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Rainforest Articles - September 2003
Reuters
Hepatitis Threatens to Wipe Out Two Amazon Tribes
Tue Sep 23, 3:39 PM ET
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=753&e=8&u=/nm/20030923/sc_nm/peru_hepatitis_dc
GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations (news - web sites) said Tuesday it had launched a vaccination campaign to save two tribes in the remote Peruvian Amazon threatened with extinction by a mysterious hepatitis B outbreak.
"Local leaders warned that (the two tribes) could face extinction within 10 to 12 years, if preventive action, especially among children, is not taken," the U.N. children's fund UNICEF (news - web sites) said in a statement.
Peru's Health Minister asked UNICEF for help after 40 deaths were recorded in 2002 in one of the tribes, the Candoshi, with only 2,500 members. They suffered 145 cases in 2001 but it was not known how many people died that year.
There was no data for a neighboring tribe, the Sharpas, who were also at risk.
UNICEF aims to vaccinate all the tribes' 150 babies three times before they are one year old to try to stamp out the disease, which can cause liver failure.
The cause of the outbreak was a mystery as was the reason for the "amazingly" high mortality rate in a disease that often takes 20 to 25 years to manifest itself, said UNICEF spokesman Damien Personnaz.
The tribes live along the Pastaza and Morona rivers in an area of the Amazon basin so remote that travel from any of the 124 communities in which they live to the nearest health center can take four days.
The New York Times
Relentless Foe of the Amazon Jungle: Soybeans
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/17/international/americas/17BRAZ.html?ex=1064376000&en=14925cefe32069d8&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
UIAB�, Brazil � It takes only a trip on the busy but rutted highway that leads north from here to understand how an area of the Amazon jungle larger than New Jersey could have been razed over the course of just a year.
Where the jungle once offered shelter to parrots and deer, the land is now increasingly being cleared for soybeans, Brazil's hottest cash crop.
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Amazon Rainforest in Peru
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Woolly Monkey in Brazil
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Soy cultivation is booming, driven by a coincidence of global demand from as far off as China and the local politics of state where the new governor was known as the Soybean King even before his election last October.
Today soybeans are eating up larger and larger chunks of the Amazon, leading to a 40 percent jump in deforestation last year, to nearly 10,000 square miles. Even the pastures where cows grazed until recently are being converted, pushing a cattle herd that has become the world's largest even deeper into the agricultural frontier.
"The new factor in the equation of Amazon deforestation is clearly soybeans and the appeal they hold for agribusiness," Stephan Schwartzmann, director of the Washington-based group Environmental Defense, said after a visit to the region in July.
A dry season that was unusually parched also appears to have figured in the surge in deforestation from August 2001 to July 2002, according to the country's National Institute for Space Research. So did a certain laxness in law enforcement, traditional during an election year, and a weak currency that made farming for export especially attractive, analysts have suggested.
But experts are unanimous in warning that as soybean farming continues to spread through the adjacent southern Amazon states of Mato Grosso and Par�, the threat to the Amazon ecological system is likely to worsen in the next few years.
Environmental groups had hoped that Brazil's left-wing president, Luiz In�cio Lula da Silva, would take steps to combat deforestation. But Mr. da Silva has instead emphasized increasing agricultural production to swell exports and feed the urban poor, a position that has earned him criticism even from allies.
"The Amazon is not untouchable," Mr. da Silva said during a visit to the region in July. That view is strongly supported by Blairo Maggi, the new governor here in the state of Mato Grosso, who has repeatedly dismissed any concerns about deforestation.
Mr. Maggi, elected last year as the candidate of the Popular Socialist Party, and his family own one of Brazil's largest soy producers, transporters and exporters. The Soybean King, as the Brazilian press is fond of calling him, advocates soybeans as an engine of growth and development in the Amazon.
In fact, Mr. Maggi has called for nearly tripling the area planted with soybeans during the next decade in Mato Grosso, whose name means dense jungle. His own company, Grupo Maggi, announced early this year that it intended to double the area it has in production.
"To me, a 40 percent increase in deforestation doesn't mean anything at all, and I don't feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here," Mr. Maggi said in an interview at his office here in Cuiab�, the capital of Mato Grosso. "We're talking about an area larger than Europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about."
Economists say that the main spur to the soybean boom is the emergence of a middle class in China, much of whose newly disposable income has been spent on a richer, more varied diet. During the past decade, China has been transformed from a net exporter of soybeans to the world's largest importer in some years of whole soybeans as well as oil and meal byproducts.
At the same time, the recent outbreak of mad cow disease in Europe has led to a sharp shift away from using ground-up animal body parts in feed, further increasing demand for soy protein for cattle and pigs.
Initially, the planting was focused in savanna in the area that the Brazilian government defines as Legal Amazonia, but which is not truly forest. But as soy prices rise, producers are pushing northward into the heart of the Amazon, especially along the 1,100-mile highway called BR163, which links this city to the Amazon port of Santar�m.
With Mr. da Silva's support, state governments in the Amazon are pushing to complete the paving of highway BR163, which scientists and economists say would accelerate both deforestation and soy cultivation. Mr. Maggi said an agreement had been reached to split the paving costs among private interests and the state and federal governments.
Mr. Maggi rejected the argument advanced by his critics that there is an inherent conflict of interest between his roles as governor and businessman. "It's no secret that I want to build roads and expand agricultural production," he said. "The people voted for that, so I don't see the problem."
The soybean producers who backed Mr. Maggi have been calling for some jungle areas to be reclassified as transitional land or savanna. Brazilian law permits landowners to raze trees and brush and plant crops on 20 percent of their jungle holdings, but that figure rises to 50 percent in transitional areas and 65 percent in savannas.
During the interview, Mr. Maggi argued that the goal of more than doubling soybean production in his state over the next decade could be achieved "if we take full advantage of the deforestation ceiling of 20 percent without going beyond it." But most Brazilian and foreign experts disagree.
"It would be impossible for them to do that within the law" as currently written, said Dan Nepstad, an American scientist with the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research in Bel�m. "I suspect that is why they now want to play with the land classification scheme."
Much of last year's deforestation produced clouds of smoke so thick that some airplane flights had to be canceled. But beyond fouling the air with jungle burning, the rapid expansion of soybean production has also contributed to pollution of watersheds that feed into the Amazon, threatening isolated tribes.
Mr. Maggi says any pollution and deforestation problems are largely caused by thousands of poor families from other regions of Brazil that the federal government has settled on homesteads in remote areas of this frontier state.
Recent government research, however, indicates that only 17 percent of deforestation can be attributed to small peasant farmers trying to feed themselves.
Reuters
FEATURE-Soy farmers' dream road may hasten Amazon ruin
09.18.03, 12:44 PM ET
By Reese Ewing
http://www.forbes.com/home_europe/newswire/2003/09/18/rtr1085446.html
SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - Plans to pave a muddy road in the lower Amazon Basin should create a new soy boom in Brazil, but at a potentially high ecological price -- exposing the world's richest tropical forest to destruction.
A roughly 625-mile stretch of dirt road links Brazil's soy-rich center-west, where most of its future agricultural growth will occur, to the lower Amazon River port of Santarem, the Atlantic and important export markets.
Torrential rains, however, make BR-163 and a few smaller roads virtually impassable from March through June, barring access for the soy belt to Europe and Asia via Santarem.
Conservationists fear that work to improve the road will hasten the ruin of the lower Amazon without government action to contain illegal logging and land invasions.
But President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is under pressure to fulfill campaign promises to create jobs and boost an economy that slipped into recession in the second quarter of 2003, while keeping a lid on fiscal spending.
The government has written the paving of BR-163 into its development plan as part of a program to stimulate exports.
A consortium of companies, including oil giant Petrobras and multinational grain broker Cargill, are so convinced the road would generate growth and profit that they are discussing funding the development of BR-163 out of their own pockets.
Jose Luiz Glaser, Cargill's director of soy in Brazil, pointed out that BR-163 had been in the government's development plans for many years but no improvement of the road has been carried out.
SOY EXPORT TERMINAL
"It is a project that will happen -- but I think it will take three to six years," said Glaser, who added that the company is conducting a viability study on improving the road.
In April, Cargill opened a $20 million soy export terminal in Santarem with a capacity to move 800,000 tonnes of soy a year, most of which the company expects to come from the center-west -- via BR-163.
Soy is the country's top farm export and should account for 10 percent of trade revenues in 2003. Brazil accounts for 25 percent of the world's soy after the United States, but should overtake its northern counterpart as the top soy producer in the next five to seven years at current growth rates.
Agriculture is one of the main engines of the Brazilian economy and, in future, most of the growth in the sector will come from the underdeveloped center-west savanna and other equatorial regions in the north and northeast.
Despite advantages such as seemingly endless, cheap, arable land and abundant water, Brazil's fertile center-west savanna has neither developed sufficient highways, integrated railways nor river barge systems like the United States and Europe.
"This road will be the spine of agricultural and economic development from the center-west to the Free Trade Zone in Manaus (upriver on the Amazon)," said Dilceu Dal'Basco, state representative in Mato Grosso, Brazil's top soy state.
The port is three days closer to Brazil's main soy markets in Europe and Asia than ports in the industrialized south. Freight costs from central Mato Grosso to Rotterdam would fall 20 percent, according to Transportation Ministry data.
"Agriculture would not be the only area to benefit," said Jony Lopes, coordinator of planning at the Transportation Ministry's infrastructure department.
He said goods coming from the Free Trade Zone in Manaus would halve travel time to the main markets in the south of Brazil and cut freight costs by 30 percent.
AMAZON EXPOSED
Deforestation of the Amazon, home to up to 30 percent of the planet's animal and plant species, jumped an alarming 40 percent last year, the Environmental Ministry said recently.
Even talk of paving the road, which often has potholes big enough to swallow cars, undermines the forest's survival.
"Just the possibility of the work spurs many of the poor to move on to the land along the road with the dream of being a soy farmer," said Roberto Smeraldi, who heads a group of international experts charged with advising Brazil and rich countries that fund Amazon conservation efforts.
Historically, when Brazil has faced the complex problem of creating economic growth to alleviate poverty while respecting the environment, the Amazon has remained an afterthought to the national agenda, said Violeta Loureiro, professor of sociology at the Federal University of Para.
"Soy is just another bulk commodity export," she said. "This is our history -- exporting primary products like rubber, coffee and sugar that offer unreliable returns. Why not explore the medium term potential in the region's rich biodiversity?"
"The problem, which is not going away soon, is Brazil lacks the resources -- the fiscal budget -- to develop and protect these assets," Loureiro said. (Additional reporting by Inae Riveras)
Copyright 2003, Reuters News Service
BBC
Peru's Amazon gas project approved
By Hannah Hennessy
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3098542.stm
The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) has approved $135m in financing for Peru's controversial Camisea natural gas project.
Critics say the project is a threat to Peru's only marine reserve
In announcing its decision, the Washington-based lender said Camisea was one of the most significant capital investment programmes in Peru's history.
But critics say gas extraction will damage the area's virgin rainforest and isolated tribes, and they also oppose work at the coastal export plant in Paracas Bay, which is near Peru's only marine reserve.
The IADB had delayed its vote on the loan because of environmental concerns, but it said it welcomed a recent Peruvian Government decision to create an environmental commission to monitor Paracas Bay.
Grand project
The project hopes to bring much-needed economic growth to cash-poor and resource-rich Peru.
It plans to extract gas from the Amazon region and pipe it across the Andes to the Pacific, eventually exporting it.
With up to 13 trillion cubic feet of natural gas to extract, the work will cost $3.6bn, but critics say the real cost will be higher.
The bank's loan will help finance a transportation component of the Camisea project.
It will consist of $75m loan from the bank itself and further $60m in syndicated loans.
Protecting the Amazon in Good Fashion
From World Resources Institute
Friday, September 12, 2003
http://www.enn.com/direct/display-release.asp?objid=D1D1366D000000F76EA703EE2B41C809
The fashion world and environmental causes usually don't share much common ground. Tie-dyed t-shirts and hemp trousers rarely, if ever, grace the runways of Paris and Milan. And many of the fabrics that are the mainstay of the fashion industry - from rayon to leather - are often made with enough polluting chemicals to make the average environmentalist queasy.
But a small company in Brazil is working to bridge the gap between good fashion sense and green sensibilities - with considerable success. AmazonLife has developed and patented an environmentally friendly material that it calls "wild rubber" or "vegetal leather." The company already supplies a number of European fashion designers, which are using the faux-leather fabric to make hip clothes, backpacks, upscale furniture, and a number of other items.
"Europe is our main market," said co-founder Maria Beatriz Saldanha, a designer who has been the driving force behind the project. "We are developing relationships in France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands." Since 1998 French fashion powerhouse Hermes Sellier has used wild rubber, which is made from the sap of rubber trees in the Amazon, to make stylish hand bags. Italian furniture company Moroso is using the material to upholster its chairs.
AmazonLife's most recent foray has been to produce courier bags for the world's largest bicycle company, Giant. "We sold them 10,000 bags," said Saldanha.
Saldanha and her partner, Joao Augusto Fortes, first conceived of using natural rubber for bags and other products after opening a store to sell environmentally beneficial products in Rio de Janeiro more than a decade ago.
"Using wild rubber as a raw material helps protect the Amazon rainforest and benefits rural communities," said Luiz Ros, head of World Resources Institute's New Ventures program, which aims to link up environmentally responsible businesses with investors. "The process of tapping trees for rubber does not kill the trees, and it provides jobs for rubber tappers who gather the sap to produce natural rubber.
Rubber production has shifted from natural latex to oil-based chemicals, driving down the price of natural rubber, and throwing many tappers out of work. In the past 3 decades lower prices for rubber has pushed many people to clear forests in the Amazon for higher-priced commodities like timber and cattle.
In the 1980s rubber tappers organized to resist the destruction of the forests that had supported them and that they had tended for decades. In 1989, after a cattle rancher murdered Chico Mendes, a key leader of the rubber tappers, the Brazilian government began to take action. The country set aside "extractive reserves," protected forests where tapping and other sustainable extraction could continue.
Saldanha's search for products for her EcoMercado store led her to rubber tappers in the state of Amazonas who showed her a traditional rubber sack that they used for carrying sap and personal belongings.
"We had the idea, so we met with rubber tappers and ordered laminates from them," said Saldanha. "We then used the rubber to make a small quantity of bags, briefcases, and other products."
While the first test run of 500 bags quickly sold out, there were still a few problems that needed to be solved. "Two months later all of the bags we had sold just melted," said Saldanha with a laugh. "We hadn't figured out that the rubber needed to be vulcanized."
So they went back to the drawing board to adapt the traditional vulcanization process from the big factories into a small-scale system that the rubber tappers could perform. Saldanha patented the process.
The company now sells around 30,000 sheets worth of wild rubber a year, both as raw pieces of material and as backpacks, briefcases, handbags, and hats. The whole process supports more than 200 rubber tappers.
In 2002, AmazonLife won a competition organized by WRI's New Ventures program, which has helped more than 20 companies receive close to $6 million. AmazonLife, which was found to be a leading environmentally sustainable business, was awarded free consulting services from Booz Allen Hamilton to help develop a business plan to expand its markets.
With the consultant services, Saldanha hopes to grow her company into more countries. "Right now our priority is finding partners and investors to help us expand our international markets," said Saldanha. (WRI Features)
By Curtis Runyan ([email protected]), managing editor of WRI Features, a monthly international news features service on environment and development issues.
BBC
Amazon could dry up in 50 years
Updated 09 September 2003, 10.08
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/world/newsid_3092000/3092688.stm
The Amazon rainforest in Brazil could dry up and die out in 50 years because of global warming.
They think there could be a 'bubble' of heat created in the Pacific which would be disastrous for the environment in south America.
Thirsty forest
It's just one model being studied by experts trying to work out what might happen to our planet.
Although it's by no means certain the Amazon will die out, the experts think there's a 10-20% chance.
The rainforest needs its rainfall for its lush vegetation but the heat bubble would mean less rain.
Agence France-Presse
Six new protected areas in Amazon announced at World Parks Congress
Sep 10, 2003
http://www.terradaily.com/2003/030910111718.toc5qz5r.html
DURBAN, South Africa (AFP) Sep 10, 2003
The Brazilian state of Amazonas announced at the World Parks Congress (WPC) in South Africa Wednesday the creation of six new protected areas covering extensive portions of tropical rainforest
"We are looking at an enormous area being protected in this state. This sort of thing was unheard of 10 years ago," Russell Mittermeier, the head of US-based Conservation International (CI), which is involved in protecting the earth's environmental treasures, told reporters in the eastern port city of Durban.
The announcement was made at the fifth WPC, hosted by the World Conservation Union and attended by 2,500 experts from across the globe who are discussing how to safeguard the earth's 100,000 environmentally protected areas.
Delegates at the 10-day congress that started Monday are also considering how communities living in protected sites can benefit from these areas.
Amazonas Secretary of Sustainable Development and Environment Virgilio Viana said that with the creation of the new areas in Brazil, the sparsely populated Amazonas now had 63 million hectares (150 lillion acres) of protected areas. That is 40 percent of its surface and a greater land surface than the entire island of Madagascar.
Viana said the new reserves were rich in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, including six types of vegetation, dense forests and seasonally flooded wetlands.
The region holds 450 bird species, 180 mammals and dozens of turtle, lizard and amphibian species.
The Amazonia region accounts for more than half of the world's remaining tropical rainforests, and more than 70 percent of the tropical rainforest wilderness areas.
Its largest new protected area, the Cujubim Sustainable Development Reserve, in the southwestern part of the state, is named after the Cujubim bird, under threat by hunting and deforestation.
The reserve is also home to some 250 villagers who live in abject poverty on the banks of the Jutai River, Viana said.
"We are reorganising our infrastructure, training municipal leaders to manage sustainable development projects that will allow the executive branch to work hand-in-hand with local communities to manage and run protected areas.
"International partnerships and financing are vital to guarantee that these areas are efficiently protected and to increase the life of the communities that live inside these reserves," Viana said.
All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse.
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