ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN-BRAZIL: Doubts Over Amazon Protection Plan

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Abid Aslam

WASHINGTON, May 2 1998 (IPS) - The government of Brazil announced Wednesday a commitment to bring 25 million hectares of Amazon forest under full protection by the year 2000.

In addition, ‘sustainable management’ – which includes the practice of ‘low-impact logging’ – would be introduced on 200 millio hectares of the Brazilian Amazon by 2005, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso declared. But doubts remaied over whether that effort would receve sufficient funding, or be fully enforced.

Cardoso’s videotaped announcement, shown at a news conference here, was trumpeted as the first outcome of a new alliance between the World Bank and the World Wild Fund For Nature (WWF), known in the United States and Canada as the World Wildlife Fund. The alliance was set up to help countries establish 50 million hectares in new protected areas by the year 2000 and bring 500 million hectares under sustainable management by 2005, according to World Bank President James Wolfensohn. That would increase the world’s protected forest area from the current six percent to 10 percent.

The Brazilian leader’s “gift to the Earth represents the first tangible, major accomplishment for the World Bank/WWF alliance and shows what can be achieved when two effective, influential organisations combine their expertise with a farsighted government in an effort to save the world’s forests,” said WWF-International Director General Claude Martin.

Several questions, however, loomed over any celebrations. Establishing the protected sites alone would require 90-125 million dollars and conservation efforts so far have drawn only 720,000 dollars in funding commitments, said Robert Buschbacer, WWF’s programme director in Brazil. Also an undetermined amount of extra cash would be needed to maintain protected areas.

The Brazilian government and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multi-agency consortium dominated by the World Bank, each has committed 300,000 dollars and WWF, 120,000 dollars, Buschbacher said.

“The World Bank stands ready to support and finance whatever is necessary” to meet the alliance’s goals, Wolfensohn added. “But what I’m not prepared to do is provide an open cheque.”

The fate of communities living in areas to be brought under ‘full’ protection also had to be worked out, officials said. Sites previously designated as indigenous peoples’ reserves would not be covered by the latest effort, said Buschbacher, but any peasant communities living in the new protected areas could be made to move.

The question of which independent group would ensure that ‘sustainable management’ was being practiced on the 200 million hectares set aside for judicious exploitation also has proven politically prickly.

The Bank/WWF alliance adopted a four-page list of criteria for certifying logging operations deemed to be compliant with local laws and international environmental principles. WWF and Bank oficials said the only independent group capable of meeting those criteria is the Mexico-based Frest Stewardship Council, which was set up by the 1992 U.N. ‘Earth Summit’ to monitor the international logging industry.

Timber executives, with whom Wolfensohn has been working since January to develop voluntary industry standards for low-impact logging, have opposed the Council’s involvement. Companies have argued they should certify their own operations – exactly what the Council was established to counter.

The Bank would either have to persuade the companies to accept Council certification or persuade environmentalists – including WWF – that another entity could do the job just as well, officials said.

For the World Bank, the latest effort was a chance to make up its numerous “bungles in the jungle.”

The lender, faced with mounting evidence of the environmental and social damage inflicted on the Brazilian Amazon by projects it funded during the 1980s, in 1992 approved a 167-million-dollar loan for natural resource management and environmental protection in Brazil’s Rondonia state. But last year, the Bank’s independent Inspection Panel revealed that under the lending agency’s project, known as PLANAFLORO, deforestation actually had increased to “high historical levels” of nearly 450,000 hectares per year.

Greater community participation under PLANAFLORO in the past year could yield positive results, officials and veteran analysts said, but the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and governments in the meanwhile were financing environmentally harmful projects throughout the region, said Steve Schwartzman, an anthropologist with the Environmental Defence Fund. These included a highway from Manaus in northern Brazil to Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, and the Bolivia-Brazil gas pipeline, which runs through the Amazonian jungle.

Wolfensohn on Wednesday highlighted encroachment by poor people living in or near the jungle as a leading cause of deforestation. He said he had no statistics on the proportion of damage attributed to peasants as compared to that blamed on logging companies, “but the percentage of encroachment by poor people is much larger than that by forest companies.”

Many poor settlers had entered forested areas on roads built by timber companies and settled in areas already logged by the corporations, said Martin.

“Yes but historically poor people have torn down the forests,” Wolfensohn retorted.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have voiced fears that the Bank, which is reviewing a 1991 policy that bars it from financing logging in tropical rainforests, is seeking to sneak back into the jungle under the cover of ‘sustainable loggng’.

“I’m not trying to get into tropical forests. The point is to protect the forests. There are some NGOs that’ll never believe that,” Wolfensohn told IPS, adding: “I’m as interested in having my children grow up in a good world as they are in having theirs.”

Bank inspectors concluded last year that illegal logers – primarily timber companies but also migrant workers and their families – were responsible for as much as 90 percent of the forest loss in the PLANAFLORO project area.