By Emad Mekay
WASHINGTON, Feb 19 2004 (IPS)

A leading environmental group accused several U.S. companies Thursday of fuelling violence and the possible destruction of millions of animals and plants in the sensitive Brazilian Amazon by doing business with a controversial local logger.

Greenpeace said the U.S. firms were buying or distributing wood from Grupo Madenorte, a logging company that engages in corrupt practices in Brazil’s conflict-torn Pará state.

The environmental group says Madenorte, based in Belém, and other timber companies engage in "fraud, intimidation, slavery and murder" in order to seize land from Pará residents and raze the rainforest.

In a report, ‘State of Conflict’, the group says Texas-based Ihlo Sales & Import Company is the single largest importer of Madenorte’s wood.

The report lists several other U.S. companies that Greenpeace says either import from Madenorte directly or distribute the company’s wood from Ihlo.

Group members say they delivered copies of the report to every company named in it Thursday, along with a letter urging the firms to stop doing business with Madenorte.

The firms identified in the report include Columbia Forest Products of Portland in Oregon state, Dantzler, from Miami Lakes, Florida and DLH Nordisk of Greensboro, North Carolina.

"Despite decades in the international spotlight, the Amazon is more than ever under siege from loggers, farmers and politicians, who view it as a modern day El Dorado to be plundered for profit," says the report.

El Dorado is the legendary city of gold desperately sought by Europeans who colonised South America.

"By doing business with Madenorte, U.S. companies directly contribute to environmental destruction, slavery and death in the endangered Amazon rainforest," said Scott Paul, coordinator of Greenpeace’s Forest Campaign, in a statement.

"The U.S. is the largest importer of forest products worldwide and too many U.S. companies don’t bother to look into the practices of the companies from which they buy," he added.

According to the group, Pará, the largest timber-exporting region in the entire Amazon region, has already lost rainforest equivalent in size to the U.S. states of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland combined.

In 2002, Pará exported at least 312 million dollars worth of timber products with the largest share, 40 percent, destined for the United States, adds the report.

The Amazon has one of the world’s highest absolute rates of forest destruction, averaging around 18,000 sq km a year, or an area larger than Connecticut state.

Market demand for high-value ancient forest timber plays a critical part in this process. Exports from the Amazon include high-grade tropical hardwoods that carry a very high market value.

Mahogany or "green gold," for example, is worth 1,600 dollars per cubic metre, says the report, while a tree bought for 30 dollars in Brazil can have a retail value of 250,000 dollars in finished products.

"The hunt for these trees drives timber traders deep into the most remote regions of untouched forest, where they sometimes bulldoze illegal access roads to gain access to a single mahogany tree," the report says.

Traditional forest dwellers are often forced off their land by a variety of methods of faking land titles, known as ”grilagemii”, enabling loggers and others to take advantage of the legal chaos that is symptomatic of land ownership in the Brazilian Amazon, it adds.

If communities cannot be expelled or intimidated into leaving their lands, they are sometimes killed. Pará State has the highest rate of assassinations associated with land conflicts in Brazil – murders that are rarely, if ever, investigated, according to Greenpeace.

These reports could not be independently confirmed.

But the group says that with its latest study, the federal government and companies such as Ihlo "can no longer plead ignorance to the criminal activity of Madenorte".

In July, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a 15-million-dollar global initiative to help stop illegal logging, but critics fault the plan for not including laws that would stop tainted wood from entering the United States.

"If this administration is serious about stopping logging, that’s one of the most effective things they can do," Greenpeace Media Officer Nancy Hwa told IPS.

The group released the report as world leaders and scientists are meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to discuss the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

The United States is still not a signatory to the CBD, already ratified by 187 governments.

The world’s environment ministers on Thursday urged Washington to ratify the pact to help preserve biodiversity. The officials said in a statement they were "alarmed that biological diversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate as a result of human activities".

Last year Greenpeace was indicted in Miami by the U.S. government for an April 2002 protest against a ship the group said was carrying illegal mahogany from Brazil.

In a press release the group said that "unprecedented prosecution" would not deter it from campaigning globally to protect the world’s forests.

"Brazil stands to lose hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of the Amazon, along with millions of animals and plants, with some species becoming extinct," the report added.

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