BRAZIL: Government’s Amazon Plan Fails to Convince Environmentalists

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 18 2004 (IPS) - An accurate diagnosis, but short on effective solutions, is how some environmentalists describe the Brazilian government’s new plan to stop the destruction of the Amazon forests, a phenomenon that has intensified over the past few years.

The Action Plan for Deforestation Prevention and Control in the Amazon was announced this week by government officials as "consistent and viable", with well-defined budgets, responsibilities and timelines.

Environment Minister Marina Silva underlined that the plan integrates different policies and government agencies into a single, broad strategy that was drawn up during the past nine months with the participation of 11 ministries, state governments and civil society representatives.

The 156-page plan attacks the main factors behind the rapid deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon, which from August 2001 to August 2002 lost 25,500 square km of forest, 40 percent more than in the previous 12 months.

Of the original tree-covered area, 631,369 square km, or 15.7 percent, has been deforested.

An environmental disaster of at least that magnitude is expected in the 2002-2003 data to be released soon by the National Institute for Space Research, which monitors the state of the Amazon jungles using satellite images.

The battle against accelerated deforestation will be deployed on three main fronts, according to the Action Plan: land-use regulation, environmental controls, and fomenting sustainable economic activities in the Amazon.

This approach is based on an accurate analysis of the causes, but the proposed measures are focused on the land question, and fail to respond appropriately to other important causes of deforestation, Roberto Smeraldi, director of Friends of the Earth in Brazil, told IPS.

The imbalance is reflected in the distribution of the 394 million reais (around 135 million dollars) of the Action Plan’s budget for this year, which earmarks 62 percent of the funds for land-use problems, he said.

Smeraldi admitted that it is indeed a central question in the extensive Amazon area, where most of the land is public or is occupied by people who do not hold title to it.

To legitimise their ownership, the occupants register the land with an official agrarian agency, they cut down the trees and then either cultivate it or raise livestock on it. Without regulation of that process and territorial monitoring of the Amazon, it will be impossible to "reverse the serious rising trend of deforestation," said the environmentalist.

The problem is, he said, that the plan does not take into account other activities, such as major infrastructure projects – roads and hydroelectric dams – that the government itself has included in its national four-year development programme.

These are interventions in the local environment that, in addition to directly destroying the forests, intensify land speculation. New highways are main channels for the destruction of the jungle – and plans are in the works to build more and improve existing roads in the Amazon.

The Action Plan states that 75 percent of the deforested area is located in 50-km strips along the Amazonian highways, recognition of the contradictions between public policies of different government agencies, and ultimately undermining the environment.

A new factor in the Amazon is the expansion of soybean farming. The fields generally cover areas that are already treeless, but the revenues generated by this crop drive up land values, which stimulates land occupations and the advance of deforestation, explained Smeraldi.

On the third front, the plan to foment sustainable economic activity, there is little that can be expected because the government’s sustainable development programme for the Amazon and its financing mechanisms have been paralysed for the past two years by a corruption scandal, he said.

Furthermore, it is unlikely that the activities described in the Action Plan – such as forest management, ecotourism, small-scale fishing operations and wood by-products – would be able to compete with soy and livestock without effective incentives, added the activist.

The lack of financial resources is the main obstacle to the success of the Action Plan, says another environmentalist, Jean-Pierre Leroy, of FASE, a non-governmental organisation that works with poor communities on economic and social rights issues.

"The plan is ambitious," but its budget is insufficient, and the fiscal austerity policy implemented by the government stands in the way of concrete and effective action, he told IPS.

Territorial regulation and land titles, for example, entail a very complicated, costly and time-consuming process, as FASE proved with one of its projects, in Gurupá, in the interior of the northern Amazon state of Pará.

The government’s new plan lays out appropriate approaches, includes the participation of the citizenry and is based on the principle of "transversality" of environmental issues by bringing together several ministries, says Leroy. But this does not ensure its effective application, he warns.