ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

It was Helmut Kohl’s idea. In the summer of 1990, the German chancellor
proposed to his fellow Western leaders at a Group of Seven summit in Houston
a plan to save the world’s rainforests. They should start, he said, with
the Brazilian Amazon.

Other leaders, such as George Bush and Margaret Thatcher, were taken
aback, but could hardly veto the idea at a time when they publicly shared
the worldwide concern about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. ‘It
was sprung on us,’ remembers one of the senior European civil servants.
‘Kohl wanted to be seen to be green. But the project’s scope and funding
were not discussed at the summit, and there had been no prior discussion
with the Brazilian government.’

The newly elected Brazilian president Fernando Collor de Mello ignored
local governments within Brazilian rainforest states – such as Par and Amazonia,
who claimed that the international community wanted to take control of the
Amazon – and began talks with officials from the World Bank and the European
Community to flesh out the grand vision, known as the Pilot Project for
the Brazilian Amazon.

Nobody thought much of Brazil’s shopping list of projects, which carried
a price tag of $1.5 billion. ‘The Brazilians treated the project as a blank
cheque. They chucked everything into the pot,’ said one World Bank official
involved. Some ideas were blatantly destructive of forests. Conservation
proposals were uncosted and uncoordinated with development strategies. So
last summer, with London and Washington still unwilling to match German
offers to fund the project, the World Bank effectively grabbed the reins.
It drew up its own proposals, which involve a tight hand on the purse strings,
through a rainforest trust to be set up under the umbrella of the new Global
Environment Facility – the bank’s response to the criticism that many of
its development projects have been environmentally destructive. The plan
was agreed by the Western donors and Brazil at a meeting in Geneva in early
December (see This Week, 21/28 December 1991). Cash commitments reached
$250 million, the amount the bank said it needed to start the project.

The project is a pioneering attempt to marry Brazil’s desire for economic
development with an international desire to save large parts of the world’s
largest rainforest, for their biological wealth and presumed role in maintaining
the world’s weather. But it is also a model for saving other forests and
other crucial ecosystems around the planet. As Roberto Smeraldi from Friends
of the Earth International and author of a critique of the programme, explains:
‘Months before the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio, this is a critical test of
the political will of governments to solve global environmental problems.’

But how do you stop the destruction of a rainforest as large as Western
Europe? The programme has four aims.

The first is to ‘conserve biodiversity and indigenous areas’, where
tribal groups still live largely in harmony with nature. This will be done
by creating and policing national parks and reserves that could eventually
cover more than a quarter of the forested region. Demarcation of protected
land will take up around a quarter of project funds.

Another aim is to ‘consolidate environmental policy changes and strengthen
implementing institutions’. This will include economic and ecological zoning
of the forests.

The programme should also ‘develop scientific knowledge and applied
technologies for sustainable development’. This will include everything
from researching rainforest ecosystems to investigating Western markets
for fruits, nuts and other forest products and developing methods of logging
forests without destroying them.

Finally the scheme should ‘build support for environmentally benign
development’, which could mean anything.

There has never been anything inevitable about the rate of destruction
of the Amazon rainforest. Thirty years of invasion, which culminated in
the orgy of forest burning by mostly poor colonists in the late 1980s, followed
a deliberate government policy, devised by military rulers in the early
1960s. This encouraged migration into the Amazon by building roads and offering
generous tax and other incentives to both industrialists and land speculators.
Few spoke then of saving the rainforest; most wanted to ‘open up the jungle’
with axe and fire.

In its report presented to the meeting in Geneva in December, the World
Bank said: ‘An expanding Amazonian road network ensured the availability
of abundant, cheap land which in turn eroded the potential profitability
of sustainable agriculture and silviculture.’ Poor soils completed the carnage.
As the natural fertility of their soils declined, farmers simply moved on.
Why bother to buy fertiliser when you can simply burn the forest to clear
land down the road and start again?

The World Bank helped to fund the process by backing, among other things,
the Polonoroeste project in the 1980s, which paved Highway 364 in Rondonia,
a state in Western Brazil. This encouraged migrants and helped them to market
their produce. In the past decade, the rush to make money from the Amazon
basin has destroyed 12 per cent of the forest, according to satellite images.

The driving forces of road building, tax concessions and the push to
migrate are largely gone today because the bank burned its fingers and the
Brazilian government ran out of cash and credit. The bank now sees the time
as ‘propitious’ for conservation. It hopes that the forces of law, nature
conservation and rational planning can now penetrate the jungle highways
as freely as outlaw colonists. The danger is that, after being kick-started
by government, the ‘opening up’ of the Amazon may be unstoppable.

Brazil already has the embryonic structure to police the Amazon – the
conservation bodies, the maps of intended national parks, the environmental
laws, the research centres. What it lacks, says the bank, is cash and expertise
to do the job. A key phrase in the project plans is ‘institutional strengthening’
for bodies such as IBAMA, the main national environmental agency, and FUNAI,
which oversees local Indian affairs.

The first and most obvious job will be to beef up national parks. The
World Bank wants to invest in five national parks (see map) based in Amazonia,
Jau, Chapada dos Guimaraes, Guapore and Jari Ecological Station within the
first six months of the project. These, it says, need urgent protection
from ‘squatters, loggers and miners’. Within three years, 15 such parks
would receive extra protection, through more and better trained park rangers,
better demarcation of boundaries and so on.

Most of the rainforest is inhabited by Brazilian Indians and the many
generations of colonists who have arrived here over the past century. (There
is a sizeable community of Japanese farmers, for instance.) Many of the
forest dwellers still live in the forest without destroying it. So a second
task is to bolster these uses, or as the bank puts it: ‘. . . as an alternative
to destructive activities such as cattle ranching, logging or colonisation
. . . to develop appropriate sustainable economic and ecological management
models’. In this ungainly statement probably lies the key to success or
failure of the entire project.

The most publicised of these management models are the new extractive
reserves – the legacy of the rubber tappers’ leader Chico Mendes, who was
assassinated at his home in the far western state of Acre in 1989. There
are so far four such reserves, set up by the government in the past two
years as stretches of forest communally owned by communities of rubber tappers
and Brazil nut growers. Most of these people, like the Mendes family, moved
into the forests early this century as employees of large landowners. The
reserves were established, as the bank puts it, to help forest dwellers
to ‘defend their homes and resource base against often violent encroachment’
from cattle ranchers and others. The largest, the Chico Mendes Extractive
Reserve, covers almost a million hectares, half the size of Wales.

The Amazon project calls for the extension of the decrees establishing
the four pioneer reserves, each of which lapses this year, and the creation
of 20 more in the next three years. But the bank warns: ‘. . . It is a mistake
to think of extractive reserves as a panacea . . . The gatherers are currently
producing only a marginal income.’ The communities and their outside supporters
want a system of guaranteed prices for products of extractive reserves.
But the bank instead calls for research into ways of boosting incomes. That
means looking for new jungle products such as medicinal plants and natural
vegetable oils – balms for the Amazon economy as well as the customers of
Body Shops round the world.

It also means investing in small factories to process produce in the
forests and activities ranging from ‘eco-tourism’ to alligator ranches and
heart-of-palm plantations. The bank says that it wants to concentrate on
finding money-making schemes that can be used throughout the Amazon.

Currently, extractive reserves meet the bank’s test of ecological but
not of economic sustainability. ‘These products and technologies emerged
in the context of small-scale, low-density, non-market societies and often
require adaptation to dynamic market economies.’ The question is: can this
be done without bringing a new era of destruction in the forests?

Many, including Western environmentalists, believe that the involvement
of the World Bank and ‘dynamic market economies’ could be the kiss of death
for extractive reserves. A report by Friends of the Earth International
last summer warned of the risks that middle men could gain control of rubber
produced on commercialised extractive reserves. The bank itself admits that
‘there is some question as to whether erecting financial and institutional
and organisational machinery, such as proposed here, might erode the independence
and self-sufficiency of this unique movement . . . ‘

Also living in the jungle are the indigenous Brazilian Indian communities.
The largest community, the Yanomami, was recently offered its own reservation
by President Collor de Mello after a 21-year struggle (see This Week, 30
November 1991). In many places, notes the bank, ‘the indigenous reservations
tend to be better protected from environmental degradation than those under
the protection of the government environmental agencies’. By 1994, according
to the current Brazilian constitution, all reservations should be bounded
by concrete markers at 200-metre intervals round their borders. To date,
however, there has been little or no progress due to a lack of resources.
The World Bank wants to change this by funding the demarcation of all reserves,
from the fishing islands along the Rio Negro in the west to the lands of
the Poturu in Para state. It is only five years since the Poturu were first
contacted by the New Tribes Missionaries, yet their lands are now threatened
with invasion.

One of the most controversial features of the pilot project is the rehabilitation
of abandoned former forest land – the huge stretches of former mines and
ranches and land left for dead by timber companies and cattle ranchers.
‘Rehabilitation is often thought of as restoring an area of land to its
original conditions,’ says the bank’s report. ‘However, this solution is
rarely feasible.’ Often, it says, rehabilitation will mean simply restoring
a cover of vegetation to eroding soils. And here is where alarm bells begin
to ring.

The Brazilian government wants to see ‘rehabilitation’ money put into
planting former natural forest with eucalyptus trees. Through successive
drafts of the project, Brazil has pushed for the inclusion of a large eucalyptus
plantation on land in the Grand Carajas region. This huge area, roughly
a tenth of the entire Amazon basin, has been largely stripped in recent
years to provide charcoal production and pulpwood for cellulose manufacture.

Brazil says that the plantations will provide an alternative to chopping
down natural forest, but environmentalists say they will encourage industry
and bring pollution and more colonists in their wake. Last summer, Brazil
was persuaded by Western governments to withdraw the proposal – at least
as a scheme deserving the support of a conservation project. But by December
it had quietly reappeared. While environmentalists were boasting of the
final ‘removal of the Carajas plantations scheme’, the small print of the
bank report noted that ‘rehabilitation of degraded areas in the Carajas
region’ was ‘being considered by the government of Brazil for inclusion
in the pilot programme’. Civil servants close to the negotiations said that
the plantation project was ‘back in’.

Perhaps the test for the project will be in how the detailed economic
and ecological zoning of the Amazon is carried out. Much of the biological
diversity resides in a few core areas. Likewise the heartlands of the Brazilian
Indians and other identifiable groups, in theory at least, may cover only
a quarter of the region. The key question is what happens to the rest of
the forest.

Will it be handed over to the miners and cattle ranchers or set aside
for the new extractive reserves and other benign uses? One World Bank adviser,
Dennis Mahare, argues that the majority of the land should be held ‘in perpetuity
as forest reserves, closed to all development or as sites for environmentally
benign activities such as rubber tapping and Brazil nut gathering, tourism
or sustained-yield logging.’ But most environmentalists are profoundly pessimistic.
The radical World Rainforest Movement warns that once the areas zoned for
industry and agriculture are exhausted, ‘it is almost inevitable that ‘protected
areas’ will be encroached upon’. It adds that zoning does nothing to address
the social and political forces that lie behind forest destruction. Indeed
it is a policy that is intended to allow the ‘growth-oriented development
programmes that are at the root of deforestation to continue’.

For these radicals the World Bank’s vision of environmentally benign
economic development of the Amazon is a recipe for further destruction.
‘So long as economic growth remains the object of our economic activities,
the tropical forests will always be under the axe.’

Despite these doubts, a successful beginning to the project will boost
support for the UN Earth Summit. Negotiations in advance of the summit are
currently mired in disputes between rich nations – who want certain global
resources such as rainforests protected – and the poor nations, who want
economic development. The poor nations lay global troubles at the door of
the rich, and insist that if they want to mitigate the damage they have
done by, for instance, preserving rainforests they must stand the bill.

Much hangs on the success of the collaboration between the Group of
Seven governments and Brazil in the Amazon rainforest. It will, as the bank
says, ‘provide an important example of international cooperation in support
of a global objective that will benefit the discussions taking place in
the negotiations of conventions on biodiversity and climate change’ – not
to mention a proposed global agreement on saving rainforests.

In the case of the Amazon rainforest, the rich countries have conceded
that the rest of the world has an interest and a duty to invest in saving
it. As the bank report notes: ‘Preservation of biodiversity, reduction in
carbon emissions and new knowledge about the sustainable activities in tropical
rainforests represent benefits (from the pilot programme) that are global
in scope and justify financial transfers from the international community
to Brazil.’ Come Rio in June, the rest of the world may argue that what
goes for Brazil should go for them, too.

PRACTICAL TARGETS FOR SPENDING

Science, says the World Bank, is the key to saving the Amazon rainforest.
It intends to spend more than half of the proposed $350 million budget
for its pilot programme on research and monitoring in the rainforest. Most
of the money will go to two research centres – the National Institute of
Amazon Studies at Manaus, the largest city in the forest, and the Goeldi
Museum at Belem, on the coast.

‘Conditions in these well-established centres have recently deteriorated
dramatically,’ says the bank, ‘due to a generalised lack of funds.’ ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s
have no photocopiers, classes at Goeldi are held in a herbarium thick with
pesticide fumes, zoological specimens are kept in mayonnaise jars with rusting
tops and plant specimens rot in old wooden containers. Subscriptions to
most journals have lapsed, computers are rare, phone lines must be booked
days in advance, salaries for senior staff have been halved and there are
300 unfilled vacancies.

Over the next two years, the bank wants to spend $130 million on these
two centres, topping up salaries, creating endowed chairs to attract top
scientists, installing equipment and setting up training programmes. It
will be the largest single tranche of cash in the early years of the project.

More money is earmarked for specific research projects. Ecologists will
delve into the myriad ecosystems of the jungle and research ways to reclaim
degraded land; anthropologists will investigate how to better the lot of
Brazilian Indians without destroying their way of life; economists aim to
improve the economic productivity of the forests.

Other teams will measure the exchange of heat, carbon dioxide and water
between the forest canopy and the air above. These data will help scientists
to assess whether the loss of the forest will exacerbate the greenhouse
effect, heat up the tropics or cause drought in countries far away. Indeed,
the whole rationale for funding such studies out of international coffers
is that their results are likely to be of global, rather than just local,
relevance.

Officials at Britain’s Overseas Development Administration anticipate
a strong contribution from British science that will build on the Memorandum
of Understanding signed in 1989 between the Brazilian government and the
then minister for overseas development, Chris Patten. So far, British projects
in the Amazon have concentrated on climate research and on ecological studies
of the flooded forest of Combu Island near Belem.

New projects will investigate the economic value of aromatic forest
plants as medicines and food flavouring and, more controversially, the feasibility
of sustainable logging in the Tapajos forest in Para state. Most tropical
ecologists remain sceptical about sustainable timber extraction, which,
as the World Bank notes in its report, is ‘still an unproven concept’.

The British are keen to try to harness local expertise as much in the
fields and forests of the Amazon as in the laboratories, says Patten’s successor,
Lynda Chalker. She told the Royal Geographical Society last May: ‘We must
build on the considerable knowledge that local communities have of their
environment – after all, they have been managing them for a long time.’

Chalker spoke of a farmer she met near Belem who ‘had a remarkable range
of skills ranging from the construction of shrimp traps from palm fronds
to the harvesting and processing of the fruits of the acai palms. We must
not lose this knowledge but build on it.’

But will the current World Bank plan, with its emphasis on outside scientists
and on funding research into ‘replicable’ projects, tap this local expertise?
One way to ensure at least some involvement of the local communities would
be to help fund a research centre and university course set up by the Union
of Indian Nations at the Catholic University in Goias, Mato Grosso. The
aim of the centre, says the union’s national coordinator Ailton Krenak,
is to assemble in written form the accumulated expertise in biology and
native law of the Indian communities throughout the forests and surrounding
grasslands, and to find the elements of Western technology that can help
them. They want, for instance, to improve their orchards and animal husbandry
and to develop simple food processing plants – for cracking nut shells,
peeling fruit, extracting seeds and mil-ling grain.

Some Western voluntary groups are keen to back such small-scale local
projects. In Britain, the Gaia Foundation has funded the Jaburu regeneration
project, the first project of the Indian Research Centre. Through this,
the Xavante people hope to combine economic development and ecological regeneration
on land to which they returned after the departure of loggers and cattle
ranchers, who had cleared the timber and exhausted the soils in the mid-1980s.
The project involves breeding, in captivity, wild animals such as pigs,
and harvesting and processing fruits, using equipment supplied by the Indian
Research Centre.

The starting point for their research is not Western technology or expertise,
but the local shaman (medicine man). As the Gaia Foundation puts it, the
shaman ‘guided the meetings with this dreams . . . this main concern was
that his people were losing touch with the laws of the forest and starting
to think like the white man – believing that development means destroying
the forest for cash.’ One of the outstanding questions for the World Bank
and the European Community is whether such projects, conceived and executed
by local people using their own beliefs and knowledge, can find a place
within the Amazon project.

It is a long way from a Group of Seven Summit to a shaman’s hut in the
rain-forest – but it may be the only route to saving the rainforests.