Environmentalists Warn of Roads, Dams in Amazon
Date: 04-Aug-03
Country: BRAZIL
Author: Axel Bugge
The report on the world's largest tropical forest, by international environmental experts charged with advising Brazil and rich countries donating to a program which has channeled $350 million to conserving the Amazon, came after data in June showed the Amazon deforestation rate jumped 40 percent last year.
"The situation really is critical but the ministry is aware of this," said Mary Allegretti, the Environment Ministry's secretary of the Amazon. "This report underlines our worries about infrastructure projects."
The group visited the locations of four proposed projects, including paving 485 miles of dirt road running through the heart of the Amazon, building a gas pipeline through forests touching on Indian lands and developing two hydro-electric dams.
The projects are slated to be included in an economic development plan the government is putting together.
"The mere possibility of big projects is opening the possibility of new frontiers," of deforestation, said Roberto Smeraldi, who heads the group and is also director of Friends of the Earth in Brazil.
"There are illegal land seizures, which in general leads to deforestation," he said, explaining that illegal loggers and farmers were moving into areas where projects were planned on the mere anticipation of them becoming reality.
He said that threatened a repeat of past populating of the Amazon, such as in the 1960s when a major highway was opened in the eastern Amazon, allowing loggers and farmers to hack deeper into the forests and accelerate deforestation.
Profitable soy farming is seen as a special threat.
Roughly 15 percent of the Amazon - an area larger than western Europe of continuous tropical forest that is home to up to 30 percent of the world's animal and plant species - has so far been cut down.
Annual Amazon deforestation rose to 9,840 square miles last year, an area slightly smaller than Haiti, from 7,010 square miles in 2001.
The report recommended that the projects are reconsidered to take into account long-term environmental impacts and urged that the wide-scale problem of illegal land deeds in the Amazon be formalized, which could make monitoring considerably easier for the government.
It also suggested the creation of a fund that would earn royalties from energy projects in the Amazon to ensure the livelihoods of the 20 million people living in the region.