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In the late 1990s, Antonio Paes de Carvalho, a Brazilian physician, and Jorge Raimundo, an attorney, had a wild idea: why not take on the global pharmaceutical industry? Although the two didn't have the money and machines of Big Pharma, they had the Amazon's diversity to draw on--and after all, most of the world's medicine originates from wild plants. So, Carvalho and Raimundo started a business, Extracta, and went "bioprospecting." In 178 expeditions to the Atlantic and Amazon rain forests, they amassed the biggest "library" of medicinal flora in Latin America: 4,621 medicinal plants, among them, perhaps, drugs to fight staph, diabetes, emphysema and other scourges. In no time, Extracta had attracted $3.5 million in venture capital. If the founders could fashion one active plant molecule into a pill or potion, they stood to gain millions in royalties.
That never happened. After four years of battling the Genetic Patrimony Management Council, which controls plant research, and Brazil's intellectual-property law, which bans patents of anything discovered in the wild, work at Extracta has largely halted. Only five of the original 60 scientists and lab assistants remain. The investors are gone. Thousands of flasks of plant extracts are in the deep freeze. "It breaks my heart to see this," says Carvalho. "We've been stalemated."
The loss isn't just Extracta's. Bioprospecting was supposed to help reap the riches of the rain forest without razing it. The problem, from a public-relations point of view, is that bioprospecting falls under the category of "development." No one opposes the idea of development, but in the Amazon it is still mostly taboo. Brazil, pressed to the wall by environmentalists, has thrown its weight behind halting the jungle's destruction--with money, police, sophisticated satellite technology and a thicket of conservation laws. None of this has worked. The Amazon is still a free-for-all. Last year, 23,000 square kilometers--an area nearly the size of Sicily--fell to the logger's ax or the clear-cutter's match.
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For decades, environmentalists and developers have been engaged in a dialogue of the deaf. On one side of the barricades are the "developmentalists," to whom the world's largest remaining rain forest is a bump in the road to progress. For decades they had the upper hand, taking soft loans and official blessings and laying the forest low to make way for cattle or cash crops. Now the tide has shifted in favor of the environmentalists. They embrace Amazonia as a cause celebre, a vital and endangered ecosystem, far more precious standing than drawn and quartered into so many plantations, pastures and strip mines. Policymakers want it both ways, insisting that the wilderness can be spared and exploited at the same time. "It's ridiculous," says environmental economist Herman Daly, "to urge the preservation of biodiversity without being willing to halt the economic growth that requires human takeover of places in the sun occupied by other species." The real scandal of the Amazon is not that nature is disappearing--that's only to be expected in a country as restless and ambitious as Brazil--it's that the wealth of this storied wilderness is being squandered.
A growing number of scholars now agree that to save the Amazon there must be a sensible plan to develop it. A realistic plan would have to start by recognizing that the rain forest is not a green cathedral but a booming frontier, and that the only hope of preserving what's left of the jungle depends on finding a way for the 20 million people who live there to make a living. To do so, Brazil must make good on an old promise: to discover which part of the complex rain-forest basin would be suited for human enterprise--farming, herding, mining, logging or ecotourism--and which part would be best left alone. None of this can happen, however, without first clearing the conceit and red tape that stifles legitimate development, and then letting the rain-forest scientists do their job. "We finally have the possibility of developing a viable forest-based economy," says Adalberto Verissimo, a rain-forest ecologist at Imazon, an Amazonian think tank. "If we don't get this straightened out now, there may be no way to keep the Amazon from falling into the hands of outlaws and predators."
For decades now, the Amazon's settlers have been trapped as though on a wheel of ruin. Ranchers are the vanguard, buying up sprawling tracts of virgin forest, clear-cutting and burning away the debris in epic fires. In two or three years the shadeless pastures wither under the punishing tropical sun into weedy patches, forcing the ranchers to abandon their fields and cut their way deeper into the Amazon. They are followed by settlers, who arrive with little more than a plot of government land and a Bible. Those who survive malaria must still scratch a living out of niggardly soil and then somehow get their goods to market. Often they sell out to large farmers, who sow the abandoned fields and pastures, pour on fertilizer and herbicides, and hope for the best. Since the lush rain forest draws its nourishment not from the soil but from the trees--falling leaves and branches, roots that rot into mulch--the farmers' fields give out after a few harvests. Timber companies often buy them out, or else pillage untended woods when no one is watching. The details vary from region to region, but not the outcome.
Even the most zealous green groups now admit there is little hope of nurturing the Amazon without aiding its struggling residents. Simply banning them from spreading their pastures or cutting forests is usually futile. Amazonia now exports beef to the rest of Brazil. Most ranchers keep on cutting forest not out of avarice but because they have no alternative.
Technology could help make the cattle ranchers more productive and encourage them to stay in one place. At the Acre branch of Embrapa, an official agricultural research center in western Amazonia, this is already happening. Judson Valentim, a pasture expert at Embrapa Acre, has taught hundreds of ranchers how to restore degraded pastures and triple the number of cows per hectare without toppling any more trees. He does this by using artificial insemination to boost the productivity of the herds, rotating them to avoid overgrazing, and swapping traditional brachiaria grass, which turns into a bug-infested stubble in the tropics, with kudzu or tropical peanut, which thrives and keeps the soil moist. Spreading the word might help rescue the Amazon's 20 million hectares (half the size of Denmark) of abandoned pastures. Yet official support for such technology ($154,000 a year) is a fraction of what Brasilia spends on policing the Amazon.
Helping loggers do their jobs with the latest forestry methods might also help make the forests more productive. Right now, because forested land is so cheap and policing so haphazard, clandestine loggers pillage as they please and then move on to the next stand of timber. Verissimo, of Imazon, argues this is one reason 70 percent of timber they cut goes to waste--a loss of $500 million a year. More-modern foresters make an inventory of valuable timber, divide their woods into strips, harvest a few trees of each species at a time and then move on to the next strip. If small holders used such methods, they might help the rain forest to bounce back in 25 to 30 years. "We want to move forestry from the environmental agenda to the development agenda," says Tasso Azevedo, forestry secretary for the Environment Ministry.
That won't happen unless Brazil overhauls its antiquated forestry and land-tenure laws. In theory, the government permits managed logging in its national forests. In practice, this never happens, because the forestry code restricts logging contracts to five years--even though it takes up to 30 years for trees to regenerate. That's why investors are plowing money into forestry projects everywhere in Latin America but Brazil. An even bigger problem is the fragile system of land tenure in the Amazon. Although the government owns three quarters of the Amazon Basin, it controls only a fraction of it. This is an open invitation to land-grabbers, who often settle their scores in blood. (One of the latest victims was Dorothy Stang, an American missionary murdered by gunmen in February.) "No one with good sense wants to invest in a battleground," says Verissimo.
The government has taken some steps in the right direction. It has asked Congress to set aside 13 million hectares for managed logging, nearly 10 times the current amount. But cutting the most valuable timber without disturbing the jungle's intricate mosaic of tree species is still a challenge. And no one knows how many times a single hectare can be harvested. "If managed forestry is so good, where is the second and third generation of timber?" asks Niro Higuchi, a forestry expert at the Institute of Amazon Studies. "We don't have any."
While the jury may be out on forestry, aiding struggling Amazon pioneers to become more efficient would surely relieve some pressure on the forests. Agronomists and geneticists have re-engineered temperate-zone crops for the tropics: through selective breeding, scientists have altered the growing cycle of soybeans, steeling them to sauna-like weather and inducing the beans to ripen despite the reduced daylight hours of the tropics. Yet bioprospecting, perhaps the most promising wealth-creating Amazon science, is stymied by Brazilian law, which requires government vetting of anyone studying any plant. Such requests languish in Brasilia for months or years, giving scientists a Hobson's choice. "Either you give up your research or work clandestinely," says Ruy Valka Avles, head of the herbarium at Rio de Janeiro's National Museum.
Showing that logging, herding and even bioprospecting can be profitable, or that modern technology can spirit even spent soils back to life, may ultimately put more pressure on the rain forest, not less. In the end, however, there may be little choice. The question is no longer how to save the rain forest from frontier civilization, but what kind of frontier the Amazon will be.
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