ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Democracy and Technology to Save Amazon

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 17 1998 (IPS) - Democracy and state-of-the-art technologies are the most important instruments for saving the Amazon jungle, Brazil’s Minister of the Environment, Gustavo Krause, said Tuesday.

The possibility of curbing deforestation by enforcement by environmental inspectors is “a myth,” an objective unreachable in such a vast area, more than half of Brazil’s total territory, even “with two or three armies,” said the minister.

Satellite surveys, which are being perfected and will allow precise identification of the hardest-hit areas, opens possibilities for more effective control.

But an alliance with “the local population, capable of promoting sustainable development,” is also indispensable, he added.

The world must “change its vision of the Amazon, which is not a demographic vacuum,” said Krause. It must take into account “endogenous forces” in efforts to protect the jungle and its biodiversity.

The use of satellite images has been made even more necessary by the changing pattern of destruction of the Amazon jungle, said Eduardo Martins, the president of the Brazilian Institute of the Environment (IBAMA, the Ministry of the Environment’s executive body).

The most recent survey, carried out in 1997, identified 50,000 deforested areas measuring less than 50 hectares in size, compared to only 142 larger than 2,000 hectares, he pointed out.

That proliferation of small deforested areas indicates that peasant farmers are largely to blame today for burning and cutting down the forests, said Martins, who added that when most of the offenders “cannot even pay” the fines, enforcement becomes exceedingly difficult.

The new characteristics of the typical deforester has led environmental authorities to blame agrarian reform as a factor in the destruction of the jungle, because many new peasant settlements are located on the edge of the Amazon forest.

Besides the images bought from U.S. satellites, IBAMA will soon be able to make use of the contributions from the Amazon Vigilance System, a military project that will use radar and electronic devices to improve monitoring in the region, mainly with military and flight security aims.

Brazil now has a law that defines and stipulates sanctions for crimes against the environment, offering “an effective legal base” for combating destruction of the environment and “foster good environmental management,” the minister told foreign correspondents in Rio de Janeiro.

But environmentalists raised an outcry when President Fernando Henrique Cardoso vetoed 10 clauses of the new law when signing it last week.

Krause and Martins justified the vetos arguing “poor wording” of the draft law approved by Congress, a problem they said could give rise to future disputes and annul positive aspects of existing laws. “No crime was left out or excluded from penalisation,” the minister maintained.

Some gaps left by the vetos and criticised by non-governmental organisations, such as sanctions for “sound pollution” and “bio- piracy”, are covered by other draft laws currently being studied by Congress or soon to be submitted by the government, said Martins.

The most controversial presidential veto annulled the article defining “objective responsibility,” which forced polluters to repair environmental damage even before being found guilty in court. But according to Martins, that aspect is already covered by other laws, and depends more on legal interpretation and enforcement.

The most important thing is that now the legal conditions exist for more effective action by environmental authorities, he stressed.

Up to now, “due to the lack of a legal base,” IBAMA had only collected six percent of all fines issued, and lost almost all its legal cases. It had lost 30,000 cases against the producers of charcoal alone, for example, Martins pointed out.