ENVIRONMENT: All Timber Roads Lead to the Amazon

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANIERO, Jul 20 1997 (IPS) - The road involving international trade in timber – a 114 billion dollars a year business – now lead to the Amazon, threatening the world with grave environmental consequences.

Jag Maini, Coordinator of the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests of the United Nations, estimates timber exports grow only two percent less than the global flow. The threat to the Amazon, especially in Brazil, Guyana and Surinam is posed principally by displacing the routes of exchange.

Given the depletion of the Southeast Asian forests, until now the main source of tropical wood, the natural target of the logging industry has become the Amazon, Maini says. Africa, another potential supply region, has been bypassed by the big timber companies because of too many problems – including wars.

Tropical wood makes up from 20 to 22 billion dollars of the annual exports, a little less than 20 per cent of the world trade in timber, Maini estimates. For now, 80 per cent of the wood exchange occurs principally among the rich countries of the North.

“The consumption is directly proportional to the per capita income,” Maini says. Accordingly, people in the United states consume several times more wood than do Latin Americans or Chinese.

But the trend is for an even greater increase in the demand for tropical wood, because of “the changing cultural paradigm of forests,” whereby the protected areas in rich countries are enlarged, according to experts who met in Rio de Janiero lasat week in a workshop on forest policies for the Amazon.

Furthermore the South-South trade flow, which has been small up to now, tends to become more important as Asian countries become importers. This is especially true for China, whose rapid economic growth and gigantic population suggest a strong future demand of wood, said Antonio Carlos Prado, Director of Studies on Sustainable Development of the Brazilian Ministry of Environment.

He said that Brazil, previously a marginal exporter, is turning into a principal supplier of wood. Ten years ago, Brazil’s participation in the world trade of tropical wood was just one percent. Now it is up to four percent.

More than half of Brazil’s 1.13-million-dollar-a-year exports come from the Amazon basin, according to economists. In addition, 70 per cent of the internal market comes from Amazon raw material and this internal consumption is on the rise thanks to the stabilization of the Brazilian currency in 1994.

Faced with this economic reality, environmentalists’ protests are impotent. “We need to look for solutions that are also economically viable to supply this market that also lead to sustainable forms,” Prado recommended.

The greatest problem that prevents the sustainability of the exploitation of the Amazon forests is the total inefficiency of its current management. The informality dominates the extractive activity which provokes unnecessarily grave damages to the forests, he said.

The logging production causes 20 per cent more loss (of the rainforest) than agriculture according to Raimundo Deusdara Filho, Secretary of Policy and Standards of the Ministry of Environment of Brazil.

Worse still, for each tree harvested, another 25 are destroyed.

“Only the precious species are harvested, the waste is enormous,” observed Israel Klabin, President of the Brazilian Foundation for Sustainable Development, the non-governmental organization that organized the workshop.

The wood leaves the Amazon for very low prices and very few economic resources are left for development. The raw material for which a local logger gets paid one dollar becomes 170 dollars in the sale of the end product overseas, estimates the Ministry of the Environment.

The Rio workshop approved recommendations for a strategy that would promote sustainable forest development in the Brazilian Amazon.

Greater participation of the society in the control, increasing the local value of the products, increasing the management and technologies and developing an adequate legal framework were a few of the suggestions of the colloquium.