Brazil opens parts of the Amazon forest to logging

On March 2, 2006 Brazil's president approved a measure that offered huge chunks of the Amazon jungle to timber companies that were willing to comply with tough restrictions. The goal was to preserve the world's largest rain forest.

The new law lets the government tender 40-year contracts that allow the highest bidder to log trees in accordance with a sustainable development plan.

About 32 million acres (13 million hectares), which is roughly three percent of the Amazon rainforest, will be available for foresting to private Brazilian companies. Logging is not allowed in the nature reserves and territories marked for the local Indians.

The goal is to curtail the renegade lumber companies that don't comply by the rules.

" "We are authorizing sustainable development, that is the opposite of deforestation," Tasso Azevedo, forestry undersecretary at the Environment Ministry, told Reuters.

Only five or six trees can be harvested over 10 years in an areas the size of a football field, he said.

Lula's advisers said the law's controls, frequent inspections, and an end to legal uncertainty over land rights would reduce deforestation. The measure calls for the demarcation of public forests and should make private lands claims on them impossible.

Speculators have used legal loopholes and graft to illegally buy and resell land to timber companies, cattle ranchers or farmers.

So far, the administration's policies have produced mixed results, including the second-highest deforestation rate ever in 2004, as well as rising land-related violence in the region."

Several environmental groups have praise the law, and hope the both parties interests can be met.

Tags: brazil , amazon , forest , rainforest , logging