forests in brazil

8/10/2019 Forests in Brazil

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The Amazon rainforest

Cutting down on cutting down

How Brazil became the world leader in reducing environmental degradation

Jun 7th 2014 |From the print edition

IN THE 1990s, when an area of Brazilian rainforest the size of Belgium was felled every

year, Brazil was the worlds environmental villain and the Amazonian jungle the image of

everything that was going wrong in green places. Now, the Amazon ought to be the image

of what is going right. Government figures show that deforestation fell by 70% in the

Brazilian Amazon region during the past decade, from a ten-year average of 19,500

km2(7,500 square miles) per year in 2005 to 5,800 km2in 2013. If clearances had

continued at their rate in 2005, an extra 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would have

been put into the atmosphere. That is an amount equal to a years emissions from the

European Union. Arguably, then, Brazil is now the world leader in tackling climate change.

But how did it break the vicious cycle in whichit was widely expectedfarmers and cattle

ranchers (the main culprits in the Amazon) would make so much money from clearing the

forest that they would go on cutting down trees until there were none left? After all, most

other rainforest countries, such as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,

have failed to stop the chainsaws. The answer, according to a paper just published

inScience by Dan Nepstad of the Earth Innovation Institute in San Francisco, is that there

was no silver bullet but instead a three-stage process in which bans, better governance in

frontier areas and consumer pressure on companies worked, if fitfully and only after several

false starts.

The first stage ran from the mid-1990s to 2004. This was when the government put its

efforts into bans and restrictions. The Brazilian Forest Code said that, on every farm in the
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Amazon, 80% of the land had to be set aside as a forest reserve. As the study observes,

this share was so high that the code could not be complied withor enforced. This was the

period of the worst deforestation. Soyabean prices were high and there was a vast

expansion of soyabean farming and cattle ranching on the south-eastern fringe of the

rainforest.

During the second stage, which ran from 2005 to 2009, the government tried to boost its

ability to police the Amazon. Brazils president, Luis Incio Lula da Silva, made stopping

deforestation a priority, which resulted in better co-operation between different bits of the

government, especially the police and public prosecutors. The area in which farming was

banned was increased from a sixth to nearly half of the forest.

Also, for the first time, restrictions were backed up by other things: a fall in export earnings

from soyabeans because of a rise in Brazils currency, the real; a sharp improvement in

cattle breeding which meant farmers could raise more animals on fewer hectares; and a

consumer boycott. After a campaign by Greenpeace and others, buyers of Brazilian

soyabeans promised not to purchase crops planted on land cleared after July 2006. All of

these combined to cause deforestation to plummet (see chart).


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The third stage, which began in 2009, was a test of whether a regime of restrictions could

survive as soyabean expansion resumed. The government shifted its focus from farms to

counties (each state has scores of these). Farmers in the 36 counties with the worst

deforestation rates were banned from getting cheap credit until those rates fell. The

government also set up a proper land registry, requiring landowners to report their

properties boundaries to environmental regulators. There was a cattle boycott modelled onthe soya one. And for the first time, there were rewards as well as punishments: an

amnesty for illegal clearances before 2008 and money from a special $1 billion Amazon

Fund financed by foreign aid.

By any standards, Brazils Amazon policy has been a triumph, made the more remarkable

because it relied on restrictions rather than incentives, which might have been expected to

have worked better. Over the period of the study, Brazil also turned itself into a farming

superpower, so the country has shown it is possible to get a huge increase in food output

without destroying the forest (though there was some deforestation at first). Still, as Dr

Nepstad concedes, a policy of thou-shalt-not depends on political support at the top,


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which cannot be guaranteed. Moreover, the policies so far have been successful among

commercial farmers and ranchers who care about the law and respond to market

pressures; hence the effectiveness of boycotts. Most remaining deforestation is by

smallholders who care rather less about these things, so the government faces the problem

of persuading them to change their ways, too. Deforestation has been slowed, but not yetstopped.

Brazils conversion

Trees of knowledge

How Brazil is using education, technology and politics to save its rainforest

Sep 14th 2013 |From the print edition

Logging off

MAURO LUCIO IS living the dream. Having started work as a cowboy at 16, he is now 48

and raises cattle on 50 square kilometres of Paragominas municipality in Par state. Theanimals on his ranch are healthy, the grass thick and the fences solid. Along the avenues

on his estate, wooden posts name the many different varieties of trees he has planted

between the fields. His wife serves delicious food while his three daughters play happily on

the verandah of the handsome wooden ranch house.

The only thing that is not ideal about Mr Lucios estate is its history. Until around ten years

ago it was part of the rainforest. The biggest trees, up to 100 feet tall, were sold for timber,

the rest burnt. In this way Brazil has lost around 19% of its Amazonian forest. And Brazil

makes up around 63% of the Amazon region.


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Half of the worlds plant and animal species are believed to live in rainforest, so destroying

it is a sure way of wiping out large swathes of biodiversity. Species are put at risk not just

when forest is burned but also when clearing cuts up the remaining forest into smaller and

smaller fragments. A study conducted over three decades by Thomas Lovejoy, an

American scientist, shows that creatures die when the forest becomes more and morefragmented, partly because it dries up and partly because some species are deprived of the

range they need to survive.

Until recently it would have been normal practice in the area for Mr Lucio to occupy his

ranch for a few years, then, when productivity droppedas it tends to on the rather thin

rainforest soilburn down some more and move on. But Mr Lucio has no plans to do that,

nor, if they are to be believed, do any of the other ranchers in Paragominas. Burning down

the rainforest, in addition to having been outlawed, has also become socially unacceptable.

Mr Lucio is focusing on raising his income not by colonising more land but by increasing his

farms productivity.

Space-age solution

When Luiz Incio Lula da Silva became president in 2003, his government, under pressure

from public opinion and foreigners, turned against deforestation. From 2003 his

environment minister, Marina Silva, started giving greater protection to land in the Amazon

and beefed up the federal environmental police, the Ibama. Centres of illegal logging, such

as Paragominas, were put on a blacklist.

Ms Silva was greatly helped by a combination of remote sensing and a Brazilian NGO,Imazon. Brazils space agency published figures on deforestation, but only on an annual

basis, nearly a year in retrospect and without a map, so nobody knew exactly where the

trees were coming down. Beto Verissimo, who founded Imazon to use science for the

benefit of the rainforest, realised that NASAs Modis satellite collected data that could be

published monthly and would also show were the damage was being done. In 2007 Imazon

started processing NASAs data and publishing them within a few weeks of being collected.

Partly because of rising prosperity and partly because of international attention, Brazilians

were getting more interested in the fate of the Amazon. Newspapers started putting

Imazons data on their front pages. State governors had to respond to them on national

news programmes. Month after month, Mato Grosso and Par were found to have the

highest rates of deforestation.

In 2008 the government ratcheted up the pressure, publishing a list of the 36 municipalities

with the worst records. Seventeen, including Paragominas, were in Par state. Being

blacklisted did not just bring public humiliation to the citizens of Paragominas, it also hit

their wallets. Businesses in municipalities on the list were not eligible for cheap credit from

state-owned banks.


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Adnan Demachki, Paragominass mayor, saw that Greenpeaces boycott of soya produced

from Amazonian estates was hitting the soya farmers of Mato Grosso and realised that

something similar was about to happen to the beef producers of Par. He went round

making speeches to local groups to persuade them that deforestation had to stop.

The federal public prosecutor in Par, Daniel Avelino, followed the supply chain back from

the supermarkets through the beef companies to the ranchers to find out which animals

had been produced on illegally deforested land, and threatened the supermarkets with

prosecution. They reacted fast, says Mr Avelino. It was about their brand, their visibility to

the public. Brazils supermarket associationwhich includes Walmart and Carrefoursaid

its members would stop buying beef from recently deforested land.

This made Mr Avelino exceedingly unpopular. He received death threats and still travels

with an armed guard. But he was not alone in applying economic pressure. The

International Finance Corporation, the private-finance arm of the World Bank, withdrew a

loan it had promised to Bertin, a big beef producer, to expand its facilities in the Amazon.

Mr Demachki persuaded local trade associations to commit to stopping deforestation. In

April 2008 he fined three farmers who were still at it. In October 2008 he was re-elected

with 88% of the vote. But not everybody liked what was happening, and things came to a

head that November night when the environmental-police station went up in flames.

Since then deforestation in the municipality has pretty much stopped and Paragominas has

become a model town. It has a Green Lake, a Green Stadium and a Green Park in the

centre of town. A museum built from illegally felled, confiscated wood shows, with

admirable neutrality, how Paragominas performed its U-turn on deforestation. Since the

1960s two-fifths of the municipality has been cleared of forest. The plan is for about 15% of

the cleared area to go back to forest, and half of the rest to be left to cattle-ranching and

half to arable farming.

In 2011 Simo Jatene, Pars newly elected governor, decided to replicate Paragominass

achievements around the state. Central to this effort is the Cadastro Ambiental Rural

(CAR), the rural environmental registry. Uncertainty about land tenure is a big

administrative stumbling block in Brazil. Some farmers do not have title to the land they

farm; some give money to people in whose name land is registered, known as laranjas

orangesso that the real owners are not held to account for deforesting it. If you have a

speed trap but the cars have no numbers, thats useless, says Mr Avelino. Rather than try

to delve into the history of every piece of land, the state governments in Mato Grosso and

Par are trying to get farmers to apply for a CAR certificate so the government knows who

is using the land and how much forest it is supposed to have. Banks now require loan

applicants to produce a CAR; beef companies will buy only from farms with a CAR. In Par

the number of properties with a CAR has gone up from 600 in 2009 to 80,000 now.

Deforestation in Par has more or less come to a halt. In the Brazilian Amazon as a whole,

it has fallen from 28,000 sq km in 2004 to under 5,000 sq km last year (see chart 6).


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Although small farmers continue to clear land in areas where the authority of the state is

weak, the big beef and soya companies that used to do it themselves or buy produce from

those that did no longer want anything to do with it.

Brazils successso fardemonstrates how many elements have to come together to

make such policies work. You need clear direction not just at the top but all the way throughgovernment. Ms Silvas determination was crucial, but if her views had not had the support

of Mr Jatene, Mr Avelino and Mr Demachki, she would not have got far. You need

administrators with enough imagination to find novel solutions: the CAR was a way around

an apparently insuperable land-tenure problem. You need a functioning police force: if the

Ibama had not been effective, the politicians and prosecutors intentions would have been

impossible to implement. You need businessmen whose conscience or share price induces

them to change their supply chains. You need NGOs, such as Greenpeace and Imazon, to

badger business and government to do things differently. You need independent media to

pick the story up and run with it. And, crucially, you need a public that cares: if voters andconsumers were indifferent, none of this would happen.

Help from foreigners, especially Americans, has been important toothough, given

Brazilian sensitivity to interference by gringos, some of them keep quiet about it. Imazons

Mr Verissimo was inspired by Chris Uhl, an American field ecologist working in Par in the


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1980s who is now a professor at Penn State. Imazon was founded with grants from USAID

and the MacArthur Foundation. The Ford Foundation funded a sustainable forestry project

in Paragominas. NASA provides the satellite data that Imazon publishes. Google has built a

platform to allow Imazon to process the data more quickly and cheaply, and Imazon is now

training people from other rainforest countries to use it. Mr Lovejoys forest-fragmentsproject has been running for 30 years, bringing in a stream of foreign researchers,

employing Brazilian scientists and pointing out the consequences of slicing the forest up

into little bits. Greenpeaces international campaign against Brazilian soya, beef and leather

put pressure on global businesses such as Walmart, Carrefour and Nike, and that put

pressure on Brazilian companies. So although globalisation exacerbated deforestation by

boosting demand for Brazilian produce, it is also part of the solution.

Keep at it

But the problem is still not solved once and for all. Deforestation rates may rebound. If

locals can prosper without chopping trees down, there is a good chance that the rest of the

forest will survive. If they cant, it wont.

Migration should help. These days it flows away from the Amazon rather than towards it.

Brazil is urbanising fast, and the attractions of scrubbing a living from raising cows on

deforested land are diminishing.

Still, there are plenty of people left in the countryside, and stopping deforestation means

destroying jobs. In Paragominas only 14 of the citys 240 sawmills are still working, and the

charcoal industry has closed down. Yet after a brief downturn, the city is doing pretty well.One reason is in evidence in the town hall, where about 50 ranch hands in cowboy hats

and baseball caps listen raptly to a presentation on human-bovine interaction. Control by

understanding animal behaviour, says a slide, not by aggression. Suffering in the cow

represents loss of quality in the meat, says another.

The course is part of a Green Ranching Project, run by Mr Lucio in his capacity as head of

the local branch of the farmers union. Better animal welfare is a by-product: the initiatives

main aim is to increase output so that farmers can prosper without deforesting more land.

Mr Lucios farm shows it can be done. Average production for the region, he says, is 90kg

of beef per hectare per year; his average is 500kg and his profit margin 40%. Other than

happy cows, his secrets are dietary supplements in their feed, fertiliser for the grass,

allowing pastures to regenerate after 48 days of grazing and planting copses in his fields to

shelter his cattle from the heat.

The combination of better education and chemicals means that farmers like Mr Lucio can

prosper without destroying the forest. This is progress from which all species can benefit.

Protecting Brazils forests


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Fiddling while the Amazon burns

Keeping the worlds biggest forest standing depends on greens, Amerindians and enlightened

farmers working togetherif lawmakers let them

Dec 3rd 2011 | JACI-PARAN, RONDNIA |From the print edition

DRIVE out of Porto Velho, the capital of the Amazonian state of Rondnia, and you see the

trouble the world's largest forest is in. Lorry after lorry trundles by laden with logs; more

logs lie by the road, to be collected by smugglers who dumped them on the rumour of a

(rare) roadcheck. Charred tree-stumps show where ranchers burned what the loggers left

behind; a few cattle roam sparsely through the scrubby fields. In places the acid subsoil

shows through, sandy and bone-pale. Seen from above, the roads look like hatchet blows,

with dirt tracks radiating outward like thinner wounds. The picture is reproduced across the

Amazon's arc of deforestation (see map).


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The Brazilian Amazon is now home to 24m people, many of them settlers who trekked

those roads in the 1960s and 1970s, lured by a government promise that those who farmed

unproductive land could keep it. Chaotic or corrupt land registries left some without

secure title. Rubber-tappers, loggers, miners and charcoal-burners came too. The most

recent arrivals are 20,000 construction workers building dams on the Madeira and Xingu

rivers to provide electricity to Brazil's populous south. They have attracted some 80,000camp-followers, many of whom squat on supposedly protected land.

The population of Jaci-Paran, the nearest town to the Jirau dam being built on the

Madeira, has risen from 3,500 to 21,000 in a decadebut it still has just four police.

Prostitutes and drug-dealers do well. On payday, says Maria Pereira, a teacher, busloads

of construction workers hit town to drink and fight. Knife-killings are common. When the

dam is finished, many of the new residents will move on. Behind them, a bit more of the

Amazon will be gone.

Brazil's government no longer encourages cutting down the forest. Nearly half of it now lies

within indigenous reserves, or state and federal parks where most logging is banned.

Private landowners must abide by the Forest Code, a law dating from 1965 that requires

them to leave the forest standing on part of their farms (four-fifths in the Amazon, less

elsewhere), and in particular around the sources and banks of rivers, and on hillsides.

But the code is routinely flouted. Less than 1% of the fines levied for failing to observe it are

ever paid, because of uncertain ownership and poor enforcement. The Suru, an

Amerindian people, recently mapped its territory in Rondnia, on paper strictly protected.

The tribe was shocked to find that 7% had been cleared.


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In Braslia 2,000km (1,250 miles) and a world away, politicians are haggling over laws that

will affect the fate of the forest. Some legislators are pushing a bill that would give

Congress, rather than the president, the power to create new reserves. That would

probably mean fewer new onesa blow for the forest, says Ivaneide Bandeira of Kanind,

a non-profit group in Rondnia. Indigenous people protect the forest better than anyoneelse, she says.

The Senate is poised to vote on a new version of the Forest Code, already approved by the

lower house. The president, Dilma Rousseff, wants a final version on her desk before

Christmas. Everyone agrees that change is needed. The share of private land that must be

set aside has risen since 1965 and farmers who were once in compliance but omitted to

update their paperwork can end up lumped in with lawbreakers. Ktia Abreu, a senator who

is the president of the main farm lobby, says farmers find such uncertainty deeply

worrying. Environmentalists dislike it too, since it encourages loggers and land-grabbers

by fuelling disrespect for the law.

But the consensus has gone no further. The farm lobby wanted all past land clearance

regularised, arguing that if farmers had to replant trees, crop output would fall, food prices

soar and poor Brazilians go hungry. Greens countered that an amnesty would fuel future

deforestation. So far, at least, the farm lobby is winning. The current draft allows farmers to

dodge fines for illegal logging and postpone their obligation to replant by simply declaring

that their violations were committed before July 2008 and by enrolling in a vague and

leisurely environmental recovery programme, to be run by individual states.

This is an amnesty in all but name, says Maria Ceclia Brito, the head of WWF-Brazil, a

conservation group. Without safeguards, states will be able to postpone forever the

requirement to act. After several years in which the annual rate of deforestation fell, this

year it has risen, possibly because landowners think the new code will let them get away

with it. Law-abiding farmers are outraged. When Darci Ferrarin bought a large farm in Mato

Grosso in 1998, he knew that its riverbanks had been illegally cleared. He paid to replant.

Those who deforested illegally should go to jail, declares his son, Darci Junior.

The only promising aspect of the new code, thinks Roberto Smeraldi of Amaznia

Brasileira, a green NGO, is that it offers benefits such as subsidised loans to landowners

who have always stuck by the rules, or who are reforesting faster than the law demands.

But he laments the missed opportunity for a grand bargain to align opposed interests. A

cap-and-trade system like those used to limit industrial pollution in rivers could have helped

farmers short of set-aside to comply with the law by paying neighbours with more than the

legal minimum to maintain it. That would both have spared farmers from costly replanting

and cut future deforestation by making standing forests financially valuable.

Ms Rousseff promises to veto any amnesty for illegal deforesters. But the figleaf of the

environmental recovery programme may give her scope to temporise, and with a heavy

legislative schedule she may be tempted to do so. If she does, the Amazon's best hope will


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lie with the enlightened farmers and indigenous tribes who care for their land better than

the state is willing to.

For Mr Ferrarin, the way to halt deforestation is to use existing farmland better. Almost half

his farm of 13,350 hectares (33,000 acres) is set aside as forest; the rest supports 3,000

cattle as well as soya and several other crops, farmed in rotation. Innovative no-till methods

cut carbon emissions, fertiliser use and labour. The Ferrarins run workshops to teach other

farmers about such integrated farming techniques. Mr Ferrarin's daughter, Valkiria, runs a

cattle-breeding programme, with an on-site IVF clinic where embryos from prize animals

are implanted in surrogates. A productive farm can support an extended family for several

generations, he says.

Cassio Carvalho do Val's father settled in Redeno in Par in 1959. It was then virgin

rainforest: the last 150km of the journey was by donkey, carrying dried meat, rice and

beans. Nine-tenths of the 300,000 hectares he was granted has since been sold, but the

farm is still vast (the average farm in the United States comprises around 160 hectares),

and unproductive, with just one cow per hectare of pasture. But his son has started to

fatten his cows with grain and plans to try integrated farming. It's the dream of every crop

farmer to be a rancher, he says with a laugh. It's so much easier. But he thinks he needs

to keep up with the times.

The Suru set an example

Some of Brazil's indigenous peoples are redoubling their efforts to protect the standing

forest. The 1,300 Suru have moved their 25 villages to the borders of their territory to getearly warning of incursions. With help from Kanind and others, since 2005 they have

started to reforest where intruders have cleared. To the inexperienced eye, the new trees

already look ancient (though to the Suru the sparser cover is still obvious). Next year the

tribe will host other indigenous peoples who want to repair deforestation on their own lands.

They hope to start teaching non-indigenous folk, too.

The Suru are the first Brazilian tribal people to set up a REDD project, an international aid

scheme to prevent deforestation. Up to 10% of the income generated will go to local non-

Indians, to show them that standing forest can create jobs and income. We are not saying,

don't use the forest, explains the chief, Almir Narayamoga Suru. We are saying you

should think about the medium and long term when you decide how to use it. That will be

easier if the politicians approve a Forest Code that looks to the future, not the pastand

then provide the means to enforce it

Tropical forests

A clearing in the trees

New ideas on what speeds up deforestation and what slows it downAug 23rd 2014 | JAKARTA|From the print edition


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IN 1998 Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then Brazils president, said he would triple the area

of the Amazonian forest set aside for posterity. At the time the ambition seemed vain: Brazil

was losing 20,000 square kilometres (7,700 square miles) of forest a year. Over the next 15

years loggers, ranchers, environmentalists and indigenous tribes battled it outoften

bloodilyin the worlds largest tropical forest. Yet all the while presidents were patiently

patching together a jigsaw of national parks and other protected patches of forest to createthe Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA), a protected area 20 times the size of

Belgium. Now, less than 6,000 sq km of Brazils Amazonian forest is cleared each year. In

May the government and a group of donors agreed to finance ARPA for 25 years. It is the

largest tropical-forest conservation project in history.

This matters because of Brazils size: with 5m sq km of jungle, it has almost as much as the

next three countries (Congo, China and Australia) put together. But it also matters for what

it may signal: that the world could be near a turning point in the sorry story of tropical

deforestation.

Typically, countries start in poverty with their land covered in trees. As they clear it for

farms or fuel, they get richeruntil alarm bells ring and they attempt to recover their losses.

This happens at different stages in different places, but the trajectory is similar in most: a

reverse J, steeply down, then bottoming out, then upbut only part of the way. This is

usually called the forest transition curve. Brazil seems to be nearing the bottom. The

world may be, too.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a UN body, the net change in

the worlds forested land (deforestation minus forest expansion) was 52,000 sq km a yearin the 2000sa huge loss, but almost two-fifths below what it had been in the 1990s. The


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most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which

represents mainstream scientific opinion on the environment, concurred, saying

deforestation has slowed over the last decade.

Not everyone accepts that. Matthew Hansen of the University of Maryland, who has studied

millions of satellite images, thinks the rate at which forest cover in the tropics was lost rose

between 2000 and 2012though this refers to all trees cut down, including those in

managed forests that may be replanted. The FAO excludes trees in plantations and

agriculture generally (such as for shade-grown coffee).

And by the FAOs definition, several tropical countries at different points along the transition

curve seem to be doing better (see diagram). At the top, the deforestation rate in the

countries of the Congo basin, which have the largest remaining area of African forest, fell


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from an already-tiny 0.16% a year in the 1990s to 0.1% in the 2000s (see table on next

page). They have not begun to slash and burn, as many feared was inevitable. Towards

the bottom of the curve, Mexico has cut its deforestation rate even more than Brazil. On the

upswing, India and Costa Rica are replanting forests they once cut down. In 1980 India had

about 640,000 sq km of forest left. Now, it has 680,000 sq km, and is replanting about1,450 sq km a year. In the 1980s only 20% of Costa Rica was covered in trees. Now more

than half is.

To save the forest you have to think outside the forest, quotes Andrew Steer, head of the

World Resources Institute (WRI), an environmental think-tank. In line with the saying, two

big reasons for the recent slowdown in tropical deforestation have little directly to do with

forest management. They are the easing of population pressures and big improvements in

farming far from forested land.

Trees are different

In a new study* for the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a Washington think-tank,

Jonah Busch and Kalifi Ferretti-Gallon look at 117 cases of deforestation round the world.

They find that two of the influences most closely correlated with the loss of forests are

population and proximity to cities (the third is proximity to roads). Dramatic falls in fertility in

Brazil, China and other well-forested nations therefore help explain why (after a lag)

deforestation is slowing, too. Demography even helps account for what is happening in

Congo, where fertility is high. Its people are flocking to cities, notably Kinshasa, with the

result that the population in more distant, forested areas is thinning out.

Two of the countries that have done most to slow forest decline also have impressive

agricultural records: Brazil, which became the biggest food exporter of all tropical countries

over the past 20 years; and India, home of the green revolution. Brazils agricultural boom

took place in the cerrado, the savannah-like region south and east of the Amazon (there is

farming in the Amazon, too, but little by comparison). The green revolution took place

mostly in Indias north-west and south, whereas its biggest forests are in the east and

north.

But if population and agricultural prowess were the whole story, Indonesia, where fertility

has fallen and farm output risen, would not be one of the worst failures. Figures publishedinNature Climate Change in June show that in the past decade it destroyed around

60,000 sq km of primary forests; its deforestation rate overtook Brazils in 2011. Policies

matter, tooand the political will to implement them.

The central problem facing policymakers is that trees are usually worth more dead than

alive; that is, land is worth more as pasture or cropland than as virgin forest. The benefits

from forests, such as capturing carbon emissions, cleaning up water supplies and

embodying biodiversity, are hard to price, whereas a bushel of soyabeans is worth $12 on

world markets. The market for palm oil, much of which is supplied from deforested land in

Indonesia, is worth $50 billion a year. Tourism can make elephants or lions worth more


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alive than dead, giving locals a material incentive to look after them. This is less true of

trees, lovely though they are.

The most successful policies therefore tend to be top-down bans, rather than incentives

(though these have been tried, too). Indias national forest policy of 1988 explicitly rejects

the idea of trying to make money from stewardship. The derivation of direct economic

benefit, it says, must be subordinated to this principal aim (maintaining the health of the

forest). In Brazil 44% of the Amazon is now national park, wildlife reserve or indigenous

reserve, where farming is banned; much of that area was added recently. In Costa Rica

half the forests are similarly protected. In India a third are managed jointly by local groups

and state governments.


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Top-down bans require more than just writing a law. Brazils regime developed over 15

years and involved tightening up its code on economic activity in forested areas,

moratoriums on sales of food grown on cleared land, a new land registry, withholding

government-subsidised credit from areas with the worst deforestation and strengthening

law enforcement through the public prosecutors office. (The most draconian restriction,requiring 80% of any farm in the Amazon to be set aside as a wildlife reserve, is rarely

enforced.)

Two developments make bans easier to impose. Cheaper, more detailed satellite imagery

shows in real time where the violations are and who may be responsible. Brazil put the data

from its system online, enabling green activists to help police the frontier between forest

and farmland. Its moratoriums on soyabeans and beef from the Amazon, which require

tracing where food is coming from, would not have worked without satellites.

The technology has also boosted democratisation, the second requirement for top-down

bans to work. That sounds counter-intuitive: surely authoritarian regimes are better at

enforcing rules? Perhaps not. Democratisation may help explain the transition curve:

authoritarian regimes preside over deforestation while countries are poor, but when

opposition politicians, non-governmental organisations and a free press bring demands for

accountability to bear, the felling slows.

Frances Seymour of the CGD says this may be one reason why Brazil has quieted the

chainsaws and Indonesia has not: democracy in Brazil began earlier and has gone further.

Since Indonesia banned new logging and plantation concessions in primary forest in 2011,deforestation has actually risen. Land concessions continue to be issued by the Forestry

Ministry, rated the most corrupt among 20 government institutions by Indonesias

Corruption Eradication Commission in 2012. Some within government are hostile to anti-

deforestation schemes, which they see as foreign, says Ade Wahyudi of Katadata, an

Indonesian firm of analysts. Perhaps the biggest problem is the lack of a single, unified

map including all information on land tenure and forest licensing: efforts to create one have

been slowed by unco-operative government ministries and difficulties created by

overlapping land claims.

But in the longer term, says Ms Seymour, the link between democratisation and slowing

deforestation gives reason for hope. In Brazil it was not until well after military rule ended

that the voices calling for protection of the Amazon had grown loud enough that the

government had to take heed. Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, who was elected president in

2002, in the countrys fourth election after the end of dictatorship, made anti-deforestation a

priority. Indonesia has just had its second free presidential election since the fall of Suharto

and politicians across the spectrum say illegal logging must be eradicated (though so did

Suhartos successor).

Right for the wrong reasons


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Brazilian officials now say that they are reaching the limits of what top-down prohibition can

do. Despite the experience of India, they want to shift to offering more incentives to make it

profitable to keep the forests intact. Such policies, though, are an uphill struggle.

The simplest is to boost the incomes of forest dwellers, hoping they will look after the trees

better. But more money can also mean more to spend on chainsaws. The CGD study finds

that though income support sometimes works, it is often insignificant and more often

associated with cutting down trees. The same is true of improving land tenure, which can

simply encourage people to sell what have just become their trees to loggers.

Mexico and Costa Rica have pioneered something different: payment for ecosystem

services.This tries to alter the basic trade-off that makes forests worth more cut down than

standing. The idea is that users of clean water and other benefits from the forest should

pay for them, using markets in which they are buyers and the people who look after the

trees are sellers.

The idea is sound. The problems are practical. Governments have found it almost

impossible to create markets for clean water downstream from forestslet alone for carbon

emissions produced in, say, China and absorbed by trees in the Amazon.

Where the policy has worked, it has been in a roundabout way. Mexico, which has gone

further in this direction than most, kept up its payments for environmental services though

the markets that were supposed to accompany them never materialised. The result was an

income-support scheme: around $500m was handed over to 6,000 forest organisations in

2003-11, almost all by the federal government. The beneficiaries ploughed cash into

looking after the forest, though they were not obliged to do so. A study by the Union of

Concerned Scientists, an international group, concludes that the programmereduced the

rate of deforestationjust not for contractualreasons.

There is one group for whom subsidies and land-tenure improvements are an unqualified

success: indigenous people. Overwhelmingly, they respond to incentives by protecting their

land, presumably for cultural reasons: the forest is their home and they do not want to sell

it, even if that would be profitable. According to a new study by WRI and the Rights and

Resources Initiative, another NGO, deforestation in indigenous areas of Brazil is about 12

times worse than in areas outside them. Worldwide, indigenous people have legal rights in

only about 5m sq km of forest (an eighth of the total and less than the area they live in), so

expanding indigenous rights further could make a big difference to slowing deforestation.

Light at the end of the clearing

Fifteen years ago, the conversion of forest into farmland accounted for a quarter of total

greenhouse-gas emissions and the rainforest was the symbol of worldwide environmental

degradation. Average surface temperatures, ocean acidity, glacier melt and carbon

emissions are all higher now than then. Yet deforestation now accounts for only 12% ofgreenhouse gases. True, too much forest is still being turned into farms. True, too, regrown


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forests are near-monocultures compared with the virgin canopy that once stood there. But

in a world where there is little good environmental news, the state of tropical forests is a

precious exception

Conservation in BrazilManaging the rainforests

Sustainable management could help to save the Amazonian rainforest without harming

economic development

May 10th 2001 | ILHA DE MARAJO AND PARAGOMINAS |From the printedition

EMPTY fields, as far as the eye can see, line the highway for most of the 300km (186

miles) from Belem, eastern Amazonia's main city, to the timber-cutting town of

Paragominas. Once it was all forest, but since the 1970s most of the trees in a broad stripbeside the road have been cutnot just to extract timber, but to clear pasture for cattle-

raising, encouraged by subsidies and tax incentives. Now, though, most of the fields lie

empty and are becoming overgrown with scrub. Cows are seen so infrequently that they

might be imagined to be an endangered species.

The deforestation, mostly in the past 30 years, of 14% of the Brazilian part of Amazonia

(about a third of the Amazon rainforest, the world's biggest, is over the border in other

countries) has been as much an economic as an environmental disaster. The usable timber

would be ripped out of a stretch of forest and the rest would then be burned, because theland would often be worth more when cleared than it had been as untouched forest. This

value, however, was due partly to excessive optimism over the region's agricultural

potential, and partly to a set of economically perverse incentives provided by the

government. When farming was actually tried, it was frequently found to be unprofitable.

And many did not even bother to try. Some chopped down the trees, grabbed the grants

and then abandoned the land. Others used the farms they carved out of the jungle to

disguise (highly taxed) profits on other businesses as farming profits (which used to be tax-

free). As a result, there are now about 165,000km of abandoned land in Brazilian

Amazonia.
http://www.economist.com/printedition/2001-05-12http://www.economist.com/printedition/2001-05-12http://www.economist.com/printedition/2001-05-12http://www.economist.com/printedition/2001-05-12http://www.economist.com/printedition/2001-05-12http://www.economist.com/printedition/2001-05-12


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In recent years, the handouts and tax breaks that promoted deforestation have been

reduced. As a result, good-quality forested land can be worth as much as 40% more than

cleared land. A law passed in 1998 introduced stiff penalties for cutting trees without

permission from Ibama, Brazil's environmental-protection agency. Though deforestation

seems to have slowed since the mid-1990s (see chart), new figures due shortly will showthat last year's deforestation was little different from that in 1998 and 1999, and about 1/2%

of the forest was chopped.

Besides the cleared forest that shows up on the satellite pictures, each year a further,

unmeasured amount (at least 10,000km, according to a study carried out in 1999) has its

most valuable trees ripped out and is then abandoned. The big holes in forest cover caused

by this reckless extraction make the area drier and thus vulnerable to fires. And if the forest

does grow back, it grows differently, with fewer species, and choked by thick creepers that

Amazonians call cipo. Though most of the rainforest remains intactin contrast to the

gloomiest predictions of the 1980s, which predicted it would be almost gone by nowit

continues to be hacked away at a rate that will see it wiped out within the next 200 years.

A reduced impact

Fortunately, there are stronger grounds than ever for hoping that this will not happen.

Belatedly, in parts of Amazonia such as Paragominas, where much local forest is either

razed or damaged, timber firms are coming to see unharmed woodland as an asset that,

properly managed, can yield a good income forever. Their enthusiasm has been bolstered

by studies showing that sustainable management of forests, also known as reduced-

impact logging (RIL), can be more profitable than the reckless conventional methods of

timber extraction. One such study, conducted near Paragominas, found that RILwas 12%

cheaper than conventional logging.

InRILschemes, the area to be exploited is divided into perhaps 30 blocks, one of which

has timber extracted each year, before being left alone for 29 years. This is enough for the

forest to regenerate successfully, because in addition to rotation, the schemes take care to

leave the oldest specimens of the exploited species standing. As well as providing cover

from the tropical sun, the spreading branches of these tall trees re-seed the block with new


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specimens. In haphazard, conventional logging, such trees are usually hacked down and,

because their trunks are often hollow or damaged, then abandoneda waste of time and

money for the lumberjacks, as well as maiming the forest. RILreduces the damage further

by plotting the position of each block's valuable trees on a computer, which then works out

the shortest set of access roads that needs to be carved out to remove the felled trees.Lumberjacks are also taught ways of felling trees that avoid damaging those around them.

With planning, the forest's animals, as well as its plants, can be preserved, according to

Adalberto Verissimo of Imazon, a local environmental-research group. Amazonia's top

predator, barring man, is the jaguar. This species needs about 500km of forest to form a

viable population of 50 cats. Though a typical managed-forestry scheme is only about a

fifth of this size, by ensuring that at least corridors of forest are maintained between

neighbouring schemes, the big cats and all the other animal species below them in the food

chain can, it is hoped, survive reasonably well. It should, in other words, be possible for a

stretch of forest to provide an endless supply of tropical hardwood but still suffer a minimalimpact on its ecosystem.

The power of the consumer

Sustainable forestry of this sort has been talked about in Brazil since at least the 1980s, but

started taking off only in the mid-1990s. Across the country, including areas outside

Amazonia, there are now thought to be 10,000km of forest under sustainable

management. Foreign consumers of tropical hardwoodsfurniture makers and sellers, for

instanceare increasingly asking for timber that has been independently certified as

coming from well-runRILschemes, so that they can promise their environment-conscious

customers that they are not contributing to the destruction of the rainforest.

The Rosa Group, a big timber firm in Paragominas, started using RILin 1998, and is now

applying for certification by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international agency

that sets standards for sustainable forestry. Antonio Rosa, the firm's boss, sees certification

as key to his plan to expand its exports to Europe and North America. Foreign buyers, he

says, seem prepared to pay extra for certified timber, making it even more attractive.


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But most timber felled in Amazonia is used in Brazil, so the growth of sustainable forestry

and the decline of reckless choppingwill depend on how quickly Brazilian consumers

switch to demanding certified timber. There are signs that this is starting to happen. In

2000, 40 Brazilian firms, including Tok & Stok, a big furniture retailer, formed a buyers'

group to coordinate their purchases of certified wood, and jointly pledged to stop usinguncertified timber by 2005. By creating a growing market for certified timber, it is hoped,

supply will grow too. Imazon is conducting what it believes is the first-ever study of who

distributes and buys timber in Brazil, to suggest ways of accelerating the switch to

sustainable forestry.

Since much of the rainforest is still untouched and unclaimed, and thus public property

according to Brazil's constitution, the federal and state governments could accelerate the

move to sustainability by declaring it all a national park and then licensing timber firms to

runRILschemes in selected parts of it. A study by Mr Verissimo and others for the

environment ministry concluded that just 10% of the remaining forest, managed

sustainably, could meet all the existing demand for tropical hardwood. Much of the rest

might then be declared untouchable.

In practice, policing such a huge preservation area against illegal logging would be an

immense task. A national park that existed only on paper would not be worthy of the name.

And Ibama, whose job it would be to patrol this park, has a reputation for inefficiency and

corruption. It seems to be improving, but slowly. Timber firms in Paragominas say the local

branch that inspects them is now doing a reasonable job, but they complain of unfair

competition from surrounding regions where the agency is ineffective.

Some environmentalists say the answer is to take the job away from Ibama (whose broad

remit includes dealing with everything from oil slicks to urban noise) and create a

specialised body similar to America's Forestry Service. Raimundo Deusdara, an

environment-ministry official responsible for forest preservation, agrees that the idea is

worth considering. In the meantime, he hopes that a new environment tax, to be introduced

soon, will at least double Ibama's budget, and thus make it more effective.

Another hindrance to the effort to control illegal logging has been that, since Brazil lacks a

central land register, it has been easy to steal publicly owned forest. Only now has thefederal government launched a campaign to seize back the vast tracts of Amazonia that

have been stolen over the years. A law creating a land register has been passed, and the

government hopes the register will be compiled by 2003.

Combined with better land registration, improved satellite imaging should help to monitor,

and thus prevent, deforestation. Brazil's space-research agency, INPE, currently produces

its deforestation figures annually, but the Chinese-Brazilian CBERSsatellite it uses scans

Amazonia once every 26 days, so it is studying whether it could produce figures more

frequently. Mato Grosso state, which includes a small slice of Amazonian forest, is already

doing this on its own. A state laboratory is downloading satellite images and comparing


24/26

them with a computerised land register to spot breaches of the often-flouted national forest

code, which allows landowners in Amazonia to deforest only 20% of their property, and

even then, only with permission.

In theory, real-time detection of deforestation could be done for all of Amazonia, according

to Thelma Krug of INPE, especially after the launch, due in 2004, of a Brazilian satellitethat will provide images every two hours. Sivam, Brazil's giant radar-surveillance system for

Amazonia, is now being brought into service. Though its main role is in defence, and to

monitor the traffic in illegal drugs, it could also be used to detect loggers' activities. But

collecting and processing such masses of data would be expensive. And, of course, it

would only be worthwhile if there were an effective forest service which had enough

wardens with boats, planes and helicopters to rush them to remote areas where illegal

logging had been spotted.

Tales of the riverbankEncouraging sustainable timber extraction, and suppressing illegal logging, are only part of

what must be done to stop the rainforest being degraded and destroyed. The other big

threat is population pressure. Last year's census found that about 12m people live in

Amazonia, and that the population there is increasing by 3.7% a year. So there is a growing

need to find people ways of making a living without despoiling the forest.

This was one of the objectives of the Pilot Programme to Conserve the Brazilian Rain

Forest, set up in 1992, with the promise of $350m from the Group of Seven rich countries

hence its nickname, PPG7. All sorts of projects were created to help forest dwellers make

a living from such things as collecting fruits and plants. But, as an independent review

concluded last year, progress has been very slow. Much of the $88m spent so far has been

swallowed up by bureaucracy, and many projects have not got beyond being experiments

(though PPG7does pay for Mato Grosso's satellite-based enforcement system, which has

already resulted in the jailing of 50 landowners).

One reason for the poor results, the report concluded, is that the scheme has done little to

involve the private sector in creating forest-friendly businesses. But, here and there,

independently of the PPG7, this is beginning to happen. In the Ilha de Marajo, an island

twice the size of Wales at the mouth of the Amazon, Muana Alimentos, a food-processing

company, is working with the local authorities to persuade the growing numbers

ofribeirinhos (riverbank dwellers) to cultivate the acai palms that grow abundantly in the

swampy land around their wooden huts. The company wants to expand the supply of the

two products it sells: palm heart, the soft inner stem at the tree top, from which the fronds

sprout, which is pickled and used in salads and pies; and the pulp of the aca fruit, which is

served as a delicious sorbet on Brazil's poshest beaches.

Arriving in the settlement of Piria, Georges Schnyder, director of Muana Alimentos,

accompanies a state official on a boat trip to try to interest the ribeirinhos in taking a short

course in cultivating the trees to maximise yields of fruit and palm hearts. You could be

earning 8,000 reais (about $4,000) a year from this plot, Mr Schnyder tells Raimundo and


25/26

Rubens, a father and son who live nearby. The two smile politely but disbelievingly

incredulous that what is a small fortune by local standards might be within their grasp. The

company already owns and tends its own plots of land on the island, but Mr Schnyder says

he would rather leave the cultivation and processing to the locals and stick to being a

distributor.Like the lumberjacks in Paragominas, Mr Schnyder is seeking the FSC's certificate of

sustainability, seeing it as a way to add value to his products. Despite the PPG7's poor

progress, Mr Schnyder believes such schemes to find sustainable livings for forest dwellers

can be made to work. But, he grumbles, environmental groups could do more to help: they

seem keener on sitting in their offices writing damning reports than on setting up local

branches in forest villages to foster sustainable development by offering training and

advice.

Political pressure pointsPoliticians must change their ways too. Though many of the incentives that led to chopping

have gone, some persist. Amazonia's state governors opposed the recent decision by

Brazil's president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, to abolish Sudam, a corruption-riddled

Amazonian development agency, whose handouts have sponsored much futile forest

clearance.

The military dictators who ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985 were obsessed with populating and

developing Amazonia, convinced that otherwise another power might seize it. Such

paranoia has died down (though many Amazonians believe that America is plotting to

invade on the pretext of saving the trees) but Advance Brazil, the government's 776

billionreais economic-development plan, still assumes that Amazonia needs to be opened

up with new roads and waterways. Yet a study published by William Laurence of the

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and his colleagues, in Sciencein January,

argued that such transport links, when built near forests in the past, triggered massive

deforestation. Extrapolating from past patterns to forecast the effects of the proposed roads

and highways, the study said, at worst, only 5% of Amazonia might remain as pristine

forest in 2020, with a further 24% being lightly degraded and the rest badly damaged or

gone.

There are good reasons for hoping that things will not turn out so badly. Brazil's growing

fiscal prudence may mean not all of Advance Brazil advances. It may also lead to further

cuts in the remaining incentives to chop trees. Past deforestation may not be a guide to the

future, because it was mostly in the drier fringes of Amazonia rather than the really rainy

rainforest, where agriculture would be even harder. The government has stopped settling

landless peasants in forested areas, which until recently had been a smaller but significant

cause of deforestation. And the reaction in Brazil and around the world to

the Sciencepaper helped, by forcing the government to submit Advance Brazil to an

independent environmental-impact assessment.


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Dr Laurence agrees that things may not turn out as badly as the paper's bleakest

prognostications. But, he argues, it is not so much Advance Brazil that threatens the forest

as the thinking behind the project. It assumes that economic development depends on

extensifying, ie, extending the amount of land in economic use, rather than intensifying

the use of land already exploited. Maybe so, says Raul Jungmann, Brazil's land-reformminister, but the trouble is that extensifying is cheaper and simpler than intensifying. If

richer countries want the Amazon rainforest saved (and, he correctly points out, they are

lecturing Brazil on preserving its forests after destroying much of their own and their

colonies'), they could offer more technology and capital to intensify the return on Brazil's

existing agricultural land.

Though economic development has often been depicted as the environment's enemy, the

richer a country gets, the more its people tend to worry about environmental matters. It is

encouraging that it was mainly Brazilian greens, not foreign ones, who successfully

campaigned last year against a plot by the big landowners' lobby in Congress to weaken

the forest code, and are mobilising against a similar attempt this year.

Brazil has already lost one tropical forest: the Mata Atlantica, which used to run all the way

down the country's southern coast, but of which only 7% now remains, and that divided into

small fragments. It is too early to guarantee the survival of the bigger, more famous one in

Amazonia. Much more needs to be done to stop it being eaten away by 1/2% or so each

year. But its chances are improving, especially now it is increasingly being seen as a

valuable economic asset, something that could produce returns forever

forests in brazil

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