The remote town of Tailândia in the state of Pará in northern Brazil has quickly come to symbolise the conflict between those who see the Amazon rainforest as an expendable resource and those seeking to slow its rapid rate of disappearance.
Townspeople last week rioted in defence of local loggers, forcing state police and inspectors from Ibama, the federal environmental agency, to flee Tailândia after trying to make arrests and seize illegally felled logs.
Federal police, special troops and Ibama inspectors this week descended on the town in the first stage of operation Arc of Fire, the biggest crackdown on illegal logging in the Amazon.
They are far from welcome. Logging, legal and illegal, accounts for about 70 per cent of the local economy. At least 6,000 workers have been laid off since the federal police arrived and began shutting down illegal operations.
But Alvaro Palharini, the federal police officer in charge of the operation, says his men will stay in this and other parts of the forest until illegal logging has been stamped out once and for all.
“We fully believe it can be done,” he told the Financial Times in an interview last week. “A year from now the rate of deforestation will have fallen sharply.”
That is a bold assertion. During the past five months of 2007 alone – normally low season for logging – about 7,000 sq km of forest was cut down, equivalent to an annualised rate of nearly 17,000sq km. That compares with 11,200 sq km of forest cut down during the previous 12 months.
Logging plays a big role in deforestation but not the biggest. As much as 70 per cent is caused by low-density cattle ranching, often sustainable using the simplest methods for just two or three years, after which many ranchers burn down more forest.
Pressure also comes from the advance of crops such as soya and sugar cane which have displaced ranching in much of the region.
“Soya certainly has a big role. So does the exchange rate,” says Daniel Zarin, professor of tropical forestry at the University of Florida who is researching deforestation, funded by the Packard Foundation. The rate of deforestation rose strongly to 2004, when soya prices were rising and Brazil’s currency, the Real, was weak.
Since then, soya prices have fallen, the Real has appreciated and, perhaps most significantly, Brazil’s beef industry has faced a string of crises. Deforestation slowed in tandem but, in the second half of last year, as food prices recovered, so did deforestation.
Observers also blame public policy, which encourages settlers to clear part of the forest to show they are engaged in productive activity – a defence against invasion from rival settlers and a means of obtaining government incentives. Meanwhile, notoriously weak enforcement has allowed many landowners and settlers to ignore regulations.
“The forest has no economic value when it is standing up,” says Paulo Moutinho of Ipam, an Amazon research institute in Brasília. “And there is absolutely no control by environmental or other government agents.”
Marina Silva, environment minister, dismissed such arguments in an interview last week. She conceded that “populist local politicians often encourage people to confront inspectors or cut down the forest.”
However, she said a crackdown leading to 650 arrests, including those of allegedly corrupt officials, about R$4bn ($2.4bn, €1.6bn, £1.2bn) in fines and the seizure of more than 1m cubic meters of timber since 2003 were behind the drop in deforestation to the middle of last year – and that the subsequent surge might have been caused by unusually dry weather, leading people who would have cut down trees later to bring their activities forward.
Mr Palharini believes operation Arc of Fire will work by reimposing governance on remote regions. “The simple presence of the state will prevent people from putting logs on trucks and sending them down the highway,” he said. “Ordinarily, the state cannot be present in all of Brazil. The country is of such a size, in some regions the state hardly exists.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3afcb82a-e720-11dc-b5c3-0000779fd2ac.html
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