Amazon rivers' newest ship is floating eco-lodge

I thought my impish Brazilian guide was pulling my leg. All doubt was banished when, standing on a wooden dock in the Amazon village of Novo Airão, I was greeted by three robustly pink dolphins thrusting their heads from the water.

I followed my guide's prodding to slip into the tea-colored river holding a sliver of fish, which was deftly plucked from my fingers. The dolphins playfully jostled me for more, bumping and rubbing me with their cool, rubbery bodies.

The Amazon basin is a place of natural astonishments, and pink dolphins are just the start. Many are albino, with coloring ranging from rosy gray to flamingo pink. They apparently grow pinker when excited, as if blushing.

A small pod has become friendly with a village family that innocently started to feed them fish scraps. The dolphins became daily visitors, and word spread, putting Novo Airão on the small but burgeoning Amazon tourist circuit. The French hotel group Accor is building a 100-room hotel nearby, slated to open in 2010. Hilton also plans to build an eco-resort here.

I arrived by luxurious riverboat from Manaus, a Brazilian city of nearly 1.8 million people in deep rain forest, 1,000 miles upriver from the Atlantic coast. Dozens of small boats carry tourists on river trips from Manaus, but the one on which I traveled has caused a splash by being the newest and largest.

The Grand Amazon is a floating resort modeled on Nile River cruisers. It offers 72 balconied cabins on four decks, a good restaurant, sun deck with pool and bar – all the amenities of a large passenger ship.

Based in a jungle lodge, I had explored the area before, visiting the wilds in motorized canoes.

I feared that a cruise ship would offer a more superficial experience. That is, until I grasped the concept. The Grand Amazon is essentially a lodge that moves. The ship carries small boats for exploring. And this lodge can relocate overnight.

The vessel was custom-built in Manaus (Brazilian hardwoods lend a rich glow to its interiors) by Spanish hotel company Iberostar to make this difficult environment easily accessible to the growing number of eco-tourists.

Like the lodges on land in the area, the ship offers a choice of two or three excursions each morning, afternoon and evening.

After breakfast, we'd clamber into the boats – about 20 people per group, accompanied by local guides – and head off on our chosen tours. Skimming across water as glassy as a polished mirror, I loved how the river reflected the mountainous clouds in the blue sky. At night, with the moon and stars duplicated in the black water, I had the sensation of cruising across the universe.

On hikes through pungent forests, we learned which plants could be eaten and which were poisonous, which were best for building shelter and which could sterilize wounds. We learned that potable water can be found in vines, filtered by the plant. We ate açai berries, a nutrient- and antioxidant-rich fruit considered a superfood.

With eyes trained to spot things we could not, the guides found ant nests, scorpions, tarantulas and huge spiders. I managed to spy a twiglike insect and one large ant.

"Bullet ant," said Marco, our naturalist. He tapped his machete against a tree trunk, and the bark soon was crawling with the agitated insects. "The bite of one can make you very sick," he advised us, "and 10 could kill you." The pain of the bite is likened to that of a bullet wound, hence the name.

During an onboard buffet lunch of local specialties, the ship would sail to a new spot, and we'd reboard the small boats for a slow cruise through channels and flooded forests. Or, we'd be transported to another hiking trail.

"You won't see an anaconda in the wild," said Rafael, one of our guides. "They are too secretive." Yet, on the second day I spotted one of the giant snakes swimming.

"You won't see a jaguar," the guides told us, and we didn't.

But we did see toucans, scarlet macaws, parrots and dozens of other exotic birds. We saw sloths, and howler and spider monkeys. We fished for piranha.

At night, our shallow-draught boats slipped through reeds in search of crocodiles, their eyes glowing red in our strobe lights.

At Manaus, the Amazon splits into two tributaries: the cola-colored Rio Negro and the muddy Rio Solimões. The rivers present two distinct environments, and Grand Amazon explores both waterways. Rio Negro is the Amazon of our imagination: dark, deep, mysterious. Rio Solimões resembles the Amazon of headlines: pockets of settlement, river traffic and trees cut to make room for cattle.

I preferred the unspoiled Rio Negro (and the pink dolphins of Novo Airão), while others onboard enjoyed the Solimões with its river traffic and greater concentration of wildlife. More people live on the Solimões because there are more fish, and more fish also mean more birds and animals.

A four-day itinerary focusing on the Rio Negro and a three-day route on the Rio Solimões can be booked separately, but it makes sense to do both. In a week, I felt I'd seen and learned a lot.

The explorer in me was secretly disappointed, though, that it was so easy. And so comfortable.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/lifetravel/stories/013108dnamazon.32a8297.html

Return to the Amazon With Jean-Michel Cousteau

The Amazon: The most powerful of the world's rivers, its rapid transformation will alter the global climate. Emptying into the great Atlantic Ocean, it flows through the world's largest tropical rainforest, the vast, natural theater where evolution has gone wild, creating the greatest biodiversity of any area on the planet. Twenty-five years ago, Jean-Michel Cousteau explored this fabled region with his father, the legendary Jacques Cousteau. Since then, an area the size of Texas has been deforested. With an intimate look at recent changes, Jean-Michel returns with a new expedition for the signature PBS environmental series, Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures. Combining science and discovery with expert story-telling and astonishing footage, the new season premieres nationally with Return to the Amazon, airing in two parts on April 2 at 8pm, and April 9 at 8pm (both 60 minutes), and is narrated by the acclaimed actor, Delroy Lindo.

Traveling down the Amazon River basin with Jean-Michel are his children Fabien and Celine and his crew of adventurous oceanauts. Over the course of ten months, through wet and dry seasons, in the water and on land, the team encounters debilitating challenges and uplifting discoveries throughout the multiple expeditions and forays into both wild and developed regions. All experienced ocean divers, they now have the unique experience of investigating the murky waters of the Amazon basin, where there are more species of fish than there are in the entire Atlantic Ocean! The team encounters many unusual, rare species and surprises, including swimming with an anaconda, the world's largest -- and perhaps most dangerous -- snake; going nose-to-nose with the jacare, the Amazon version of the crocodile; and playfully swimming with beautiful pink river dolphins.

Over 4,000 miles long, and without a single bridge crossing it, this is the world's longest and widest river. Negotiating it is not easy. Covering an area larger than the continental United States, the team travels together on long river passages and also breaks into small, mobile groups, sending Fabien and Celine on trips to investigate more leads. From the Brazilian city of Manaus -- a hub of commerce on the main Amazon tributary, the Rio Negro -- to protected areas in the Amazon like Xixuau and Mamiraua Sustainable Development Reserve, they investigate projects and places that are finding solutions to the destruction of the land and river. From the mouth of the Amazon at the Atlantic Ocean to a glacier in the Peruvian Andes, they explore incredible natural phenomena and the catastrophic consequences of climate change and deforestation.

Issues, challenges and problems that exist in the Amazon have a direct connection to the rest of the world, especially through global commerce. Expansive soy farms, lumber companies, commercial fishing, illegal animal trafficking, and more come under close scrutiny, but the Cousteau family and Ocean Adventures team uncover both inspiring and shocking stories throughout Brazil and Peru. They investigate the crucial role of native people in sustaining the natural rainforest and river system, and visit indigenous peoples in small, remote villages, as well as in large, protected reserves. New business models such as ecotourism, fish farms, organized fish monitoring by markets and fishermen, and developing and exporting sustainable rainforest products and medicines are all examples of potential solutions to global issues, as clear progress is made in the Amazon.

From this region of urgency and conflict, where human enterprise and expansion not only compromise the health and ecology of the river and rainforest basin, but truly inflict consequences on a global scale, come new beacons of hope and sustainability. The fight for the future of the Amazon and its people is underway, and Return to the Amazon presents solutions already in motion for keeping the forest alive and thriving.

Return to the Amazon is shot in high-definition and is narrated by Delroy Lindo, the Tony award-nominated actor whose films include "Malcolm X," "Crooklyn," "Get Shorty," "Romeo Must Die" and "The Cider House Rules." He most recently starred in the 2007 holiday hit, "This Christmas."

Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures is produced by KQED and Ocean Futures Society. The exclusive corporate sponsor is The Dow Chemical Company.

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/01-29-2008/0004744927&EDATE

Brazilian lawyers propose international court to save Amazonia

Brasilia - The Brazilian bar association on Friday proposed the creation of an international tribunal to fight deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, Brazilian media reported. "Allowing Amazonia to be devastated, as is happening at great pace, is committing a crime against humanity," the Order of Brazilian Lawyers president Cezar Britto said in a statement.

The association said it will hold a large-scale meeting this year to discuss the creation of the tribunal and "definitive solutions to prevent the disappearance of these assets that belong to Brazil and to humanity."

Britto said the tribunal should be permanent and put pressure on individual countries to adopt public policy to preserve the rainforest and its great biodiversity.

Amazonia, the largest tropical rainforest in the world, covers a surface of 5.5 million square kilometres across eight countries - Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru and Venezuela.

Official data were released Thursday showing 3,235 square kilometres of jungle were destroyed in the last five months of 2007, setting a record pace for deforestation.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva Thursday called an emergency meeting of seven ministers, and a series of measures were announced to investigate the increase in deforestation and intensify efforts to fight it.

Among the measures announced were the suspension of licences to cut down the forest in towns with the highest rates of illegal deforestation in 2007, an embargo on estates where there is deforestation and the suspension of financial assistance for businesses that promote illegal tree-cutting.

Beginning February 21, surveillance of Amazonia is set to be increased, with the presence of an extra 780 federal police officers.

Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva said the recent increase in deforestation is linked to the search for more land for the production of meat and soy.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/178614,brazilian-lawyers-propose-international-court-to-save-amazonia.html

Acai: Powerful Antioxidant Beverage Hitting Select Stores Nationwide

Purple Beverage Company, Inc. (OTCBB: PPBV), announced today that it has shipped PURPLE, its hot new antioxidant beverage, to GNC, the world’s largest specialty retailer of nutritional products. PURPLE, known for its revolutionary formula that combines seven powerful antioxidant-rich fruits in a tangy, delicious beverage, will be featured in select GNC stores nationwide in February.

The main ingredient of all natural, no sugar added PURPLE is the exotic acai berry which, after being hailed as the new “superfood” on the Oprah Winfrey Show and website, had wise consumers clamoring for its high levels of antioxidants.

Purple Beverage Company combined the dark purple Amazonian açaí berry with six other antioxidant-rich juices, including black cherry, pomegranate, black currant, purple plum, cranberry and blueberry, in its signature beverage, creating a rich-tasting antioxidant drink that is great on its own and makes a healthy and nutritious fruit smoothie.

Additionally, PURPLE is the perfect mixer for your favorite cocktail. In fact, researchers from the United States Department of Agriculture and a study at Kasetsart University in Thailand recently reported that adding alcohol to antioxidant-rich berries increases their antioxidant power – a fact that is making PURPLE one of today’s most popular cocktail trends in nightclubs and lounges, like the legendary Palm Restaurant in New York City.

“We are thrilled to join the ranks of the high-end, healthful products sold at GNC stores. This is an important step in our planned nationwide retail rollout to make PURPLE available for consumers everywhere to enjoy,” said Ted Farnsworth, CEO of Purple Beverage Company. "Since PURPLE made its official debut a few short months ago, consumers and even celebrities like legendary recording artist Chaka Khan have embraced it, sky-rocketing the antioxidant-rich drink to its status as one of the most sought-after beverages in markets like New York, Los Angeles and Miami. With select, national availability at GNC stores, more consumers can now experience the Power of PURPLE.”

Purple Beverage Company, Inc. is a beverage company that develops, markets and distributes a unique antioxidant beverage product. Its business strategy is to develop and market a special line of beverage brands and products that will be positioned as "better for you" beverages targeting the growing category of New Age/Functional beverage consumers.

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080128005230&newsLang=en

Brazil acts after jump in Amazon clearing

Reforestation & sustainable forestry

The Brazilian government has introduced new measures to fight deforestation of the Amazon rainforest following an apparent surge in land clearing in the second half of 2007.

After limiting deforestation in the first eight months of 2007 to less than 100 square miles a month, government officials said the last third of the year had seen more than 300 sq m of Amazon rainforest cleared each month. Satellite photo evidence is expected to see a significant lift in this estimate.

Brazilian environment minister Marina Silva said the jump in world commodity prices is thought to be behind the renewed plunder of the rainforest.

The new measures announced include making companies that use timber and other forest resources from the Amazon in their products legally liable for deforestation. Such firms as meat and crop processors and commodity traders are in the governments eye.

Agriculture Minister Reinhold Stephanes said farming output, especially soy and beef, could be increased in the country without clearing rainforest.

The government said it would also use the army to boost its inspection coverage of threatened forest areas and had frozen land clearing requests in 36 municipalities.

Deforestation of tropical rainforest is thought responsible for 20 per cent of total world greenhouse emissions each year.

http://www.carbonpositive.net/viewarticle.aspx?articleID=971

Brazil's Johnny Appleseed

Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado Jr.

Profession: Photojournalist

Cause: Restoring Brazil's Atlantic rainforest

Why I was moved to support this cause:

What I saw, throughout my life, was this incredible relationship between human degradation and environmental degradation. They are completely linked, one to the other. After so many years of traveling and seeing this unhappiness, I began to lose confidence, and believed that the human species was heading straight into the wall. Because we are rational, we forget we are animals, part of nature. This split in humans--this departure from the fact we are really nature and part of the planet--this has created the big complication for man.

In 1990, me and my wife, Lelia Deluiz Warnick, bought a 2,000-acre cattle farm from my parents in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. We decided to transform this land into a national reserve and to replant the property with the Atlantic forest that was there 80 years before.

The Atlantic forest is the most neglected part of the rainforest in Brazil. The country has two big forest ecosystems, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic rainforest, and we now have just 7% left of this big Atlantic forest that was once twice the size of France.

Our wish, when we started this project, was to try and see if we could add ourselves, humans, back into the planet. The big hope here is that we can rebuild our planet--that what we destroy we can also rebuild.

What I am personally doing to support this cause:

In October, 1998, our family farm in the Rio Doce Valley of Minas Gerais became Brazil's first Private National Heritage Reserve, and the following year Lelia and I created the nonprofit Instituto Terra. Lelia is its president.

Our plan is to plant 2 million trees over this 2,000-acre area; we started planting in 1999, and we are now at 1.1 million trees. The tropical rainforest is a very sophisticated ecosystem, and you must plant a lot of different types of trees. There are more than 300 species of trees in the rainforest, with some of them growing 25 meters high.

The water came back to the property. The birds and insects came back. And now we are seeing the animals return.

We have eight people working full-time at the Instituto Terra. We also have a training center, where we hold classes. One set of classes is for people in the region, and is built on the belief that if you change people's attitude, you will change behavior. So we have classes for miners, for forest police, for bulldozer operators. If you teach the bulldozer operator how to properly build a road, they won't kill the rivers.

The Instituto's training center has a library, lab, auditorium and place for the students to live and eat. We bring in researchers from universities and foundations, specialists who also teach classes. The second type of classes we offer are for students from technical agriculture schools. They come for two years to the Instituto Terra, and we teach them environmentally sustainable agriculture.

We also have a big nursery for the native plants of Minas Gerais. We have the capacity to produce 1 million seedlings a year of 160 different species of native plants.

What you can do:

I want the public to engage themselves in helping to save the planet. To plant a tree in the U.S., China or in Brazil is exactly the same, because what you are contributing is the sequestration of carbon on this planet. We have this huge problem of global warming, and the only way to reduce this carbon is by planting trees. What we are doing at the Instituto Terra is creating a factory of carbon sequestration for all the carbon omitted into the atmosphere, and, at the same time, producing water. What we want people to do is join us in tackling this problem, because together we can do something.

Please join us. We fight all the time for money, and have received help from individuals and foundations and companies, from the state of Brazil and the governments of Asturias in Spain, and Emilia Romagna and Rome regions in Italy. But every year we are running for money. In the U.S., the Tides Foundation in San Francisco collects donations for us; only a tiny contribution goes to their overhead. Please visit our Web site to learn more about the Atlantic forest and what we do, and to make a contribution in the section, "Ways to Help."

http://www.forbes.com/philanthropy/2008/01/25/brazil-rainforest-ecosystems-pf-ii-in_ss_0125philantrophy_inl.html

Join the carnival

As the locals prepare to samba, British buyers are starting to make a real song and dance about Brazil’s sultry northeast

The world’s largest and longest street party will erupt this week into a bright flurry of feathers, booty-shaking music and white-toothed smiles. Amid the throngs of carnival-goers will be thousands of Britons dressed in little but flip-flops and the pink beginnings of a tan – many of whom will decide to carry on after the party and invest in a second home in Brazil.

Most potential buyers head to the northeast of the country, where, along more than 1,000 miles of coast from Salvador to Fortaleza, fishing hamlets are being swallowed up by gated resorts with private pools, golf courses and spas. In a reflection of the continent’s obsession with beautiful bodies, some of the developments even have plastic-surgery clinics and rehabilitation spas.

If you can put up with the flight (at least £400 and 8½ hours, often with one or two changes), then the attractions are obvious: long, pristine white-sand beaches, temperatures that reach 30C in January and February, low living costs and properties that are up to a third cheaper than their equivalents in southern Spain. Indeed, many of the developers andimobiliarias funding the building boom cut their teeth on the costas and have crossed the Atlantic in search of a stake in the country Goldman Sachs predicts will have the world’s fifth-largest economy by 2050.

Property prices have seen stratospheric growth, fuelled by an emerging Brazilian middle class, an international campaign to attract investors, and the 2014 World Cup, to be staged across the whole country. “Some locations have seen capital appreciation of more than 1,000% in five years,” says Felipe Cavalcante de Melo Lima, president of the Association for the Development of Tourism and Real Estate in the Brazilian Northeast. He predicts a more modest 12% increase for this year.

“It is like southern Spain 10 or 20 years ago,” agrees David Gordon, commercial director of Qualta Resorts, which is behind two of the largest upmarket resorts in the states of Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Norte. “Brazil is a fabulous alternative to Spain and is more affordable than the Caribbean. People are fed up with the classic Costa del Sol pitch, which has become one big ghetto of British people.”

There may not yet be a fully fledged expat community, but those Britons who have moved there are seeking each other out to share tips on living in a tropical climate. One couple already living their Brazilian dream are Chris Cakebread, 46, and his wife, Collette, 50.

Two years ago, they fell in love with a banana-coloured granja, a smallholding 30 minutes’ drive from Joao Pessoa, in the state of Paraiba, the most easterly part of the Americas.

The couple, who spend half the year in Worcestershire and half in Brazil, and intend to retire The region boasts a seductive mix of sun, sea and samba, as well as elegant old towns such as Salvador, above right there, paid £42,000 for the plantation-style bungalow, which had holes in the roof, no lavatory and only an outside oven. They spent £12,000, and it now has a new roof and a fitted kitchen.

“I watch the sun rise above the mango trees, then hop out of bed and lie by the pool,” Chris says. “I love being in my Brazilian bubble.” The couple regularly go for supper with Jeremy Baker, 68, and his wife, Gemma, 67, from Birkenhead, who have retired to a similar property 15 minutes’ drive away.

Other British neighbours include a policeman from Dover, a Hollywood stunt man and one who works as a volunteer bouncer at Tambaba, the world-famous naturist beach – all of them trying to make a new life in the country. So is it paradise? Almost.

“You can’t buy an electric kettle, so pack one in your suitcase,” Baker says. “And the best way to get rid of the cockroaches that live in the coconut palms is to pack sea salt in newspaper at the top of the trunk. When it rains, this coats the tree and stops the pests wandering indoors.”

Given that Brazil is a vast and diverse country – the northeast region alone is the same size as France, Germany, Italy and Britain combined – what and where should you buy? To help you choose between a granja in the interior, a villa on a golf course or a flat on the beach, here’s our guide to Brazil’s northeast coastal states. Remember, too, that English is not widely spoken, so, if you don’t speak Portuguese, you will need someone who knows both languages to guide you through the buying process – and help you to deal with everything from repairs and renovations to paying your electricity bill once you have acquired your home.

Bahia

Five years ago, the state capital, Salvador, was regarded by most tourists as a grimy, crime-ridden no-go area. Today, the old town is being restored: its peeling pastel facades are getting a face-lift, the Hilton chain is moving in and double-decker tour buses with adverts for village-style gated resorts travel the cobbled streets. Even a couple of years ago, it was possible to pick up a run-down property in the Pelourinho district, in the 18th-century centre, for less than £50,000, but derelict townhouses now start at £150,000 or more; count on spending the same again on renovations. And check out the neighbourhood by night as well as day: as in many Brazilian cities, crime can be a problem.

You’ll need a good guide, and a number of long-term British residents in the city are offering just such a buying service. Daniel Daly, who has lived in Brazil for more than 20 years.

Paraiba

For many years considered one of Brazil’s poorest and least developed states, Paraiba is largely overlooked by the package-holiday and property-tour crowd. It has fewer flights, and a poorer infrastructure, but there is a greater feeling of getting away from it all.

Pernambuco

The beautiful colonial town of Olinda, which adjoins Recife, the largely industrial state capital and site of the airport, is popular with sightseers, but most buyers head for the coast. One of the most attractive, upmarket schemes is the Reef Club, at Porto, set in 500 hectares of Atlantic rainforest and mangroves, an hour’s drive from the city. Buyers will have access to a planned VIP lounge at the airport. There will be 4,000 residential units. All have views of the golf course, ocean or rainforest. As well as enjoying the spa, health-conscious owners can opt into a bio-metric scheme that will measure their calorific intake and blood-sugar levels.

Rio Grande do Norte

If you need more extreme help to keep in shape, then one of the 13,500 properties planned for Lagoa do Coelho, a 35-minute drive from Natal, might be ideal. Purchasers will have access to dentistry and plastic surgery. AGS Properties has one-bed flats. Tourism and property prices look set to receive a further boost from the planned expansion of Natal’s airport.

The hot spots are Ponta Negra and Pipa, where the beaches are consistently voted among the best in Brazil. They attract a younger crowd, looking for a laid-back lifestyle of kitesurfing and cocktails. A second phase of larger villa-style holiday homes on the 350-hectare site will be released later in the year.

Ceara

The most developed spot on the northeast coast, Fortaleza is fast becoming the Torremolinos of Brazil.

http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/overseas/article3245446.ece

British Airways announces new green initiative

British Airways has launched a new carbon offset scheme initiative this week which will see the airline backing deforestation prevention in Brazil and research into the effects of aircraft’s non-carbon emissions. The carrier’s new initiative is UN certified and will help to finance clean energy projects in developing countries.

Monetary funds offered by customers off setting flight emissions will be supporting a new windfarm in one of the poorest regions of China, as well as river run hydro electric plants in China and Brazil.

British Airways’ offset scheme will also soon be accompanied by further projects to reduce carbon emissions, including projects to help protect the Brazilian rainforest and working with Cambridge University which will aim to establish scientific understanding of the non-C02 effects of aviation by 2012.

“We were the first airline to offer carbon offsets, and we intend to remain at the forefront in this area,” said Silla Maizey, head of corporate responsibility.

“We need a broad response to climate change: controlling our emissions with cleaner aircraft, the inclusion of aviation in emissions trading and the setting of tough international emissions targets...Offsetting is closely related to emissions trading. It is valuable in itself and improves general understanding of how carbon trading works.”

http://www.etravelblackboard.com/index.asp?id=73731&nav=130

Brazilian Acai Berry

The acai berry comes from a palm tree deep within the Brazilian rainforest, Euterpe oleracea, growing as tall as 25 meters. Branches at the top have ribbon-like leaves and from these branches the acai berries hang in clusters.

The average tree branches into four to eight trunks, each 4 to 6 inches in diameter. It is not uncommon to find palms with as many as 25 trunks. The palm tree grows best in low-lit, swampy areas, such as the conditions found in the Brazilian rain forest, but it has been spread by animals throughout the Amazon basin. Each branch produces four to eight bunches of berries throughout the year. The largest fruit production occurs in the dry season. The acai palm starts producing fruit when it is about 4 to 5 years old.

The acai palm produces small, deep-purple, almost black, fruit. When ripe, the berries are about the size of a blueberry or grape. It is edible, and its pulp is used in wines, liqueurs, as flavoring, as colorant and of course, as juice and smoothies.

The acai palm was originally used for its palm hearts, taking the place of another palm that was harvested to near extinction. It is fortunate that the multiple trunks of the acai palm will grow back after they are removed.

Brazilian Acai Berry

Acai is used not only for food; the fronds are used to thatch homes and for weaving. Acai palms now provide most of the world’s palm hearts, but over-harvesting is a concern.

In the traditions of the local people acai berries were picked by hand. A tribe’s males would climb up the tree and cut the branches from the top where the acai berries are. Now that the amazing acai berry has been discovered by the outside world, it is a highly sought after crop and it is mass harvested.

Because the juice’s beneficial properties are active for only 24 hours, the acai berries must be loaded into baskets and onto boats as soon as possible after picking. Overnight transport gets it to the market in Belem, one of Brazil’s busiest ports.

An acai palm produces about 20 kilos of fruit per year. The wine produced from acai has become Brazil’s most important product after wood forest products. Belem employs more than 30,000 people to keep up with demand.

In addition to the brazilian acai berry's medicinal attributes, historically acai has been used as a great energy food. It was traditionally pulped to make a mineral-rich wine. Today these attributes are available in juice form in North America and other parts of the world.

http://www.excitingbrazil.com/brazilianacaiberry.html

Pressures build on Amazon jungle

The Amazon is not just a precious resource for Brazil but for the entire world, and the year ahead seems likely to produce important indications of what the future holds for this vast rainforest.

The scale of the challenge is widely acknowledged.

In the past 40 years, close to 20% of the Amazon has been cut down.

Land cleared for cattle is the leading cause of deforestation, while the growth in soya bean production is becoming increasingly significant. Illegal logging is also a factor.

Deforestation and forest fires are now responsible for nearly 75% of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions.

In the past three years the Brazilian government has celebrated a 59% cut in the rate of deforestation, but there are now signs of problems ahead.

Fines

In December, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said there had been a 10% increase in deforestation between August and November 2007 and announced a range of measures to try to stem this.

The president signed a decree imposing fines for buying or trading goods such as beef or soya planted illegally on deforested properties.

Several hundred federal police are to be sent to the area to help combat environmental destruction, joining more than 1,600 inspectors already there.

In recent years the government says it has carried out numerous inspections, seized more than one million cubic metres of wood, cancelled thousands of land registrations and arrested hundreds of people, as well as creating large conservation areas.

At the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia, last month, Brazil also announced the creation of a voluntary fund to protect the Amazon, due to be launched in 2008.

Growing concern

On a broader international front, it was also agreed at Bali that forest conservation would be included in discussions about a future agreement on global warming.

The new measures may be a sign of growing government concern, and it will only become clear in the months ahead just how effective they will prove to be in the struggle to protect the Amazon.

Environmental groups, while welcoming the government's efforts, say the response is simply not good enough.

Critics had already warned that recent falls in deforestation could be explained by a drop in market prices for products such as soya and meat, and that once these rose again land clearance would start to increase.

"We have a national plan to fight deforestation that, historically, was a good plan on paper but lacked implementation both due to political will and due to resources," said Marcelo Furtado, campaigns director for Greenpeace in Brazil.

"Although the government could celebrate in recent years a decrease in deforestation, the fact is that structurally this didn't change.

"The environment ministry still lacks funding. You still have situations where the police don't have a helicopter to fly over a certain area or there is no fuel in the truck to go to verify if an area is being deforested or not. You still have a problem with availability of maps," Mr Furtado said.

"The tools to decrease deforestation and monitor implementation of the law are still not good enough."

Frontier mentality

That concern is reflected by John Carter, director of Alianca da Terra, a group that promotes environmental awareness in land management.

Mr Carter, however, has a different perspective on the causes and how the problem needs to be addressed.

"Most of the environmental groups are concentrating on the law and why the law is not being upheld and they mysteriously forget this is a frontier and no-one ever upheld the law in any frontier in Europe or the United States, anywhere," he says.

He believes giving producers incentives to reduce the impact on the forest will prove more effective than traditional conservation methods.

The results of failure can be seen in the thick smoke of forest fires being used to clear land.

"I would easily say [2007] was one of the worst years I have seen in 11 years living here," said Mr Carter, who was born in the US but moved here with his Brazilian wife.

"I flew with several different people at several different times in September and October and I couldn't see the end of my wings, I couldn't see the ground.

"I tried to land in the Xingu park [in Mato Grosso]... I couldn't... I couldn't see the runway. I was flying 300 ft (91m) above the forest and couldn't even see it."

Responsibility

Andre Lima, a senior official at the environment ministry with responsibility for the Amazon says it will be difficult to keep deforestation in 2008 down to the level achieved in 2007, especially given the growing market pressures.

But he believes the presidential decree will force a wider range of people to address these concerns.

"What is important to do is to share out responsibility for illegal deforestation," he says.

"The responsibility is not only with the farmers involved at the forefront, but it is the chain of production that buys from them as well. The big soya companies, the meat storage plants that have set up there and know there is no authorisation for deforestation in the area.

"They have to assume a share of the responsibility."

The next few months will be a test of that resolve, but there seems to be a growing recognition on all sides that the Amazon faces another testing period.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7186776.stm

Ancient Amazon Trees

Some of the trees in the vast Amazon rainforest might have been alive when Columbus landed in the New World. And that could be bad news for Earth's climate.

Findings published in 2005 show that Amazon trees, long thought to be quick growing and short-lived, are in some cases hundreds of years old. The oldest were on the order of 1,000 years, and one Amazon Methuselah hit 1,400.

While there are older trees on Earth -- California redwoods might live 2,000 years or more -- the revelation of ancient trees in the Amazon is likely to add to the worries of climate scientists, said Susan Trumbore, a UC Irvine earth system science professor who wrote the study along with Brazilian colleagues.

It means many climate models designed to calculate how fast the planet is warming up might be wrong.

The main culprit in global warming is carbon dioxide gas, a major byproduct of industrial civilization. It is believed to trap heat in Earth's atmosphere.

One of the ways to slow down global warming is to bind up carbon dioxide in the bodies of trees and other vegetation, climate scientists say. If the Amazon trees grew quickly -- as most experts thought -- they could be relied upon to absorb carbon dioxide, slowing the rate of warming.

But large, old trees are not as good at sequestering carbon dioxide.

"The potential for those forests to take up (carbon dioxide) has been overestimated," Trumbore said.

Trumbore and her fellow researchers estimate that as many as half of the trees in the Amazon greater than 3.9 inches in diameter could be more than 300 years old.

The Amazon basin contains a full third of the Earth's land vegetation.

"The little trees we all ignore are really old," Trumbore said. "One tree that we found was 12 centimeters in diameter – about the size of a CD. The tree was nearly 800 years old."

Tropical trees do not have easily identifiable tree rings, so until recently statements about their age were mostly guesswork.

But Trumbore, who takes frequent trips to the Amazon as part of an international team of scientists, used a sophisticated instrument at UCI called a particle accelerator to determine the age of tree samples.

By blasting bits of carbon from the wood and analyzing the results, the accelerator can tell the proportion of carbon 14 in each sample. The more carbon 14 has decayed, the older the wood.

Repeated tests of the same samples confirmed the results.

"Nobody believed us," she said of the tiny, nearly 800-year-old tree. "We didn't believe it either. We measured it seven or eight times."

Brazil nut trees, one of the few species widely recognized, ranged from 800 to 1,000 years old, Trumbore said.

Some of the researchers followed loggers around the rainforest to get samples of trees they cut down.

The research was done not only to learn more about global warming but also to help conservationists in the Amazon determine which trees to harvest, Trumbore said.

"If you're going to sustainably cut trees, you want to figure out which ones are going to take 1,000 years to replace versus a few decades," Trumbore said.

http://www.ocregister.com/news/trees-amazon-carbon-1960397-trumbore-old

Rumble in the jungle

Brazil is home to the latest creation from the hotelier Anouska Hempel, says Kate Quill

ANOUSKA Hempel’s new project, Warapuru, is an ambitious new complex on an empty stretch of jungly coastline near Itacaré, beloved of surfers, in Bahia. The hotelier and designer became famous for her exacting eye for detail with her first hotel, Blakes, in South Kensington, which opened in the Eighties.

Hempel’s arrival in Bahia seems right for her. It’s a place favoured by chic, well-to-do bohos, which, to some extent, describes the New Zealand-born designer, who delivers luxury in a clean, Zen-like guise — pure and unostentatious.

Warapuru looks as if it will embody that stripped-down approach more strongly than any of her previous hotels. Wallpaper magazine has already described it as a “Bond lair”; my initial impression was of the strange, futuristic work of Le Corbusier — but Hempel swiftly puts me right. “It has nothing to do with that look,” she says icily. Still, it’s hard to describe — a minimalist, linear design that combines 20th-century Modernism with something altogether more weird: part Mayan palace, part — well, yes — Bond-villain fantasy.

Warapuru will be a top-end hotel with private villas attached, each with its own pool, which will be for sale but run and managed by the hotel. It is backed by João Vaz Guedes, a Portuguese hotelier, whom Hempel describes as a man with “great vision”. He has given her complete creative and managerial control of the project, from the architecture and interiors through to the food and spa products (the latter will be her own). Hempel appears to have learnt a few hard lessons from the sale of Blakes in 2004, which she bought back this year, apparently eager to reimpose her authority on it. “I will never, ever take on any project where I don’t have a sustainable design and management contract. I have to be in control,” she says firmly.

Details on Warapuru are still sketchy. The hotel is not built yet, and Hempel is “completely in the middle of the creative process”, which is why she could not give me exact room rates (“could be £500 a night, it depends . . .”), the overall budget (“that keeps changing”), or its capacity, but she gave a ballpark figure of 150 hotel rooms and 40 to 60 villas. The villas will cost anything between £500,000 and £1.5 million, she says, but they will be managed by the hotel, and owners can lease them back when they are not there.

Warapuru is stepped into the hillside and its vegetation, giving it, on paper, a look of something emerging from this wild, exotic landscape. There’s a conspicuous absence of doors. Instead there are long, vertical, recessed openings that could be corridors, or windows, or light shafts. Hempel seems to want to play on this ambiguity, so that you will surrender yourself to the abstract nature of the building, leaving your old life and habits — such as walking through rectangular doorways — behind. Hempel says the experience will be “like entering a citadel — you will walk between crevices and cracks, you will hardly ever see a door.

“The scale of it is extraordinary. It will be long, strange and strong, it will be homogeneous with the landscape, with the outside coming inside. It can be a retreat, or somewhere where you have innovative beauty treatments, go powersailing, climb banana trees, have picnics, or learn any sort of Brazilian dance you want.”

And will the project be ecologically sound? “If I can make it that way, then yes.” But when pressed, Hempel says that green principles are, in truth, not much of a concern for her guests, even though they may profess to care about them.

In the usual pattern of hotel openings, Warapuru’s launch date keeps shunting forward. Completion is now scheduled for 2007. To get there, you will fly to Salvador and then travel by car for about 90 minutes, although Hempel hopes to put a landing strip into the complex within a few years of its opening. It seems to mark a new, adventurous chapter in her design career, which has been quiet for a few years now.

And if Warapuru looks strange, her next project sounds downright subversive: a “totally anti-Vegas” hotel in Las Vegas, right on the Strip. “It’s a monastery,” she says, without a trace of irony.

http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/destinations/latin_america/article624371.ece

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BRAZIL

Wembley’s opening was positively punctual in comparison with Warapuru (www.warapuru.com; rates not yet set), Anoushka Hempel’s Brazilian resort. It was first scheduled for 2004; several missed completion dates since have merely increased anticipation among aficionados. La Hempel really will unveil the much talked-about Bond-villain fantasy in fashionable Itacare this spring, with a rainforest spa and a supersexy beach scene. Fly to Salvador, via Rio.

Destruction of Amazon forest accelerates

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest has surged in the past four months, raising the prospect of 2008 being a disastrous year for the world's most important eco-system, a senior Brazilian government scientist has warned.

Dr Carlos Nobre, a scientist with a government agency that monitors the Amazon, said thousands of square kilometres of rainforest had been destroyed since October, after four years in which deforestation rates had begun to slow.

"I think the past four months is a big concern for the government and now they are sending people to do more law enforcement," Dr Nobre told a seminar in Washington yesterday. "But I can tell you that [deforestation] is going to be much higher than 2007."

5 957 square kilometres of forest lost in the past four months

The claims from the head of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research come in the same week as a major report was released detailing the growth of cattle ranching in the Amazon.

Dr Nobre said 5 957 square kilometres of forest had been lost in the past four months. That compares with an estimated 9 582 square kilometres in the 12 months that ended on July 31, which Brazilian officials hailed as the lowest deforestation rate since the 1970s.

These figures had already been hotly disputed by conservationists who point to increasing pressure from sugar-cane plantations to feed the ethanol boom, illegal cattle ranching for beef exports, soybean production and illegal logging operations. "All those drivers of change are there," said Dr Nobre. "The three years of reduced deforestation did not bring by themselves a cure for illegal deforestation."

Roberto Smeraldi, from Friends of the Earth Brazil, said the surge was part of the same cycle of destruction that has seen so much of the forest cleared in the past. "We had a real overdose of deforestation between 2002 and 2005, which led to abundant availability of cleared land," he said. "Now this land has been occupied, the process heats up again."

Friends of the Earth released a report this week which revealed that 74 million cattle are reared in the Amazon basin where they outnumber people by a ratio of more than three to one.

Deforestation has emerged as the second leading source of the carbon emissions driving climate change. Brazil is now among the four main carbon polluters in the world and deforestation accounts for more than three-quarters of its emissions.

Despite its acknowledged role as one the largest carbon sinks on the planet, its unrivalled biodiversity and the fact that it stores half the world's fresh water, one fifth of the Amazon basin has been destroyed in recent years. There are serious concerns that the very survival of the world's largest rainforest is threatened and, last month, the WWF published research suggesting the Amazon could be wiped out by 2030.

A record drought two years ago reduced the Amazon River to less than a trickle along large stretches and fires last year, caused in part by forest-clearing for ranches, scattered tons of ash over Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay.

Now in his second term, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has made a series of commitments to safeguarding the Amazon. Marina da Silva, his environment minister, has been feted for her stance on conservation.

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=143&art_id=vn20080120083450882C882428

'Ethanol production Brazil is not causing deforestation in the Amazon

'Ethanol production in Brazil is not causing deforestation in the Amazon region,- says Peter Zuurbier, Associate Professor and Director of the Wageningen UR Latin America Office. According to him, the notion that sugarcane is displacing cattle and soybean production into the Amazon is inaccurate. 'The real problem lies in illegal deforestation and lack of property rights, as around 50 percent of the Amazon region has disputed titles and this is an invitation for timber companies- he says.

In an interview with Ethanol Statistics, Mr. Zuurbier tries to explain a dynamic process between illegal activities in the Amazon rainforest and the expansion of agricultural lands towards that region. NGO's often state that sugarcane production is displacing cattle and soybean production towards and into the Amazon, burning down the area to make it suitable for agriculture and pastures.

According to Mr. Zuurbier however, the process is slightly different. 'Well organized groups and corporations with questionable land titles, but also official land owners began to chop down large acreages of forest to trade timber, both legally and illegally- he says. 'Usually, after the empty strips of land were abandoned, cattle owners would move into these cheap lands. However, after 3 to 4 years of cattle breeding, the thin soil of the Amazon is completely useless without any form of fertilization and livestock owners usually move into the next abandoned area. Soybean farmers meanwhile replace the livestock in these areas, recognizing the opportunity to fertilize the area for soybean production.-

According to Mr. Zuurbier, the cause of deforestation and agricultural production in or near the Amzone, is simply illegal deforestation itself. The fact that Brazil still has questionable land titles, no set-aside policy and great difficulty to enforce existing laws to counter illegal timber trade, are the real reasons why the Amazon rainforest is in danger according to him.

Mr. Zuurbier made his comments in an interview with Ethanol Statistics, focussed specifically on the topic of the indirect effects of ethanol production in Brazil. In the article, he also discusses the steps that have been taken already, among which are Brazil's satellite monitoring system and self-enforcing regulation large commodity traders such as Cargill and ADM.

The entire interview, titled ‘Brazilian Ethanol and the Displacement of Cattle' can be found on

http://www.ethanolstatistics.com/Expert_Opinions/Brazilian_Ethanol_and_the_Displacement_of_Cattle_210108_1.aspx

Europe’s Biofuel Rethink

Those pesky greener-than-thou Europeans are at it again. Not content with leading the way on carbon trading and greenhouse gas reductions, the European Union announced a plan this week to ban the import of a broad swathe of biofuels that scientists say may do more harm than good.

The new rules are primarily designed to protect vulnerable ecosystems in Asia and Latin America, which have borne the brunt of the biofuel revolution as unscrupulous producers cleared rainforests and grasslands to make way for palm-oil and soy plantations. Already, peatland clearances in Southeast Asia account for 8 percent of global carbon emissions; in Indonesia, meanwhile, some 44 million acres of rainforest have already been cleared by palm-oil producers.

While nixing the import of biofuels from recently cleared rainforests and grasslands is a start, Europeans are also raising questions about their entire biofuel strategy. The EU currently aims to source 10 percent of its transport fuel from ethanol and biodiesel by 2020; increasingly, though, its scientists are arguing that such quotas may be misguided.

A new study from the Royal Society - Britain’s most important scientific body - argues that rather than mandating the use of fixed quantities of biofuels, policymakers should set targets for fixed carbon savings from the use of biofuels. That would help ensure that the fuels sold to consumers are genuinely carbon negative, both sustainably farmed and produced without the excessive use of fossil fuels.

That’s a swipe not just at producers of Asian palm oil and Brazilian soy, but also at America’s corn ethanol industry: A study by Swiss scientists recently found that corn ethanol - which demands significant quantities of water and energy to produce - may actually be worse for the environment than regular fossil fuels. That’s a big problem: The US is looking to massively expand its biofuel sector, and corn ethanol remains at the center of its strategy.

The real message from Europe’s rethink is simple: not all biofuels are equal. With the right regulations, responsibly farmed and processed plant petrol can still play a key part in the battle to avert climate change; but an unregulated rush to embrace biofuels - particularly American corn ethanol - will only lead to disaster.

Given Iowa’s electoral importance, it’s been difficult until now for America’s policymakers to talk frankly about this problem: The corn-belt simply carries too much clout. Now, though, with the caucuses out of the way, it’s time for politicians to take a page out of the EU’s playbook, and give some serious thought to the way forward.

http://www.plentymag.com/blogs/political/2008/01/europes_biofuel_rethink.php

Brazilian berry may fight leukemia

A Brazilian berry found high in antioxidants destroyed cultured human cancer cells, reported by researchers of the University of Florida who published their study today in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry.

The study, one of the first to investigate the fruit's potential benefits, showed an extract from acai berries triggered apoptosis or self-destruction in up to 86 percent of leukemia cells, said Stephen Talcott, assistant professor with UF's Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences.

"Acai berries are already considered one of the richest fruit sources of antioxidants," Talcott was cited by Science Blog as saying. "This study was an important step toward learning what people may gain from using beverages, dietary supplements or other products made with the berries."

But he cautioned that the study was not intended to determine whether compounds in acai berries could be used to prevent leukemia in humans. "This was only a cell-culture model and we don’t want to give anyone false hope," Talcott said.

Other fruits including grapes, guavas and mangoes were also found to be able to kill cancer cells in similar studies, according to Talcott.

World Bank Pledges to Save Trees, Then Helps Cut Down Amazon

The World Bank has emerged as one of the key backers behind an explosion of cattle ranching in the Amazon, which new research has identified as the greatest threat to the survival of the rainforest.

Ranching has grown by half in the last three years, driven by new industrial slaughterhouses which are being constructed in the Amazon basin with the help of the World Bank. The revelation flies in the face of claims from the bank that it is funding efforts to halt deforestation and reduce the massive greenhouse gas emissions it causes.

Roberto Smeraldi, head of Friends of the Earth Brazil and lead author of the new report, obtained exclusively by The Independent on Sunday, said the bank's contradictory policy on forests was now clear: "On the one hand you try and save the forest, on the other you give incentives for its conversion."

There are now more than 74 million cattle reared in the Amazon basin, the world's most important eco-system, where they outnumber people by a ratio of more than three to one. Fuelled by massive illegal ranches, the South American giant has become the world's leading beef exporter, rearing more cattle than all 25 EU members put together. This industrial expansion comes despite international agreements to combat deforestation, and claims from the government of Brazil that it is succeeding in slowing the destruction of the world's largest standing forest.

"Land-use change in the Amazon is first and foremost a product of ranching. It is on the hooves of cattle, out on the forest fringe, where the repercussions are being felt," said Mr Smeraldi.

The new report, "The Cattle Realm", comes after a year in which deforestation was acknowledged as the second leading cause of carbon emissions worldwide and was included in the plan for a new global treaty to fight climate change. But the catastrophic destruction of the Amazon to make way for ranches is being funded by the same international institutions that have pledged to fight deforestation.

The World Bank, which unveiled a new programme to fund "avoided deforestation" at the UN climate summit in Bali last month, is at the same time pouring money into the expansion of slaughterhouses in the Amazon region. The new report estimates that the internationally funded expansion of Brazil's beef industry was responsible for up to 12 billion tons of CO2 emissions over the past decade - an amount comparable to two years of emissions from the US.

The World Bank, which British taxpayers help to fund, lent its backing to the inclusion of deforestation in the Bali "road map" signed by 180 countries last month. At the summit the bank unveiled its Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), aimed at reducing deforestation by compensating developing countries for carbon dioxide reductions realised by maintaining their forests. The pilot programme has received more than $160m (£82m) in funding from donor governments.

The World Bank's president, Robert Zoellick, claimed that the project "signals that the world cares about the global value of forests and is ready to pay for it. There is now a value to conserving, not just harvesting the forest." But the institution, set up to provide loans to developing countries aimed at reducing poverty, has been accused of hypocrisy as it talks up relatively low levels of funding on "avoided deforestation" while spending millions more on the industries - such as cattle ranching and soya production - that are the acknowledged drivers of forest destruction.

In a single project last year, the IFC -- part of the World Bank group -- handed $9m to Brazil's leading beef processor to upgrade its slaughterhouse operations in the Amazon, despite an environmental study, carried out for the IFC, which showed that expansion of a single slaughterhouse in Maraba would lead to the loss of up to 300,000 hectares of forest to make way for more cattle.

The project was signed off despite angry resistance from up to 30 NGOs in Brazil and the intervention of the influential US lobbying group the Sierra Club, all of which pointed out that the high-risk agricultural project contradicted the bank's stated aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In the past three years Brazil's National Development Bank and the World Bank have poured funds into the southern Amazon, fuelling the expansion of the cattle industry with new slaughterhouses and four million additional head of cattle. "While governments insist they are doing their utmost to stop deforestation they have been putting in place incentives for the destruction of the forest. It is taxpayers' money fuelling this," said Mr Smeraldi.

Only the US rears more cattle than Brazil, which since 2004 has led the world in beef exports. The endangered eco-system of the Amazon basin has accounted for 96 per cent of all growth in the country's cattle industry. The ranchers are expanding as meat consumption soars both in Brazil and the rest of the world. Britain is the sixth largest importer of Brazilian beef, buying more than 80,000 tons in the year to November 2007.

The Amazon basin is home to one in 10 of the world's mammals and 15 per cent of land-based plant species. It holds more than half the world's fresh water, and its vast forests act as the largest carbon sink on the planet, providing a vital check on the greenhouse effect. This vital resource faces three main dangers: the expansion of the soya industry, driven by high prices for animal feed; the surge in sugarcane plantations to feed the sudden and insatiable global appetite for bio-fuels; and the traditional threat of cattle ranching, underestimated in recent years as soya and sugarcane have received more attention.

Since the "Save the Amazon" campaigns of the 1970s the role of illegal ranchers in the destruction of the rainforest has been widely known. Virtually non-existent government control has allowed ranchers to clear large areas of remote forest for pasture. But the land - while initially fertile - quickly erodes, spurring the need for new pasture and driving the chainsaws further into the forest, in a vicious cycle largely unchecked for decades. Carbon dioxide emissions from the fires set to clear the trees have helped to propel Brazil into the top four carbon polluters in the world, exceeded only by the US, China and Indonesia.

At the end of each dry season, in anticipation of the first winter rains, farmers and cattle ranchers throughout South America set fires to "renovate" pasture land. But this process has spun out of control as deforestation and climate change have created a tinderbox, leading to ever-larger blazes. Last October a record area of the rainforest went up in flames, choking vast areas of not just Brazil but Paraguay and Bolivia.

There are increasing signs that the strain placed on the Amazon's eco-system could lead to an irreversible breakdown Last month the WWF predicted that the combination of drought and fire could wipe out the Amazon by 2030, with disastrous consequences for the world.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/74031/

Amazon deforestation surging due to oil, soy prices

A Brazilian scientist has confirmed that forest clearing in the Amazon rainforest has surged in recent months, according to Reuters.

Carlos Nobre, a scientist with Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, which tracks Amazon deforestation, told a seminar in Washington that deforestation "is going to be much higher than 2007."

Nobre said that 2,300 square miles of forest had been cleared in the past four months, compared with 3,700 square miles in the 12 months ended this past July 31. The Brazilian government had championed the 2006-2007 numbers — the lowest annual forest loss since the 1970s — as a sign that enforcement efforts were working in the region, but scientists said the decline was more likely a temporary one tied to slowing global commodity prices. As soy and cattle prices have risen in recent months, the number of fires and apparent forest clearing have also increased.

Brazilian satellite data show a marked increase in the number of fires and deforestation in the region. The states of Para and Mato Grosso -- the heart of Brazil's booming agricultural frontier -- both experienced a 50 percent or more increase in forest loss over the same period last year coupled with a large jump in burning: a 39-85 percent jump in the number of fires in Para during the July-September burning period and 100-127 percent rise in Mato Grosso, depending on the satellite. More broadly, the 50,729 fires recorded by the Terra satellite and 72,329 measured by the AQUA satellite across the Brazilian Amazon are the highest on record based on available data going back to 2003 (the NMODIS-01D satellite suggests 2005 burning was higher but still shows a 54 percent jump since last year). Reports from the ground indicated that burning was indeed very last fall.

Satellite imagery from NASA indicates that much of the burning late last year was concentrated around two major Amazon roads: Trans-Amazon highway in the state of Amazonas, and the unpaved portion of the BR-163 Highway in the state of Pará. Scientists have long warned that the roads would drive deforestation in the area by encouraging settlement and development.

"Infrastructure is associated with aggressive and progressive land use change," said Nobre, noting that 90 percent of Amazon deforestation occurred within 30 miles of roads, according to Reuters.

Nobre also said that high oil prices would create further pressure on the Amazon for biofuel production.

"If oil prices keep increasing there will be an explosion of biofuel production in the Amazon," he said.

Nobre's comments come shortly after Brazilian Agriculture Minister Reinhold Stephanes told Reuters that Brazil would need at least a decade before it could stop deforestation resulting from its fast-growing agriculture business.

"Today Brazil has the conscience not to cut down trees to increase its production," he was quoted as saying. "The government has decided -- no more deforestation. Now, it will be at least a decade before the policies are in place and working."

Stephanes told Reuters that Brazilian agriculture would grow by recovering 50 million hectares (124 million acres) of degraded pasture land as well as converting 50 million hectares of cerrado, a grassland ecosystem bordering the Amazon rainforest. Critics say that landowners often bribe officials to classify forest land as cerrado so they can clear it for pasture and soy farms.

http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0117-amazon.html