Bad News for the Rain Forest

One of the hardest-hit regions was the forested land along BR-163, a highway designed to connect the fertile farm belt in central Brazil to world markets by way of the Amazon's rivers and ports. Brasília has held up BR-163 as a showpiece of its Plan to Accelerate Development, a bullish development project that promises to marry prosperity and preservation. Yet the highway is not even paved and already it has touched off a frenzy of forest clearing and land grabbing, cutting deep into the 47 million acres designated as off limits to developers. "Brazil has vastly increased the amount of protected land in the Amazon, which is great news," says Adalberto Veríssimo, an Imazon scientist. "The problem is that they haven't been able to control it. The Brazilian government still can't seem to make its presence felt in the Amazon basin."

Yet even the best policing in the world might not help. "If you look at the environmental safeguards for each of these projects, they seem impressive," says Tim Killeen, a biologist and tropical forest scholar with Conservation International. "But you can't consider them in isolation. The dams generate cheap energy for industry, which draws job seekers, who need to be housed and fed, which means building and farms. It's a perfect environmental storm."
 
No one expects Brazil or any of the other seven Amazon nations to wall off the rain forest, and sacrificing part of the forest to plumb its cache of minerals and timber, and the energy wealth stored under the 10-story canopy, seems inevitable. But too often neither development nor conservation has been the result of the grandest development drives in the Amazon. Three decades into Brazil's aggressive push into the Western Hemisphere's last frontier, per capita income in the Amazon region is still 40 percent below the national average, and four of five people are relegated to makeshift jobs in the informal economy, according to Imazon.

What has changed in the Amazon is that thanks to the latest satellite technology the government can now see in the minutest detail what goes on in one of the world's unruliest wildernesses. But so can the rest of the world. Unless the authorities can stem the destruction, not even the greenest diplomacy is likely to help.

© 2007