Source: Tonic
Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has only four fingers on his left hand. Legend has it he was 19 when doctors told him he was too poor to save his left pinky after he smashed it in a printing press. That injustice turned the former factory worker into an advocate for workers’ rights and the rest is history. Had Lula been as wired on Guaraná and açai beverages as I was during tonight’s dinner with the Minister of Energy and Mines, he probably would have been paying better attention on the assembly line. Perhaps he wouldn’t be president today.This week’s jam-packed schedule has demanded I do what I can to stay alert. Four Brazilian coffees, each the size (and reportedly strength) of an espresso shot couldn’t keep me from dozing Wednesday morning during a chartered low-altitude flyover of the Tapajós National Forest. I glanced out the window at the geometry of a broken forest below, where imperfect squares had been cut into the natural cover to clear room for soy or pasture. Then things got blurry and before I knew it we were back on the tarmac.
On the eastern border of remote Amazonas and almost three-times the size of California, the state of Pará is ground zero for logging activity in Brazil’s rainforest. In June, 39 square kilometers of jungle was illegally destroyed in Pará, three-times as much as Mato Grosso, the second most deforested state during that same period, according to the Brazilian Environment Institute (IBAMA).
Cattle ranching is the number one cause, contributing to nearly half of all deforestation in the Amazon, though soybean farming isn’t too far behind. Cargill, the largest private company in the US and one of the world’s biggest soy suppliers, operates a processing plant and port facility where the Amazon and Tapajós rivers meet in Santarém (below, left). The gangly projection of steel girders jutting from the port city's otherwise romantic boardwalk isn’t an unfinished bridge. It is Cargill’s stamp on the landscape, and probably one of its least enduring.
When it opened in 2003 without first submitting an environmental impact report, Greenpeace cried foul, claiming the plant caused illegal deforestation. McDonalds stopped feeding its chickens with rainforest soy because of the outcry and Brazil enacted legislation making it illegal to grow soy on deforested land. But as Luciano Evaristo, Director of Environmental Surveillance at IBAMA, made clear during a meeting at IBAMA headquarters in Brasilia on Thursday, it’s impossible to regulate an area larger than 3 million square miles (nearly 20 Californias) with just 6 IBAMA helicopters and 700-800 enforcers on the ground. Evaristo tells me he’s always open to helicopter donations.Cargill’s plant in Santarém still operates today. A headline with the word “Cargill” was splashed across the front page of local newspapers left splayed beneath the empty seats at Santarém’s tiny airport. I don’t know what the story is this time, but it’s related, at least in some distant degree, to Brazil’s projected soybean output of a record 68.7 million tons in 2010, a considerable jump from last year’s 57.2 million tons.
Deforestation, like most things evil, reveals itself as not so evil when you get past the headlines and into the meat of the story. Maybe I was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome on Monday as I became intrigued with drilling for oil in the Amazon at Petrobras’ remote Urucu oil field (more on that at a later time). Maybe again I was falling under the spell of my captors on Wednesday as I visited Ambé, a small community built of corrugated roofs just a paved hour away from the Santarém airport. Ambé isn’t the nucleus of an active logging zone, I was led to believe. It’s a sustainable forest management project.Under the spell of the Brasileiro lumberjacks in hardhats and snake-bite shin guards, you have to agree that Ambé is better than the alternative. Putting representatives from 24 forest communities under one roof (or several, corrugated roofs) for weeks at a time (No relations with the opposite sex. No music after 22:30, read a sign affixed outside the co-op’s kitchen), Ambé has helped preserve 30,000 hectares of primary growth rainforest and improved living standards for hundreds of families. Before IBAMA and international donors provided the seed money to start the cooperative, local families earned on average 4,800 reais (about $2,700 USD). Today, those families earn more than twice that. In just 2009, Ambé made more than $2 million auctioning responsible lumber to local logging companies that may have otherwise pried the trees from the forest in a much more harmful way.
Ambé only takes old trees, trees that no longer effectively seed an area or aren’t needed to do so. They cull species like Carapanaúba, Jatobá, Brazilwood, and they do so responsibly. Ambé foresters ascend to the canopy and unwind the vines connecting targeted trees to their neighbors, freeing them from trees whose branches could be striped from their trunks when cut trees come crashing down. Co-op loggers cut trees as close to the root as possible and fell them so they don’t destroy the surrounding forest. According to a PowerPoint presentation given by Jeremias Batista Dantas, the 23-year-old leader of the lumberjacks, Ambé never thins an area beyond the limits of age old notions of sustainability.The strategy appears to be working. Similar projects that are both environmentally and economically responsible, if not outright sustainable — I’ve learned to be careful using the word — are popping up all over the Amazon. After we skidded to a halt at the Santarem airport, passing dirt-stained passenger jets from the ‘70s permanently hangared in the foliage off the runway, the IBAMA employee accompanying us unbuckled his seatbelt and mentioned that he hadn’t noticed any deforestation while flying over the area managed by Ambé. He said the Tapajós National Forest is an example of how to do things right in a state where there’s plenty going wrong. At least that’s what I think he said.