large and contiguous

rainforest expanses - in particular the Amazon - would be a tragic,

global catastrophe. It would mean less rain regionally, more carbon

release into the atmosphere, and massive species loss. Rainforest

loss threatens global ecological sustainability.

Tropical terrestrial ecosystem collapse also threatens international

security. The US is ready to spend tens of billions of dollars on a

missile defense system against rogue missiles that may or may not

pose a threat. Yet they and most of the World's governments pay

little heed to the certain threats posed to global security by

collapsing regional and global ecosystems. Every type of global

ecosystem shows signs of failing - rainforests are disappearing,

climate is spiraling out of control, marine fisheries are collapsing,

and water supplies are being exhausted. Collapse of these ecological

systems represents the final and irrevocable threat to our security.

Following is a marvelous article. The scientists that are applying

their craft to rainforest ecosystem protection are heroes.

g.b.

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Title: Inside story: Road to oblivion: The Amazon jungle has long

been ravaged by developers. But now it faces what conservationists

are calling a 'final assault' from a pounds 29bn superhighways

project

Source: Copyright 2001 The Guardian (London)

Date: June 13, 2001

Byline: John Vidal

In 1976, an aeroplane crashed seven miles from the centre of Manaus,

the largest town in the Amazon forest. People saw where it fell, but

it took rescuers 10 days to find the wreckage. Today, you could get

in a car and reach the crash site in 15 minutes. The jungle that was

there is now a suburb, with paved roads, and, from being a remote

frontier town of about 50,000 people, Manaus is now Brazil's eighth

largest city. The sprawling settlement on the north bank of the

world's greatest river has sprouted hi-tech assembly plants - along

with slums, drugs and various social problems.

The aeroplane story was told recently by Dr William Laurance, a

Smithsonian Institute researcher based at the National Institute for

Amazonian research in Manaus, to illustrate how rapidly the world's

greatest forest can be transformed. He and an international team of

scientists have been trying to predict what the Amazon will look like

in a generation's time. They spent months examining a Dollars 40bn

(pounds 29bn) tidal wave of major government-backed projects -

including 10,000km (6,200 miles) of highways, dams, power lines,

mines, gas and oilfields, canals, ports, logging concessions and

other developments - lined up for the Brazilian Amazon. Under a

project called Avanca Brasil (Advance Brazil), these are being fast-

tracked through parliament without much consultation. Critics,

including the WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature), fear

that it will be the "final and definitive assault" on the forest.

The scientists have used the past to predict the future, feeding into

a super-computer gigabytes of satellite studies and historical data

about how deforestation has always followed Amazonian developments.

They hit the button, and the results - just published in the journal

Science - were shocking. Two-fifths of the world's remaining tropical

rainforest is in Brazil and only 14% has been felled in the past

century. But Laurance and his team believe that, within 20 years,

only 5% of it might remain in its wild state. A further 42%, they

say, could be totally denuded or heavily degraded. In effect, after

20,000 years of barely being touched and even less understood, the

world's greatest forest would be transformed in a quarter of a single

western lifetime. Even under the team's alternative, more optimistic

view, Laurance predicts that well over half the forest in Brazil

would no longer be in a pristine state within a generation and about

30% would have been lost for ever. There was more. Unstated but

implicit in the findings was the warning that such developments could

provoke an ecological change that could affect billions of people as

far away as Europe.

The Amazon ecosystem, straddling the equator, is one of the great

generators of world climate. Large-scale deforestation, say Laurance

and other scientists, could lead to up to 20% less rain fall in the

region by decreasing evapo-transpiration and solar energy absorption

- the two main ingredients of cloud formation. It would feed into and

further exacerbate global warming by releasing vast amounts of

carbon. Severe, though unpredictable, consequences could follow for

much of the world.

When Laurance's paper was published, the Brazilian government

fiercely disputed some of the data. Laurance's team then spent 10

days triple-checking their facts. If anything, they found their

forecasts had been conservative.

"We were shocked and very surprised at the results," says Laurance.

"We were not being alarmist. This was solid, empirical data. We kept

finding more and more information." The present government, like

others before it, has never quite known what to do with the Amazon

forest except to "develop" it. In the past, it has barely had the

means to do this, but now, international finance is widely available

and pressure is mounting from giant agribusiness.

The authorities say the motor for Brazil's "infrastructural

development" of the Amazon will be the 10,000 kms of new or upgraded

"superhighways" planned to crisscross the region in place of dirt

tracks built in the 1970s.

However, history shows that when all-weather roads are built, they

open a Pandora's Box of ecological, geopolitical and social change.

Laurance predicts 100km (62-mile) corridors of deforestation, farming

and settlements either side of the new roads. Build a highway in

Brazil and, inevitably, come colonists, ranchers and loggers, he

says.

The most controversial development is the BR-163, a proposed 960km

road from Cuiaba north to the Amazon port of Santarem. Like most

locals, Santarem's vice-mayor, Alexander Wanghon, favours the new

road because it will bring economic and political benefit, even

making the town the capital of the proposed new state of Tapajos. But

he fears it, too. "It will come like a hurricane," he says "Our

concern is to discipline the occupation that will follow." Brazil has

some of the world's most far-sighted environmental laws, but its

ability to police them has proved almost impossible.

The rush has started. The government's plan is to open up the Amazon

to soya farming. The BR-163 will allow giant grain producers in the

Matto Grosso region to the south to export their crops to Europe via

Santarem far more quickly and cheaply. It could mean, says Wanghon,

up to 20m tonnes of crops thundering up the BR-163 to the river each

year with an invasion of people and development in their wake.

Laurance and others forecast that up to 49,000 sq km of forest will

be destroyed by the road, with a similar amount put at risk of fire.

Speculators from all over Brazil are already buying up land along its

route and oiling the chainsaws, says Wanghon. A dozen or more global

companies have bid to build a new port terminal in Santarem and the

contract has gone to Cargill, the world's largest soya exporter. ADM,

another major agribusiness, is building local storage facilities and

nearby forest is already being cleared for more farmland.

Feverish activity is under way, too, at Sinop, at the other end of

the BR-163 and on the northern margin of Brazil's soya belt. There,

land speculators and soya-bean growers and traders anticipate

extending their farmlands farther north into the forest.

The BR-163 will end Santarem's isolation, but it will open it to the

global market and social ills, according to Maria Martins, a labour

politician and state attorney. "I favour the road - but we are very,

very worried," she says. "People can hear the mermaid sing. They are

moving in. The road will bring inevitable problems such as child

prostitution. It may only help the rich."

The new roads will fragment the forest and start an irreversible

cycle of degradation, fire risk and possible eventual

desertification, leaving vast tracts of land unfarmable because of

drought, says David McGrath, professor of Amazonian studies at

Brazil's University of Para. He spent 30 years in Amazonia, much of

it studying fire risk, and identifies what he calls the "vicious

feedbacks" of road building in the Amazon.

What starts with increased land supply along the roads leads to

deforestation and accidental fires, which, in turn, encourages

farming and more deforestation which then inhibits rainfall. In 1998

alone, 40,000 sq km of Amazonian forest was burned.

"Fire begets fire," he says. "Once an area burns, up to 40% of the

trees can die. This increases the likelihood of a second fire.

Eventually, the forest ceases to become a forest as the successive

fires allow the invasion of the understorey by grasses, which make

the area even more flammable." He expects up to 270,000 sq km of

forest to be felled in the new rush and millions of acres to become

prone to fire.

The BR-163 is one of many roads planned. Others will link Manaus to

the south-west. The Trans-Amazon highway will open an east-west

route. Giant new waterways are to be carved through rapids to allow

grain barges to reach the main rivers, and big timber companies are

moving in. Much land reserved for indigenous groups is likely to be

affected.

"Until now it was impossible to transform the Amazon. It was too

vast. But now it can be done," says McGrath. "The trouble is the

vision is just to asphalt the highways and let the timber and the

soya beans out, and encourage land speculation, ranching and

squatting in. There's no thought of a sustainable Amazon."

Yet until his and Laurance's research was made public, few Brazilians

had any idea of the scale of the plans. A fierce debate has now

broken out, with the federal government on the defensive. Meanwhile,

northern environmentalists, indigenous peoples' support groups such

as Survival and others have begun an international campaign to get

the government to mitigate the potential destruction.

Amazonas Mendes, the governor of Amazonas state, of which Manaus is

the capital, is not impressed by outsiders' concerns. They are, he

says, "ill-informed and lack objectivity. The federal plans are timid

and will not affect the core of the forest which until now has been

barely denuded."

Mendes, who claims to be "green" but who admits handing out chainsaws

to farmers in an election rally, argues that the new roads will not

bring development or destruction. He argues that the state faces

ecological disaster only if, as expected, the government ends

Manaus's free-port status and stops its Dollars 50m-a-year subsidy.

"Amazonas state depends on Manaus which depends on the free zone," he

says. "If the subsidies go it will be a total disaster. People will

have no work. They will go to the forest and destroy it as in other

states."

Ecologists and development workers argue that the vast region must be

managed along ecological lines, for the sake of everyone. "It needs a

comprehensive plan with a vision of what Brazil wants the Amazon to

be in 50 years' time," says McGrath. "It needs to ask what sort of

roads and development it wants. It needs intensive development around

the existing centres to help local people. It needs to respect basic

ecological laws. If it is not done properly, it will only be a

process of squandering resources. It will be a disaster."

At stake, says Laurance, is nothing less than the fate of the

greatest rainforest on earth.

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