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

Two new National Parks created in the Amazon Rainforest

In Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has just created two new national parks in the Amazon rain forest. Additionally he has expanded another park to protect an environmentally sensitive region where the government has plans for a major highway project. The decree puts 3.7 million acres of rainforest under protection of development.

"The protected land lies in an area where President Silva declared a logging moratorium after the killing last year of Dorothy Stang, an American nun and environmental defender.

Stang, who spent the last 23 years of her life defending poor communities against the loggers and land grabbers who abound in the Amazon, was killed in a land dispute with a local rancher on Feb. 12, 2005.

Her killing sparked an international uproar, and within days the government declared the creation of two national parks and two reserves areas where people can live as long as they do not damage the forest, along with the logging moratorium along the BR-163.

Two gunmen have been convicted for Stang's killing and two ranchers are awaiting trial on charges of ordering her death."

Environmentalist weren't as excited about the anouncement.

""The moratorium proved to be effective because it gave the state power to act against those who thought they could illegally seize public lands," said Claudio Maretti, coordinator of protected areas for the World Wide Fund for Nature in Brazil. "But the government should be quicker to declare protected areas in other regions." "

After the decree the total area in the Amazon under some form of federal protection is now about 113 million acres.

The Brazilian Amazon spreads over 1.6 million square miles, about the size of western Europe. Experts proclaim that as much as 20 percent of the forest has been destroyed by farming, logging and development. They estimate that last year the forest lost a near-record 10,000 square miles.

Tags: amazon, rainforest, brazil, amazon rain forest, environment