The End of the Amazon?

NELSON ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty ImagesCut and run? The Amazon is disappearing as acres are cleared and burned.
Saving the rain forest is a fashionable idea in faraway developed countries in Europe and North America. Preserve this ecological treasure, the story goes, and greenhouse gas emissions will go down, countless species will be saved, and the environment will be in far better shape. Sounds simple enough.

But at the heart of the matter in Brazil — home to 60 percent of the Amazon rain forest — it is anything but straightforward. Wrapped up in the intensely political debate are not just the environmental stakes, but competing economic claims on the land, an increased demand for the food staples and ethanol raw materials grown there, and a rising dispute over land rights. Thanks to the escalation on all fronts, Brazil’s conflict between man and nature has hit fever pitch. A bill waiting on President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva’s desk will grant ownership rights to previously illegal occupiers of vast tracts of land in the Amazon if he signs it into law. Proponents claim that granting property rights will create an incentive for owners to conserve their land; critics worry that sanctioning previous land grabs and deforestation will only breed more of the same.

The question nowadays is not so much whether Brazilians can save the rain forest — we know they can — but one that is harder to pin down: Do they really want to?

Much hinges on the answer. The Amazon represents more than half of the planet’s remaining rain forests; it is the single largest and most species-rich tract on Earth. Just 1 square km of Amazon rain forest can contain more than 90,000 tons of living plants. The Amazon basin supplies 20 percent of the world’s oxygen and nearly one third of its freshwater. The forest also holds 10 percent of the carbon stores in the world’s ecosystem, meaning that when acres are destroyed, carbon dioxide is released en masse. Each year, an area of Amazon rain forest about the size of Belgium is cleared and burned. Based on current trends, the forest could shrink 40 percent during the next 20 years — with dire consequences for global warming.

If the environmental stakes are high, however, the economics of deforestation are equally profound. Twenty million Brazilians live in the Amazon region, one of the poorest parts of the country. Many of these people were encouraged to move there during Brazil’s period of military dictatorship in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Colonizing the Amazon was a strategic necessity, the junta decided, and settlers would be living evidence that Brazil both occupied and owned the land.

Ironically, ownership is not what the settlers got. Brazil has the second-highest concentration of land ownership in the world: While 47 percent of the country’s land is controlled by a mere 1 percent of the population, in Amazonia the inequality is even starker, with 82 percent of Brazil’s largest landowners holding estates. Most squatters, meanwhile, have no land rights, or at best, well-faked property deeds. So establishing who owns what is difficult; a study by the NGO Imazon suggests that only 14 percent of privately owned land has a secure title.

Poverty and lack of secure tenure render it nearly impossible for farmers to invest in modern techniques. Instead, they simply clear land by slashing and burning the forest. Loggers and farmers work in tandem, with the former taking the best wood — often illegally — and the latter sowing grass to raise cattle. The planted pasture soon becomes overrun with native grass, which is unsuitable for grazing, and so farmers move on and on. They knock down adjoining forest to start again, leaving swaths of unproductive deforested land in their wake. A study in the latest issue of Science described this phenomenon as a development boom-and-bust that has failed to bring long-term economic growth or social benefits.

Deforestation is a well-known problem in Brazil and one that President Lula promised to take on when he came to office in 2003. An estimated 20 percent of the Amazon had already been lost by then, and about 10,000 square miles had disappeared in the previous two years alone. The signs initially looked good. The president appointed a strong advocate for conservation, Marina Silva, as his minister for the environment. And by August 2007, Lula’s government euphorically announced that the rate of destruction had fallen nearly a third — a success attributed to a crackdown on illegal logging. The government has jailed 600 people for environmental crimes and also prosecuted the killers of Dorothy Stang, an American nun and environmentalist assassinated in 2005. Lula’s government increased the protection given to indigenous people’s land rights and faced down protests from some ranchers and farmers.

But Silva resigned in 2008, saying she had lost the strength to carry on. During her tenure, she clashed repeatedly with other ministers, including Lula’s chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff. She found herself on the losing side of a familiar argument about the environment and development. Her replacement, Carlos Minc, is a founder of Brazil’s Green Party, but he lacks the credentials of Silva, who grew up in an impoverished Amazon settler family. Minc is from the affluent south side of Rio de Janeiro.

The two ministers also have markedly different attitudes toward the new land bill that passed both houses of Brazil’s Congress early this month. Minc initially claimed it will bring social justice to millions and end violence in the region. It’s not a panacea but it’s an important step to end this chaos. Silva, meanwhile, has warned that it could provoke a new wave of land-grabbing and deforestation.

Both have united, however, to oppose last-minute amendments inserted by the bancada ruralista, an informal block of parliamentarians who defend the interests of ranchers and large-scale farmers. Their amendment would enable companies to benefit from the new land-rights measures by claiming territory previously occupied by native Indians, rubber tappers, and traditional forest inhabitants.

It is yet unclear how the situation will move forward. Visions of the future range from those of the environmentalists who wish to conserve the Amazon rain forest in its original state to those of people like Blairo Maggi, governor of the state of Mato Grosso and the world’s largest soybean farmer, who told the New York Times, To me, a 40 percent increase in deforestation doesn’t mean anything at all. … We’re talking about an area larger than Europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about. There have been other suggestions, too: The Economist has suggested that the Amazon’s best hope might be as a national park.

If there is one consensus in the debate over the Amazon, however, it is that Brazil will need money — perhaps lots of it — if it is to preserve its rain forest. Last year, Brazil launched a $20 billion Amazon fund to do just that. The resources could be used for everything from monitoring to curb illegal logging to developing alternative livelihoods for Amazon farmers and cattlemen. Norway has already pledged $1.1 billion over 10 years for the fund, contingent on government performance, and has called on other countries to follow. At this year’s climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, a proposal will be tabled for rich countries to offset their carbon emissions by paying poor countries to maintain forests in tropical regions.

But for these initiatives to do much good, Brazil will have to first answer one question: Is saving the rain forest something Brazilians want to do? It’s hard to tell. The country’s population has gone from being a predominantly rural one to a mostly urban one in the last few decades. City dwellers who don’t depend on the land directly for their livelihoods are probably more romantically attached to environmental preservation than previous generations. International groups are also pushing for conservation; Greenpeace, for example, has built up strong branches in Brazil. Yet, they still cannot compete with the influence of the traditional rural elites. The bancada ruralista account for between a fifth and a quarter of the Brazilian Congress and could play a pivotal role in the outcome of next year’s presidential elections. Although this over-representation is a legacy of the dictatorship era, Lula is conscious of the need to align the block behind his chosen successor, Rousseff. She comes down firmly on the development side of the debate, often to the detriment of the environment. It doesn’t bode well for those who hope to keep the Amazon rain forest intact.