The top story on the BBC Americas page is that the rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has increased during the past few months. These findings fall amongst earlier reports from 2007 claiming the opposite. Check out this link for a map highlighting the worst affected areas.
I visited the Brazilian Amazon in 2001 as part of a pilot study-abroad program at Michigan State University. It was an amazing trip highlighted by week-long riverboat trips down the Amazon and Rio Negro, a week-long stay at a research station in the middle of the Amazon (with nothing protecting me from the elements except for a feeble mosquito net), and interacting with many local Brazilians who live at the intersection between their development and the mighty Amazon rainforest.
One of the most lasting things I learned from the trip is that it is very difficult to place blame on the people of such countries for their harmful actions on environment. If given the choice, would you clear an acre of rainforest tomorrow if it meant you were able to feed your family for a month? It’s a tough pillow for us in the Western world to swallow, but we had a similar dilemma before us many decades ago, and we made the same decision that some Brazilians are making now.
It’s true that scientists have a better grasp on the important role the Amazon plays in global processes, but that does not mean we (i.e. the West) can swoop in and interfere with development.
So how is this problem remedied? Who is responsible for finding a solution? The answers to such questions are not as cut-and-dry as we would like to believe.
EDIT: Later today the BBC posted another article on this topic, found here describing Brazil’s renewed commitment to curbing deforestation.
Today I read a story about the Gates Foundation donating 306 million (USD) to develop farming in poor countries. I thought this was great but it also made me think about what impact this could have on the environment. So this too brings up your question about rationalizing deforestation or other environmental impacts related to farming.
I agree that it is hypocritical for developed countries to limit the ability of an undeveloped countries ability to put food on the table. I do believe that there has been advances made to combat deforestation and still have a successful harvest. I think the solution lies in educating the people on sustainable farming techniques and soil conservation.
Here is an interesting report: COMBATING DEFORESTATION
http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/agenda21/english/
agenda21chapter11.htm
I am a Brazilian Biologist, and work with forest ecology. However, the points I listed below are my personal opinion based not only on privileged local experience, but on national debates, and may reflect the perception a middle class, educated Brazilian has on the subject.
1 – Main forest devastation has been caused by large agro-industries in the South Amazon, particularly for soya and pasture plantation, for commercial logging, or for mining and other large economic projects. Among those, plantations and pastures open the largest areas, and mostly are done by wealth properties-enterprises.
2 – Many of those deforestations, particularly those reported in the last months, are not legal and authorized by the government. The lack of investment in an environmental vigilance-controlling system allows the environmental crime, which is detected a posteriori, by the excellent satellite imaging system the Country has for the Amazon.
3 – The present deforestation is a crime, as predicted by the Brazilian laws, which are considered quite advanced for environment protection compared with many developed (or Western, if you like) Countries. Therefore, most of impacting activities may have been caused by criminal organizations and not by local, honest and poor people. For instance, the Brazilian Federal Police has published in national press, few years ago, a map showing farms where human slavery was found and dismantled. Those farms lay exactly in areas within the so-called deforestation belt. Locals were the slavers and not the loggers!
3 – Legal activities, such as authorized selective logging are suppose to cause little and controlled impact in the forest (though more studies are needed!), should allows co-existence, and head towards sustainable and social development models, if crime and corruption would be better controlled.
4 – Government has contradictory projects for the region, but still, the Brazilian Society in general does not wish to follow a developmental model that steps towards environmental disaster, as made by Western Countries.
5 – Nevertheless, Brazil has a clear internal structure of a so-called Western Country. It is the 8th world economy, and the problems in the Amazon are caused by economic pressures as designed by western capitalism, that change relations between man and the forest, and cause poverty, after exogenous occupation.
6 – Increasing education and awareness about the problems such unsustainable projects and developing models would cause to Brazil (including changes in rainfall regime in the wealthiest South-Eastern side of the Country) would contribute for national pressure against some local policies concerning land use.
7 – The present government, in my view, has a strong and committed Ministry of Environment, but also an internal dispute between developing and conservation, battled between this Ministry and the Ministries of Agriculture and others.
8 – Local farming and co-existence with the Amazon forest is a pre-colonization reality, and those man-forest interactions are also threatened by large economic projects, and illegal farm activities, made by nationals and also multinational companies. International pressure on illegal activities would be welcome, as well as the demands for certificates on many products coming from the forest (on the contrary, banning forest products would be a disaster!). For instance, beyond farming, mining activities in the Para State has increased dramatically to feed Chinese and World markets of bauxite, iron, and rare metals. No one has asked for an international certificate policy for minerals, so far.
Hello Servio,
Thank you for your insightful comments! I am by no means and expert on these issues, so it is great to hear from someone much closer to the situation. Obviously this is a very large-scale problem with many organizations/governments/consumer groups working towards a solution. I applaud Brazil’s stance on sustainable farming and their model for development. But it is unfortunate that Western/developed money still has the power and influence to promote such illegal logging practices. I like the idea of a certification program for forest/ore products, but I think it is clear that there needs to be more (given the lack of consumer power and high global demand).
Does Brazil’s current administration have enough resources to effectively police illegal logging even with a 25% increase in the regional police force, or will it necessarily require outside economic sanctions against these agro-corporations? Based on your comments above, I am inferring that economics is still the primary driving force behind deforestation. But when will this problem have to go from being driven by global economics to a problem driven by environmental urgency?
Also, to bring this discussion back towards science, I wonder if you can provide some additional insight from the point of view as a forest ecologist. At the current rate, how long do you think the Amazon (or our planet) can survive without experiencing irreversible change?
Dear Nicholas,
Thank you for your reply! Concerning the eventual need of outside economic sanctions against environmentally damaging agro-corporations, I think this is always interesting as a sign that unsustainable development can erode competitiveness and damage corporative and national image. However, in practical terms, this may not harm seriously business these days. It is well known that the largest consuming market for Amazon timber and beef is the own Brazilians from South-Eastern wealthiest States, such Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais. Therefore, Brazilian middle class should be better informed of future consequences of a lack of severe surveillance and control on forest products!
Further, considering irreversible changes in the Amazon, there is no time-lag anymore depending on what particular ecosystem we are talking about. It is necessary to remember that Amazon is half of a large continent, and composed of several and completely different types of forests. In some cases, for mining projects for instance, most people like to say laws and regulation are severe, and punctual impact is recovered by restoration projects. Nevertheless, the forest community that evolved on the top of a soil rich in bauxite (then, toxic aluminium), iron or other rich heavy metals, is made of a series of species adapted to that particular, nutrient poor soils. Similar slow growing forests also occupy sandy-nutrient poor soils of central Amazon (likely to desertification). For many of those forests, in particular after soil structure has been totally destroyed by mining, resilience will hardly results, whatever the companies invest in re-vegetation projects. On the contrary, a new forest/vegetation community will be there, but never the same type, and with the same diversity and functionality (and rarities) originally found.
In addition to that, the poorest soils with the most specialized forests are those far from the large rivers (that flood and enrich lowland forest types), and then closer to transition to cerrado (savanna vegetation). Increasing dry season periods, with stronger drought, is a present climate trend that increases severely the risk of fires, and may slowly open the forest, accelerating a dynamic condition that may indeed revert wet forest toward a savanna type of vegetation. This would be an ecological process with some mid-to-large feedback consequences. However, the worst scenario experienced today is that large deforestations happen exactly in these particular ecosystem ecotones. In theory, we would be about to monitor an ecosystem shift due to climate change, but in many localities, deforestation has done it first!
Finally, science in Brazil has become large and relatively well funded, but that does not happened equally in the Amazon region. There is a strong deficit of researcher per area/population the region, which makes difficult to learn quick enough about the forest. Furthermore, biodiversity and ecological studies have not progressed at the same pace as climate research. Lack of data on basic ecology for many particular forests is still there. Just to provide one example, nobody really knows what are the consequences of selective timber (an activity considered sustainable) on the canopy structuring or on the forest functionality in the region, or what particular forest is more sensitive to this type of activity.
Hence, we turn our attention to a better studied area, from where a scaring results appears, shaking conservationists worldwide, but mainly in the continent. As predicted many years ago, deforestation is changing rainfall dynamics, as registered by the LBA project. Mainly for the Eastern Amazon, scientists were intrigued with how rain could possibly fall regardless the lack of dust in the atmosphere. As a result of sophisticated monitoring studies related to biosphere-atmosphere interactions, researchers from the Brazilian Institutes of Spatial Research (INPE) and Amazon Research (INPA), and foreigner partners, realized that volatile organic compounds (VOC) liberated from the canopy trees were responsible for aggregating rain drops. In other words, the forest makes the rain! The tricky point is that after deforestation, heavy dust from bared ground produces strong storms that stay in the region, sort of speaking. Then, and mostly important from the political and demographic point of view, is that LBA project also realized that slow formed rains above the Amazon forest moves away from the region down to the south, and could be responsible for up to 40% of rainfall in the largest agricultural regions of Brazil, which then has a sound impact on politicians and society.
Since 2005, some scientists from this group have committed themselves in divulgating such results and using science to induce changes. Recent longing dry seasons and drier wet seasons in the South-Eastern Brazil may trig the debate around an ultimately conservationist and strategic policy for the Amazon, which seems now more important to Brazilians in a short term than to the rest of the world. Eventually, this is an alert made from science, and just in time of reversion!
Many scientists and policy makers are dedicating their whole life to the Amazon issues, and could provide better inputs to the discussion than myself. Hence, further information on conservationist and policy issues from the Brazilian point of view one will find (in English too) in:
http://www.imazon.org.br/home/index.asp
Long-term Biosphere-Atmosphere Project results are in:
http://www.lbaeco.org/lbaeco/index.html
Servio,
Thanks again for your very insightful comments. I definitely learned much (especially the interesting results from the LBA project), and I think the other readers of this blog, however many there are, also have learned a thing or two. I will indeed check out the links you sent and I encourage everyone else to do so as well. Clearly this is an important issue for scientists worldwide, and it sounds like the those scientists studying the Amazon can use some of our support!
Here is another update from the BBC (one of the only major news outlets actively covering this story) describing a major police raid on illegal lumber in the state of Para:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7244295.stm
I’ll keep adding these updates from the BBC as I see them.
Call for new laws on stolen logs
Yet another story in the BBC about Brazil’s efforts to curb illegal deforestation—this time they’ve sent in 160 Brazilian troops:
Troops sent to stem Amazon loss
Here’s some more national coverage on Brazil’s efforts to police illegal logging, this time from the New York Times (April 19th). Check it out, there’s even a video.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/world/americas/19brazil.html