ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Activists Denounce 500 Years of Destruction

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 22 2000 (IPS) - For environmentalists and indigenous peoples the 500 years that have passed since the arrival of the Portuguese Conquistadors in Brazil – an event the government plans to celebrate this Saturday – are five centuries of devastation, pollution and extermination.

The name of the country itself is symbolic of the destruction. It comes from the palo-brasil, a tree species that thrived in forests along the Atlantic coast in 1500, but, because it was an excellent source of red ink, it became the first victim of colonial exploitation.

Some 70 million palo-brasil trees were cut down and taken to Portugal over four centuries, experts estimate.

Added to this was the demographic, agricultural and industrial expansion concentrated along the shores of the Atlantic, which threatened the tree species with extinction as well as the entire forest system that makes up the Mata Atlantica.

Of these forests that covered 1.2 million square km in the coastal areas 500 years ago, from the extreme south to the northeast of Brazil, just 7.3 percent remains, according to the non-governmental organisation SOS Mata Atlantica.

In response to this situation, the Brazilian government announced a programme for planting 200,000 palo-brasil trees this Saturday at the 170,000 schools throughout the countrys 5,500 municipalities as part of the fifth centennial festivities celebrating the discovery of Brazil by the Portuguese.

The event has its symbolic side, but it is also an attempt to renew this tree species in Brazil.

But botanists do not think the measure will be very effective. The tree plantings are widespread, in inappropriate climates, soils and ecosystems, outside the species natural medium.

The palo-brasil will not be able to grow and survive alone, outside its natural environment, says Tania Sampaio, a researcher at the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Gardens, which maintains a small recovered forest of the Mata Atlantica in a nearby community where there are many of these trees.

The Mata Atlantica was the major victim among Brazils forested areas that have been over-exploited, as it has lost 93 percent of its original area, stressed a report by the Brazilian office of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on the environmental status of the nation as it reaches its 500th anniversary.

There are some forests, such as the Araucaria, in the south, that have been reduced to just two percent of their original areas.

The destruction has now displaced other large ecosystems. The cerrados, or Brazilian savannah, also lost half of their forest cover, followed by the Amazon, which has seen 15 percent destruction in the last 25 years.

The WWF study, which emphasises the alarming nature of environmental damage done in the last five centuries, proposes lessons for the future, now that technology permits faster destruction, said Garo Batmanian, the organisations secretary general in Brazil.

Logging of the Mata Atlantica intensified during the second half of the 19th century, when the Portuguese ended their palo-brasil tree extraction, but sugar cane and coffee plantations began to replace the forests.

The development of other crops and the growth of industry, as well as the expansion of cities along the coast, only increased the pressures on the forest ecosystems.

The Atlantic forests are one of the worlds 25 most environmentally threatened areas, alongside the cerrados, on the list drawn up by the US-based Conservation International, a non-governmental organisation.

The cerrados and the Amazon remained relatively unharmed until the mid-20th century, but destruction in those areas, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively, only continues to accelerate, according to studies by the WWF.

The primary villains in these regions are logging activities and the expansion of soya farming.

In addition to the near extinction of the palo-brasil, the destruction of the Atlantic regions native forests harms the numerous rivers that supply Brazils most populated areas with water.

Water shortages are already occurring in Sao Paulo and many large cities of the south and northeast.

Environmental degradation, however, pales in comparison to the extermination of indigenous peoples over the last five centuries. Brazils native population is estimated to have been five million in 1500, when the Portuguese numbered just two million.

The number of Brazilian indigenous people had fallen to 600,000 at the time of the nations independence in 1822, and to little more than 100,000 in 1970, according to experts estimates.

In the last several decades, when a native protection policy was developed, Brazils indigenous population grew to nearly 350,000, divided among 220 groups and 180 languages.

But some 800 native communities disappeared over the last 500 years and indigenous peoples became the invisible side of the Brazilian population, lamented Marcos Terena, a spokesman for his community and current co-ordinator of Indigenous Rights at the governments National Indian Foundation (FUNAI).

The term peoples is the correct word for indigenous groups as Brazils 1988 Constitution recognises the right of these ethnicities to survive and live as indigenous peoples, with their own cultures, customs and traditions, explained Carlos Frederico Mare, president of FUNAI.

Though he is a high-ranking government official, Mare will not participate in Saturdays official festivities of the 500-year anniversary of the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil. Like the indigenous peoples and environmentalists, he does not think there is much to celebrate.