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

Latest:

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