Environment, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Stepped-Up Gov’t Efforts Cut Deforestation in Half

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 26 2005 (IPS) - The rate of deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon region was cut in half between August 2004 and July 2005, the Environment Ministry reported Friday – the first triumph of a forest action plan put into effect by the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in March 2004.

The preliminary data indicate that 9,106 square km of Amazon jungle were lost in that period, compared to 18,724 square km in the 2003-2004 period.

Environment Minister Marina Silva celebrated the initial results as an achievement of the government’s action plan, which stepped up prevention and monitoring efforts against deforestation in Brazil’s five million square km Amazon jungle region.

The action plan comprises not only law enforcement but also sustainable development initiatives, she noted.

The international environmental watchdog Greenpeace responded to the news by stressing that the effort must be kept up, pointing out that the country’s environmental authorities have admitted that they lack the resources for effectively combating the illegal destruction of the country’s forests, and that this month the number of forest fires was up compared to last month.

According to environmentalists, the data announced Friday may underestimate the forest area that has been destroyed.

The statistics came from the Real Time Detection (DETER) satellite system used by the government to monitor deforestation and crack down on the culprits.

DETER is less precise than the system traditionally used to estimate the deforested area, based on Landsat satellite images, whose results for the August 2004 to August 2005 period will not be available until late this year.

The official deforestation rate using Landsat images for the 2003-2004 period was 26,130 square km, reflecting a six percent increase on the 2002-2003 period.

But the minister underlined that the estimates set forth by both systems point to a reduction in the amount of jungle that has been deforested.

DETER makes it possible to provide accurate projections, says the Amazon Institute for Man and the Environment (IMAZON), which developed a model for making estimates based on the monitoring system’s data.

The non-governmental organisation had already anticipated an unexpected drop in deforestation, based on statistics from June, when it found a 95 percent reduction in the amount of forest destroyed, compared to June 2004.

But that was due to multiple factors, and not only government action, Sergio Guimaraes, coordinator of the Life Centre Institute (ICV), told IPS.

His non-governmental organisation is active in the west-central state of Mato Grosso, where deforestation of the Amazon jungle to clear land for soy production is most prevalent.

Low international prices of soy, which curbed the expansion of cultivation, played a large role in the slowing of deforestation, said Guimaraes.

At the same time, the government prohibited logging or forest-clearing activities in an extensive nature reserve lining the BR-163 highway in the Amazon, and dismantled illegal logging networks operating in Mato Grosso.

The BR-163 highway, which was mainly built to make it possible to export soy from the state, is set to be paved in the near future. The imminent paving of the road has fomented illegal occupations of land, fraudulent land sales and land disputes, which have spurred deforestation.

The government, under pressure from the environmental movement, is working to establish control mechanisms in order to avoid a repeat of the ecological disasters provoked by previous highway construction projects in the Amazon.

“This time we are hoping for a greater state presence” to regulate the expansion of economic activities along the length of the highway and curb their harmful effects, said Guimaraes, who pointed to stockbreeding, soy farming and logging as the main causes of deforestation.

Another factor contributing to this first major victory in the battle against Amazon deforestation was Operation Curupira, which dismantled a ring of corrupt environmental authorities and logging companies in Mato Grosso in early June.

But the greatest reduction in deforestation took place in the states of Pará and Tocantins, where it decreased by 81 percent. Mato Grosso, which accounted for 48 percent of the deforested area in 2003-2004, should see its share rise to 60 percent this year, predicted Joao Paulo Capobianco, the secretary of biodiversity at the Environment Ministry.

In Pará, which ranks second in deforestation, this abrupt reduction was largely due to the stepped-up efforts to crack down on the state’s large landowners following the murder in February of Dorothy Stang, a U.S.-born Catholic missionary who defended the rights of peasant farmers in the violent land conflicts in that region.

Amazon deforestation has been a blight on Brazil’s international image since the 1980s.

The positive results announced Friday are unlikely to ease the pressure exerted by the environmental movement. Last week, the Brazilian Forum of NGOs and Social Movements for the Environment and Development, made up of 20 institutions, voiced its “serious concern” to the government over the ineffectual implementation of the Plan of Action for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation.

The plan includes a number of components, such as land titling activities and the promotion of sustainable activities, that have been either ignored or scarcely addressed, while large-scale infrastructure projects in the Amazon are moving ahead without the established precautions, the environmentalists stressed.