The Amazon rainforest

Cutting down on cutting down

How Brazil became the world leader in reducing environmental degradation

Jun 7th 2014 | From the print edition

IN THE 1990s, when an area of Brazilian rainforest the size of Belgium was felled every
year, Brazil was the worlds environmental villain and the Amazonian jungle the image of
everything that was going wrong in green places. Now, the Amazon ought to be the image
of what is going right. Government figures show that deforestation fell by 70% in the
Brazilian Amazon region during the past decade, from a ten-year average of 19,500
km2 (7,500 square miles) per year in 2005 to 5,800 km2 in 2013. If clearances had
continued at their rate in 2005, an extra 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would have
been put into the atmosphere. That is an amount equal to a years emissions from the
European Union. Arguably, then, Brazil is now the world leader in tackling climate change.
But how did it break the vicious cycle in whichit was widely expectedfarmers and cattle
ranchers (the main culprits in the Amazon) would make so much money from clearing the
forest that they would go on cutting down trees until there were none left? After all, most
other rainforest countries, such as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
have failed to stop the chainsaws. The answer, according to a paper just published
inScience by Dan Nepstad of the Earth Innovation Institute in San Francisco, is that there
was no silver bullet but instead a three-stage process in which bans, better governance in
frontier areas and consumer pressure on companies worked, if fitfully and only after several
false starts.
The first stage ran from the mid-1990s to 2004. This was when the government put its
efforts into bans and restrictions. The Brazilian Forest Code said that, on every farm in the

Amazon, 80% of the land had to be set aside as a forest reserve. As the study observes,
this share was so high that the code could not be complied withor enforced. This was the
period of the worst deforestation. Soyabean prices were high and there was a vast
expansion of soyabean farming and cattle ranching on the south-eastern fringe of the
rainforest.
During the second stage, which ran from 2005 to 2009, the government tried to boost its
ability to police the Amazon. Brazils president, Luis Incio Lula da Silva, made stopping
deforestation a priority, which resulted in better co-operation between different bits of the
government, especially the police and public prosecutors. The area in which farming was
banned was increased from a sixth to nearly half of the forest.
Also, for the first time, restrictions were backed up by other things: a fall in export earnings
from soyabeans because of a rise in Brazils currency, the real; a sharp improvement in
cattle breeding which meant farmers could raise more animals on fewer hectares; and a
consumer boycott. After a campaign by Greenpeace and others, buyers of Brazilian
soyabeans promised not to purchase crops planted on land cleared after July 2006. All of
these combined to cause deforestation to plummet (see chart).

The third stage, which began in 2009, was a test of whether a regime of restrictions could
survive as soyabean expansion resumed. The government shifted its focus from farms to
counties (each state has scores of these). Farmers in the 36 counties with the worst
deforestation rates were banned from getting cheap credit until those rates fell. The
government also set up a proper land registry, requiring landowners to report their
properties boundaries to environmental regulators. There was a cattle boycott modelled on
the soya one. And for the first time, there were rewards as well as punishments: an
amnesty for illegal clearances before 2008 and money from a special $1 billion Amazon
Fund financed by foreign aid.
By any standards, Brazils Amazon policy has been a triumph, made the more remarkable
because it relied on restrictions rather than incentives, which might have been expected to
have worked better. Over the period of the study, Brazil also turned itself into a farming
superpower, so the country has shown it is possible to get a huge increase in food output
without destroying the forest (though there was some deforestation at first). Still, as Dr
Nepstad concedes, a policy of thou-shalt-not depends on political support at the top,

which cannot be guaranteed. Moreover, the policies so far have been successful among
commercial farmers and ranchers who care about the law and respond to market
pressures; hence the effectiveness of boycotts. Most remaining deforestation is by
smallholders who care rather less about these things, so the government faces the problem
of persuading them to change their ways, too. Deforestation has been slowed, but not yet
stopped.

Brazils conversion
Trees of knowledge
How Brazil is using education, technology and politics to save its rainforest

Sep 14th 2013 | From the print edition

Logging off
MAURO LUCIO IS living the dream. Having started work as a cowboy at 16, he is now 48
and raises cattle on 50 square kilometres of Paragominas municipality in Par state. The
animals on his ranch are healthy, the grass thick and the fences solid. Along the avenues
on his estate, wooden posts name the many different varieties of trees he has planted
between the fields. His wife serves delicious food while his three daughters play happily on
the verandah of the handsome wooden ranch house.
The only thing that is not ideal about Mr Lucios estate is its history. Until around ten years
ago it was part of the rainforest. The biggest trees, up to 100 feet tall, were sold for timber,
the rest burnt. In this way Brazil has lost around 19% of its Amazonian forest. And Brazil
makes up around 63% of the Amazon region.

Half of the worlds plant and animal species are believed to live in rainforest, so destroying
it is a sure way of wiping out large swathes of biodiversity. Species are put at risk not just
when forest is burned but also when clearing cuts up the remaining forest into smaller and
smaller fragments. A study conducted over three decades by Thomas Lovejoy, an
American scientist, shows that creatures die when the forest becomes more and more
fragmented, partly because it dries up and partly because some species are deprived of the
range they need to survive.
Until recently it would have been normal practice in the area for Mr Lucio to occupy his
ranch for a few years, then, when productivity droppedas it tends to on the rather thin
rainforest soilburn down some more and move on. But Mr Lucio has no plans to do that,
nor, if they are to be believed, do any of the other ranchers in Paragominas. Burning down
the rainforest, in addition to having been outlawed, has also become socially unacceptable.
Mr Lucio is focusing on raising his income not by colonising more land but by increasing his
farms productivity.
Space-age solution
When Luiz Incio Lula da Silva became president in 2003, his government, under pressure
from public opinion and foreigners, turned against deforestation. From 2003 his
environment minister, Marina Silva, started giving greater protection to land in the Amazon
and beefed up the federal environmental police, the Ibama. Centres of illegal logging, such
as Paragominas, were put on a blacklist.
Ms Silva was greatly helped by a combination of remote sensing and a Brazilian NGO,
Imazon. Brazils space agency published figures on deforestation, but only on an annual
basis, nearly a year in retrospect and without a map, so nobody knew exactly where the
trees were coming down. Beto Verissimo, who founded Imazon to use science for the
benefit of the rainforest, realised that NASAs Modis satellite collected data that could be
published monthly and would also show were the damage was being done. In 2007 Imazon
started processing NASAs data and publishing them within a few weeks of being collected.
Partly because of rising prosperity and partly because of international attention, Brazilians
were getting more interested in the fate of the Amazon. Newspapers started putting
Imazons data on their front pages. State governors had to respond to them on national
news programmes. Month after month, Mato Grosso and Par were found to have the
highest rates of deforestation.
In 2008 the government ratcheted up the pressure, publishing a list of the 36 municipalities
with the worst records. Seventeen, including Paragominas, were in Par state. Being
blacklisted did not just bring public humiliation to the citizens of Paragominas, it also hit
their wallets. Businesses in municipalities on the list were not eligible for cheap credit from
state-owned banks.

Adnan Demachki, Paragominass mayor, saw that Greenpeaces boycott of soya produced
from Amazonian estates was hitting the soya farmers of Mato Grosso and realised that
something similar was about to happen to the beef producers of Par. He went round
making speeches to local groups to persuade them that deforestation had to stop.
The federal public prosecutor in Par, Daniel Avelino, followed the supply chain back from
the supermarkets through the beef companies to the ranchers to find out which animals
had been produced on illegally deforested land, and threatened the supermarkets with
prosecution. They reacted fast, says Mr Avelino. It was about their brand, their visibility to
the public. Brazils supermarket associationwhich includes Walmart and Carrefoursaid
its members would stop buying beef from recently deforested land.
This made Mr Avelino exceedingly unpopular. He received death threats and still travels
with an armed guard. But he was not alone in applying economic pressure. The
International Finance Corporation, the private-finance arm of the World Bank, withdrew a
loan it had promised to Bertin, a big beef producer, to expand its facilities in the Amazon.
Mr Demachki persuaded local trade associations to commit to stopping deforestation. In
April 2008 he fined three farmers who were still at it. In October 2008 he was re-elected
with 88% of the vote. But not everybody liked what was happening, and things came to a
head that November night when the environmental-police station went up in flames.
Since then deforestation in the municipality has pretty much stopped and Paragominas has
become a model town. It has a Green Lake, a Green Stadium and a Green Park in the
centre of town. A museum built from illegally felled, confiscated wood shows, with
admirable neutrality, how Paragominas performed its U-turn on deforestation. Since the
1960s two-fifths of the municipality has been cleared of forest. The plan is for about 15% of
the cleared area to go back to forest, and half of the rest to be left to cattle-ranching and
half to arable farming.
In 2011 Simo Jatene, Pars newly elected governor, decided to replicate Paragominass
achievements around the state. Central to this effort is the Cadastro Ambiental Rural
(CAR), the rural environmental registry. Uncertainty about land tenure is a big
administrative stumbling block in Brazil. Some farmers do not have title to the land they
farm; some give money to people in whose name land is registered, known as laranjas
orangesso that the real owners are not held to account for deforesting it. If you have a
speed trap but the cars have no numbers, thats useless, says Mr Avelino. Rather than try
to delve into the history of every piece of land, the state governments in Mato Grosso and
Par are trying to get farmers to apply for a CAR certificate so the government knows who
is using the land and how much forest it is supposed to have. Banks now require loan
applicants to produce a CAR; beef companies will buy only from farms with a CAR. In Par
the number of properties with a CAR has gone up from 600 in 2009 to 80,000 now.
Deforestation in Par has more or less come to a halt. In the Brazilian Amazon as a whole,
it has fallen from 28,000 sq km in 2004 to under 5,000 sq km last year (see chart 6).

Although small farmers continue to clear land in areas where the authority of the state is
weak, the big beef and soya companies that used to do it themselves or buy produce from
those that did no longer want anything to do with it.

Brazils successso fardemonstrates how many elements have to come together to

make such policies work. You need clear direction not just at the top but all the way through
government. Ms Silvas determination was crucial, but if her views had not had the support
of Mr Jatene, Mr Avelino and Mr Demachki, she would not have got far. You need
administrators with enough imagination to find novel solutions: the CAR was a way around
an apparently insuperable land-tenure problem. You need a functioning police force: if the
Ibama had not been effective, the politicians and prosecutors intentions would have been
impossible to implement. You need businessmen whose conscience or share price induces
them to change their supply chains. You need NGOs, such as Greenpeace and Imazon, to
badger business and government to do things differently. You need independent media to
pick the story up and run with it. And, crucially, you need a public that cares: if voters and
consumers were indifferent, none of this would happen.

Help from foreigners, especially Americans, has been important toothough, given
Brazilian sensitivity to interference by gringos, some of them keep quiet about it. Imazons
Mr Verissimo was inspired by Chris Uhl, an American field ecologist working in Par in the

1980s who is now a professor at Penn State. Imazon was founded with grants from USAID
and the MacArthur Foundation. The Ford Foundation funded a sustainable forestry project
in Paragominas. NASA provides the satellite data that Imazon publishes. Google has built a
platform to allow Imazon to process the data more quickly and cheaply, and Imazon is now
training people from other rainforest countries to use it. Mr Lovejoys forest-fragments
project has been running for 30 years, bringing in a stream of foreign researchers,
employing Brazilian scientists and pointing out the consequences of slicing the forest up
into little bits. Greenpeaces international campaign against Brazilian soya, beef and leather
put pressure on global businesses such as Walmart, Carrefour and Nike, and that put
pressure on Brazilian companies. So although globalisation exacerbated deforestation by
boosting demand for Brazilian produce, it is also part of the solution.
Keep at it
But the problem is still not solved once and for all. Deforestation rates may rebound. If
locals can prosper without chopping trees down, there is a good chance that the rest of the
forest will survive. If they cant, it wont.
Migration should help. These days it flows away from the Amazon rather than towards it.
Brazil is urbanising fast, and the attractions of scrubbing a living from raising cows on
deforested land are diminishing.
Still, there are plenty of people left in the countryside, and stopping deforestation means
destroying jobs. In Paragominas only 14 of the citys 240 sawmills are still working, and the
charcoal industry has closed down. Yet after a brief downturn, the city is doing pretty well.
One reason is in evidence in the town hall, where about 50 ranch hands in cowboy hats
and baseball caps listen raptly to a presentation on human-bovine interaction. Control by
understanding animal behaviour, says a slide, not by aggression. Suffering in the cow
represents loss of quality in the meat, says another.
The course is part of a Green Ranching Project, run by Mr Lucio in his capacity as head of
the local branch of the farmers union. Better animal welfare is a by-product: the initiatives
main aim is to increase output so that farmers can prosper without deforesting more land.
Mr Lucios farm shows it can be done. Average production for the region, he says, is 90kg
of beef per hectare per year; his average is 500kg and his profit margin 40%. Other than
happy cows, his secrets are dietary supplements in their feed, fertiliser for the grass,
allowing pastures to regenerate after 48 days of grazing and planting copses in his fields to
shelter his cattle from the heat.
The combination of better education and chemicals means that farmers like Mr Lucio can
prosper without destroying the forest. This is progress from which all species can benefit.

Protecting Brazils forests

Fiddling while the Amazon burns

Keeping the worlds biggest forest standing depends on greens, Amerindians and enlightened
farmers working togetherif lawmakers let them

Dec 3rd 2011 | JACI-PARAN, RONDNIA | From the print edition

DRIVE out of Porto Velho, the capital of the Amazonian state of Rondnia, and you see the
trouble the world's largest forest is in. Lorry after lorry trundles by laden with logs; more
logs lie by the road, to be collected by smugglers who dumped them on the rumour of a
(rare) roadcheck. Charred tree-stumps show where ranchers burned what the loggers left
behind; a few cattle roam sparsely through the scrubby fields. In places the acid subsoil
shows through, sandy and bone-pale. Seen from above, the roads look like hatchet blows,
with dirt tracks radiating outward like thinner wounds. The picture is reproduced across the
Amazon's arc of deforestation (see map).

The Brazilian Amazon is now home to 24m people, many of them settlers who trekked
those roads in the 1960s and 1970s, lured by a government promise that those who farmed
unproductive land could keep it. Chaotic or corrupt land registries left some without
secure title. Rubber-tappers, loggers, miners and charcoal-burners came too. The most
recent arrivals are 20,000 construction workers building dams on the Madeira and Xingu
rivers to provide electricity to Brazil's populous south. They have attracted some 80,000
camp-followers, many of whom squat on supposedly protected land.
The population of Jaci-Paran, the nearest town to the Jirau dam being built on the
Madeira, has risen from 3,500 to 21,000 in a decadebut it still has just four police.
Prostitutes and drug-dealers do well. On payday, says Maria Pereira, a teacher, busloads
of construction workers hit town to drink and fight. Knife-killings are common. When the
dam is finished, many of the new residents will move on. Behind them, a bit more of the
Amazon will be gone.
Brazil's government no longer encourages cutting down the forest. Nearly half of it now lies
within indigenous reserves, or state and federal parks where most logging is banned.
Private landowners must abide by the Forest Code, a law dating from 1965 that requires
them to leave the forest standing on part of their farms (four-fifths in the Amazon, less
elsewhere), and in particular around the sources and banks of rivers, and on hillsides.
But the code is routinely flouted. Less than 1% of the fines levied for failing to observe it are
ever paid, because of uncertain ownership and poor enforcement. The Suru, an
Amerindian people, recently mapped its territory in Rondnia, on paper strictly protected.
The tribe was shocked to find that 7% had been cleared.

In Braslia 2,000km (1,250 miles) and a world away, politicians are haggling over laws that
will affect the fate of the forest. Some legislators are pushing a bill that would give
Congress, rather than the president, the power to create new reserves. That would
probably mean fewer new onesa blow for the forest, says Ivaneide Bandeira of Kanind,
a non-profit group in Rondnia. Indigenous people protect the forest better than anyone
else, she says.
The Senate is poised to vote on a new version of the Forest Code, already approved by the
lower house. The president, Dilma Rousseff, wants a final version on her desk before
Christmas. Everyone agrees that change is needed. The share of private land that must be
set aside has risen since 1965 and farmers who were once in compliance but omitted to
update their paperwork can end up lumped in with lawbreakers. Ktia Abreu, a senator who
is the president of the main farm lobby, says farmers find such uncertainty deeply
worrying. Environmentalists dislike it too, since it encourages loggers and land-grabbers
by fuelling disrespect for the law.
But the consensus has gone no further. The farm lobby wanted all past land clearance
regularised, arguing that if farmers had to replant trees, crop output would fall, food prices
soar and poor Brazilians go hungry. Greens countered that an amnesty would fuel future
deforestation. So far, at least, the farm lobby is winning. The current draft allows farmers to
dodge fines for illegal logging and postpone their obligation to replant by simply declaring
that their violations were committed before July 2008 and by enrolling in a vague and
leisurely environmental recovery programme, to be run by individual states.
This is an amnesty in all but name, says Maria Ceclia Brito, the head of WWF-Brazil, a
conservation group. Without safeguards, states will be able to postpone forever the
requirement to act. After several years in which the annual rate of deforestation fell, this
year it has risen, possibly because landowners think the new code will let them get away
with it. Law-abiding farmers are outraged. When Darci Ferrarin bought a large farm in Mato
Grosso in 1998, he knew that its riverbanks had been illegally cleared. He paid to replant.
Those who deforested illegally should go to jail, declares his son, Darci Junior.
The only promising aspect of the new code, thinks Roberto Smeraldi of Amaznia
Brasileira, a green NGO, is that it offers benefits such as subsidised loans to landowners
who have always stuck by the rules, or who are reforesting faster than the law demands.
But he laments the missed opportunity for a grand bargain to align opposed interests. A
cap-and-trade system like those used to limit industrial pollution in rivers could have helped
farmers short of set-aside to comply with the law by paying neighbours with more than the
legal minimum to maintain it. That would both have spared farmers from costly replanting
and cut future deforestation by making standing forests financially valuable.
Ms Rousseff promises to veto any amnesty for illegal deforesters. But the figleaf of the
environmental recovery programme may give her scope to temporise, and with a heavy
legislative schedule she may be tempted to do so. If she does, the Amazon's best hope will

lie with the enlightened farmers and indigenous tribes who care for their land better than
the state is willing to.
For Mr Ferrarin, the way to halt deforestation is to use existing farmland better. Almost half
his farm of 13,350 hectares (33,000 acres) is set aside as forest; the rest supports 3,000
cattle as well as soya and several other crops, farmed in rotation. Innovative no-till methods
cut carbon emissions, fertiliser use and labour. The Ferrarins run workshops to teach other
farmers about such integrated farming techniques. Mr Ferrarin's daughter, Valkiria, runs a
cattle-breeding programme, with an on-site IVF clinic where embryos from prize animals
are implanted in surrogates. A productive farm can support an extended family for several
generations, he says.
Cassio Carvalho do Val's father settled in Redeno in Par in 1959. It was then virgin
rainforest: the last 150km of the journey was by donkey, carrying dried meat, rice and
beans. Nine-tenths of the 300,000 hectares he was granted has since been sold, but the
farm is still vast (the average farm in the United States comprises around 160 hectares),
and unproductive, with just one cow per hectare of pasture. But his son has started to
fatten his cows with grain and plans to try integrated farming. It's the dream of every crop
farmer to be a rancher, he says with a laugh. It's so much easier. But he thinks he needs
to keep up with the times.

The Suru set an example

Some of Brazil's indigenous peoples are redoubling their efforts to protect the standing
forest. The 1,300 Suru have moved their 25 villages to the borders of their territory to get
early warning of incursions. With help from Kanind and others, since 2005 they have
started to reforest where intruders have cleared. To the inexperienced eye, the new trees
already look ancient (though to the Suru the sparser cover is still obvious). Next year the
tribe will host other indigenous peoples who want to repair deforestation on their own lands.
They hope to start teaching non-indigenous folk, too.
The Suru are the first Brazilian tribal people to set up a REDD project, an international aid
scheme to prevent deforestation. Up to 10% of the income generated will go to local nonIndians, to show them that standing forest can create jobs and income. We are not saying,
don't use the forest, explains the chief, Almir Narayamoga Suru. We are saying you
should think about the medium and long term when you decide how to use it. That will be
easier if the politicians approve a Forest Code that looks to the future, not the pastand
then provide the means to enforce it

Tropical forests
A clearing in the trees
New ideas on what speeds up deforestation and what slows it down

Aug 23rd 2014 | JAKARTA | From the print edition

IN 1998 Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then Brazils president, said he would triple the area
of the Amazonian forest set aside for posterity. At the time the ambition seemed vain: Brazil
was losing 20,000 square kilometres (7,700 square miles) of forest a year. Over the next 15
years loggers, ranchers, environmentalists and indigenous tribes battled it outoften
bloodilyin the worlds largest tropical forest. Yet all the while presidents were patiently
patching together a jigsaw of national parks and other protected patches of forest to create
the Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA), a protected area 20 times the size of
Belgium. Now, less than 6,000 sq km of Brazils Amazonian forest is cleared each year. In
May the government and a group of donors agreed to finance ARPA for 25 years. It is the
largest tropical-forest conservation project in history.
This matters because of Brazils size: with 5m sq km of jungle, it has almost as much as the
next three countries (Congo, China and Australia) put together. But it also matters for what
it may signal: that the world could be near a turning point in the sorry story of tropical
deforestation.
Typically, countries start in poverty with their land covered in trees. As they clear it for
farms or fuel, they get richeruntil alarm bells ring and they attempt to recover their losses.
This happens at different stages in different places, but the trajectory is similar in most: a
reverse J, steeply down, then bottoming out, then upbut only part of the way. This is
usually called the forest transition curve. Brazil seems to be nearing the bottom. The
world may be, too.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a UN body, the net change in
the worlds forested land (deforestation minus forest expansion) was 52,000 sq km a year
in the 2000sa huge loss, but almost two-fifths below what it had been in the 1990s. The

most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which

represents mainstream scientific opinion on the environment, concurred, saying
deforestation has slowed over the last decade.
Not everyone accepts that. Matthew Hansen of the University of Maryland, who has studied
millions of satellite images, thinks the rate at which forest cover in the tropics was lost rose
between 2000 and 2012though this refers to all trees cut down, including those in
managed forests that may be replanted. The FAO excludes trees in plantations and
agriculture generally (such as for shade-grown coffee).

And by the FAOs definition, several tropical countries at different points along the transition
curve seem to be doing better (see diagram). At the top, the deforestation rate in the
countries of the Congo basin, which have the largest remaining area of African forest, fell

from an already-tiny 0.16% a year in the 1990s to 0.1% in the 2000s (see table on next
page). They have not begun to slash and burn, as many feared was inevitable. Towards
the bottom of the curve, Mexico has cut its deforestation rate even more than Brazil. On the
upswing, India and Costa Rica are replanting forests they once cut down. In 1980 India had
about 640,000 sq km of forest left. Now, it has 680,000 sq km, and is replanting about
1,450 sq km a year. In the 1980s only 20% of Costa Rica was covered in trees. Now more
than half is.
To save the forest you have to think outside the forest, quotes Andrew Steer, head of the
World Resources Institute (WRI), an environmental think-tank. In line with the saying, two
big reasons for the recent slowdown in tropical deforestation have little directly to do with
forest management. They are the easing of population pressures and big improvements in
farming far from forested land.
Trees are different
In a new study* for the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a Washington think-tank,
Jonah Busch and Kalifi Ferretti-Gallon look at 117 cases of deforestation round the world.
They find that two of the influences most closely correlated with the loss of forests are
population and proximity to cities (the third is proximity to roads). Dramatic falls in fertility in
Brazil, China and other well-forested nations therefore help explain why (after a lag)
deforestation is slowing, too. Demography even helps account for what is happening in
Congo, where fertility is high. Its people are flocking to cities, notably Kinshasa, with the
result that the population in more distant, forested areas is thinning out.
Two of the countries that have done most to slow forest decline also have impressive
agricultural records: Brazil, which became the biggest food exporter of all tropical countries
over the past 20 years; and India, home of the green revolution. Brazils agricultural boom
took place in the cerrado, the savannah-like region south and east of the Amazon (there is
farming in the Amazon, too, but little by comparison). The green revolution took place
mostly in Indias north-west and south, whereas its biggest forests are in the east and
north.
But if population and agricultural prowess were the whole story, Indonesia, where fertility
has fallen and farm output risen, would not be one of the worst failures. Figures published
inNature Climate Change in June show that in the past decade it destroyed around
60,000 sq km of primary forests; its deforestation rate overtook Brazils in 2011. Policies
matter, tooand the political will to implement them.
The central problem facing policymakers is that trees are usually worth more dead than
alive; that is, land is worth more as pasture or cropland than as virgin forest. The benefits
from forests, such as capturing carbon emissions, cleaning up water supplies and
embodying biodiversity, are hard to price, whereas a bushel of soyabeans is worth $12 on
world markets. The market for palm oil, much of which is supplied from deforested land in
Indonesia, is worth $50 billion a year. Tourism can make elephants or lions worth more

alive than dead, giving locals a material incentive to look after them. This is less true of
trees, lovely though they are.
The most successful policies therefore tend to be top-down bans, rather than incentives
(though these have been tried, too). Indias national forest policy of 1988 explicitly rejects
the idea of trying to make money from stewardship. The derivation of direct economic
benefit, it says, must be subordinated to this principal aim (maintaining the health of the
forest). In Brazil 44% of the Amazon is now national park, wildlife reserve or indigenous
reserve, where farming is banned; much of that area was added recently. In Costa Rica
half the forests are similarly protected. In India a third are managed jointly by local groups
and state governments.

Top-down bans require more than just writing a law. Brazils regime developed over 15
years and involved tightening up its code on economic activity in forested areas,
moratoriums on sales of food grown on cleared land, a new land registry, withholding
government-subsidised credit from areas with the worst deforestation and strengthening
law enforcement through the public prosecutors office. (The most draconian restriction,
requiring 80% of any farm in the Amazon to be set aside as a wildlife reserve, is rarely
enforced.)
Two developments make bans easier to impose. Cheaper, more detailed satellite imagery
shows in real time where the violations are and who may be responsible. Brazil put the data
from its system online, enabling green activists to help police the frontier between forest
and farmland. Its moratoriums on soyabeans and beef from the Amazon, which require
tracing where food is coming from, would not have worked without satellites.
The technology has also boosted democratisation, the second requirement for top-down
bans to work. That sounds counter-intuitive: surely authoritarian regimes are better at
enforcing rules? Perhaps not. Democratisation may help explain the transition curve:
authoritarian regimes preside over deforestation while countries are poor, but when
opposition politicians, non-governmental organisations and a free press bring demands for
accountability to bear, the felling slows.
Frances Seymour of the CGD says this may be one reason why Brazil has quieted the
chainsaws and Indonesia has not: democracy in Brazil began earlier and has gone further.
Since Indonesia banned new logging and plantation concessions in primary forest in 2011,
deforestation has actually risen. Land concessions continue to be issued by the Forestry
Ministry, rated the most corrupt among 20 government institutions by Indonesias
Corruption Eradication Commission in 2012. Some within government are hostile to antideforestation schemes, which they see as foreign, says Ade Wahyudi of Katadata, an
Indonesian firm of analysts. Perhaps the biggest problem is the lack of a single, unified
map including all information on land tenure and forest licensing: efforts to create one have
been slowed by unco-operative government ministries and difficulties created by
overlapping land claims.
But in the longer term, says Ms Seymour, the link between democratisation and slowing
deforestation gives reason for hope. In Brazil it was not until well after military rule ended
that the voices calling for protection of the Amazon had grown loud enough that the
government had to take heed. Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, who was elected president in
2002, in the countrys fourth election after the end of dictatorship, made anti-deforestation a
priority. Indonesia has just had its second free presidential election since the fall of Suharto
and politicians across the spectrum say illegal logging must be eradicated (though so did
Suhartos successor).
Right for the wrong reasons

Brazilian officials now say that they are reaching the limits of what top-down prohibition can
do. Despite the experience of India, they want to shift to offering more incentives to make it
profitable to keep the forests intact. Such policies, though, are an uphill struggle.
The simplest is to boost the incomes of forest dwellers, hoping they will look after the trees
better. But more money can also mean more to spend on chainsaws. The CGD study finds
that though income support sometimes works, it is often insignificant and more often
associated with cutting down trees. The same is true of improving land tenure, which can
simply encourage people to sell what have just become their trees to loggers.
Mexico and Costa Rica have pioneered something different: payment for ecosystem
services. This tries to alter the basic trade-off that makes forests worth more cut down than
standing. The idea is that users of clean water and other benefits from the forest should
pay for them, using markets in which they are buyers and the people who look after the
trees are sellers.
The idea is sound. The problems are practical. Governments have found it almost
impossible to create markets for clean water downstream from forestslet alone for carbon
emissions produced in, say, China and absorbed by trees in the Amazon.
Where the policy has worked, it has been in a roundabout way. Mexico, which has gone
further in this direction than most, kept up its payments for environmental services though
the markets that were supposed to accompany them never materialised. The result was an
income-support scheme: around $500m was handed over to 6,000 forest organisations in
2003-11, almost all by the federal government. The beneficiaries ploughed cash into
looking after the forest, though they were not obliged to do so. A study by the Union of
Concerned Scientists, an international group, concludes that the programmereduced the
rate of deforestationjust not for contractualreasons.
There is one group for whom subsidies and land-tenure improvements are an unqualified
success: indigenous people. Overwhelmingly, they respond to incentives by protecting their
land, presumably for cultural reasons: the forest is their home and they do not want to sell
it, even if that would be profitable. According to a new study by WRI and the Rights and
Resources Initiative, another NGO, deforestation in indigenous areas of Brazil is about 12
times worse than in areas outside them. Worldwide, indigenous people have legal rights in
only about 5m sq km of forest (an eighth of the total and less than the area they live in), so
expanding indigenous rights further could make a big difference to slowing deforestation.
Light at the end of the clearing
Fifteen years ago, the conversion of forest into farmland accounted for a quarter of total
greenhouse-gas emissions and the rainforest was the symbol of worldwide environmental
degradation. Average surface temperatures, ocean acidity, glacier melt and carbon
emissions are all higher now than then. Yet deforestation now accounts for only 12% of
greenhouse gases. True, too much forest is still being turned into farms. True, too, regrown

forests are near-monocultures compared with the virgin canopy that once stood there. But
in a world where there is little good environmental news, the state of tropical forests is a
precious exception

Conservation in Brazil
Managing the rainforests
Sustainable management could help to save the Amazonian rainforest without harming
economic development

May 10th 2001 | ILHA DE MARAJO AND PARAGOMINAS | From the print
edition

EMPTY fields, as far as the eye can see, line the highway for most of the 300km (186
miles) from Belem, eastern Amazonia's main city, to the timber-cutting town of
Paragominas. Once it was all forest, but since the 1970s most of the trees in a broad strip
beside the road have been cutnot just to extract timber, but to clear pasture for cattleraising, encouraged by subsidies and tax incentives. Now, though, most of the fields lie
empty and are becoming overgrown with scrub. Cows are seen so infrequently that they
might be imagined to be an endangered species.
The deforestation, mostly in the past 30 years, of 14% of the Brazilian part of Amazonia
(about a third of the Amazon rainforest, the world's biggest, is over the border in other
countries) has been as much an economic as an environmental disaster. The usable timber
would be ripped out of a stretch of forest and the rest would then be burned, because the
land would often be worth more when cleared than it had been as untouched forest. This
value, however, was due partly to excessive optimism over the region's agricultural
potential, and partly to a set of economically perverse incentives provided by the
government. When farming was actually tried, it was frequently found to be unprofitable.
And many did not even bother to try. Some chopped down the trees, grabbed the grants
and then abandoned the land. Others used the farms they carved out of the jungle to
disguise (highly taxed) profits on other businesses as farming profits (which used to be taxfree). As a result, there are now about 165,000km of abandoned land in Brazilian
Amazonia.

In recent years, the handouts and tax breaks that promoted deforestation have been
reduced. As a result, good-quality forested land can be worth as much as 40% more than
cleared land. A law passed in 1998 introduced stiff penalties for cutting trees without
permission from Ibama, Brazil's environmental-protection agency. Though deforestation
seems to have slowed since the mid-1990s (see chart), new figures due shortly will show
that last year's deforestation was little different from that in 1998 and 1999, and about 1/2%
of the forest was chopped.

Besides the cleared forest that shows up on the satellite pictures, each year a further,
unmeasured amount (at least 10,000km, according to a study carried out in 1999) has its
most valuable trees ripped out and is then abandoned. The big holes in forest cover caused
by this reckless extraction make the area drier and thus vulnerable to fires. And if the forest
does grow back, it grows differently, with fewer species, and choked by thick creepers that
Amazonians call cipo. Though most of the rainforest remains intactin contrast to the
gloomiest predictions of the 1980s, which predicted it would be almost gone by nowit
continues to be hacked away at a rate that will see it wiped out within the next 200 years.
A reduced impact
Fortunately, there are stronger grounds than ever for hoping that this will not happen.
Belatedly, in parts of Amazonia such as Paragominas, where much local forest is either
razed or damaged, timber firms are coming to see unharmed woodland as an asset that,
properly managed, can yield a good income forever. Their enthusiasm has been bolstered
by studies showing that sustainable management of forests, also known as reducedimpact logging (RIL), can be more profitable than the reckless conventional methods of
timber extraction. One such study, conducted near Paragominas, found that RIL was 12%
cheaper than conventional logging.
In RIL schemes, the area to be exploited is divided into perhaps 30 blocks, one of which
has timber extracted each year, before being left alone for 29 years. This is enough for the
forest to regenerate successfully, because in addition to rotation, the schemes take care to
leave the oldest specimens of the exploited species standing. As well as providing cover
from the tropical sun, the spreading branches of these tall trees re-seed the block with new

specimens. In haphazard, conventional logging, such trees are usually hacked down and,
because their trunks are often hollow or damaged, then abandoneda waste of time and
money for the lumberjacks, as well as maiming the forest. RIL reduces the damage further
by plotting the position of each block's valuable trees on a computer, which then works out
the shortest set of access roads that needs to be carved out to remove the felled trees.
Lumberjacks are also taught ways of felling trees that avoid damaging those around them.
With planning, the forest's animals, as well as its plants, can be preserved, according to
Adalberto Verissimo of Imazon, a local environmental-research group. Amazonia's top
predator, barring man, is the jaguar. This species needs about 500km of forest to form a
viable population of 50 cats. Though a typical managed-forestry scheme is only about a
fifth of this size, by ensuring that at least corridors of forest are maintained between
neighbouring schemes, the big cats and all the other animal species below them in the food
chain can, it is hoped, survive reasonably well. It should, in other words, be possible for a
stretch of forest to provide an endless supply of tropical hardwood but still suffer a minimal
impact on its ecosystem.

The power of the consumer

Sustainable forestry of this sort has been talked about in Brazil since at least the 1980s, but
started taking off only in the mid-1990s. Across the country, including areas outside
Amazonia, there are now thought to be 10,000km of forest under sustainable
management. Foreign consumers of tropical hardwoodsfurniture makers and sellers, for
instanceare increasingly asking for timber that has been independently certified as
coming from well-runRIL schemes, so that they can promise their environment-conscious
customers that they are not contributing to the destruction of the rainforest.

The Rosa Group, a big timber firm in Paragominas, started using RIL in 1998, and is now
applying for certification by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international agency
that sets standards for sustainable forestry. Antonio Rosa, the firm's boss, sees certification
as key to his plan to expand its exports to Europe and North America. Foreign buyers, he
says, seem prepared to pay extra for certified timber, making it even more attractive.

But most timber felled in Amazonia is used in Brazil, so the growth of sustainable forestry
and the decline of reckless choppingwill depend on how quickly Brazilian consumers
switch to demanding certified timber. There are signs that this is starting to happen. In
2000, 40 Brazilian firms, including Tok & Stok, a big furniture retailer, formed a buyers'
group to coordinate their purchases of certified wood, and jointly pledged to stop using
uncertified timber by 2005. By creating a growing market for certified timber, it is hoped,
supply will grow too. Imazon is conducting what it believes is the first-ever study of who
distributes and buys timber in Brazil, to suggest ways of accelerating the switch to
sustainable forestry.
Since much of the rainforest is still untouched and unclaimed, and thus public property
according to Brazil's constitution, the federal and state governments could accelerate the
move to sustainability by declaring it all a national park and then licensing timber firms to
runRIL schemes in selected parts of it. A study by Mr Verissimo and others for the
environment ministry concluded that just 10% of the remaining forest, managed
sustainably, could meet all the existing demand for tropical hardwood. Much of the rest
might then be declared untouchable.
In practice, policing such a huge preservation area against illegal logging would be an
immense task. A national park that existed only on paper would not be worthy of the name.
And Ibama, whose job it would be to patrol this park, has a reputation for inefficiency and
corruption. It seems to be improving, but slowly. Timber firms in Paragominas say the local
branch that inspects them is now doing a reasonable job, but they complain of unfair
competition from surrounding regions where the agency is ineffective.
Some environmentalists say the answer is to take the job away from Ibama (whose broad
remit includes dealing with everything from oil slicks to urban noise) and create a
specialised body similar to America's Forestry Service. Raimundo Deusdara, an
environment-ministry official responsible for forest preservation, agrees that the idea is
worth considering. In the meantime, he hopes that a new environment tax, to be introduced
soon, will at least double Ibama's budget, and thus make it more effective.
Another hindrance to the effort to control illegal logging has been that, since Brazil lacks a
central land register, it has been easy to steal publicly owned forest. Only now has the
federal government launched a campaign to seize back the vast tracts of Amazonia that
have been stolen over the years. A law creating a land register has been passed, and the
government hopes the register will be compiled by 2003.
Combined with better land registration, improved satellite imaging should help to monitor,
and thus prevent, deforestation. Brazil's space-research agency, INPE, currently produces
its deforestation figures annually, but the Chinese-Brazilian CBERS satellite it uses scans
Amazonia once every 26 days, so it is studying whether it could produce figures more
frequently. Mato Grosso state, which includes a small slice of Amazonian forest, is already
doing this on its own. A state laboratory is downloading satellite images and comparing

them with a computerised land register to spot breaches of the often-flouted national forest
code, which allows landowners in Amazonia to deforest only 20% of their property, and
even then, only with permission.
In theory, real-time detection of deforestation could be done for all of Amazonia, according
to Thelma Krug of INPE, especially after the launch, due in 2004, of a Brazilian satellite
that will provide images every two hours. Sivam, Brazil's giant radar-surveillance system for
Amazonia, is now being brought into service. Though its main role is in defence, and to
monitor the traffic in illegal drugs, it could also be used to detect loggers' activities. But
collecting and processing such masses of data would be expensive. And, of course, it
would only be worthwhile if there were an effective forest service which had enough
wardens with boats, planes and helicopters to rush them to remote areas where illegal
logging had been spotted.
Tales of the riverbank
Encouraging sustainable timber extraction, and suppressing illegal logging, are only part of
what must be done to stop the rainforest being degraded and destroyed. The other big
threat is population pressure. Last year's census found that about 12m people live in
Amazonia, and that the population there is increasing by 3.7% a year. So there is a growing
need to find people ways of making a living without despoiling the forest.
This was one of the objectives of the Pilot Programme to Conserve the Brazilian Rain
Forest, set up in 1992, with the promise of $350m from the Group of Seven rich countries
hence its nickname, PPG7. All sorts of projects were created to help forest dwellers make
a living from such things as collecting fruits and plants. But, as an independent review
concluded last year, progress has been very slow. Much of the $88m spent so far has been
swallowed up by bureaucracy, and many projects have not got beyond being experiments
(though PPG7 does pay for Mato Grosso's satellite-based enforcement system, which has
already resulted in the jailing of 50 landowners).
One reason for the poor results, the report concluded, is that the scheme has done little to
involve the private sector in creating forest-friendly businesses. But, here and there,
independently of the PPG7, this is beginning to happen. In the Ilha de Marajo, an island
twice the size of Wales at the mouth of the Amazon, Muana Alimentos, a food-processing
company, is working with the local authorities to persuade the growing numbers
ofribeirinhos (riverbank dwellers) to cultivate the acai palms that grow abundantly in the
swampy land around their wooden huts. The company wants to expand the supply of the
two products it sells: palm heart, the soft inner stem at the tree top, from which the fronds
sprout, which is pickled and used in salads and pies; and the pulp of the aca fruit, which is
served as a delicious sorbet on Brazil's poshest beaches.
Arriving in the settlement of Piria, Georges Schnyder, director of Muana Alimentos,
accompanies a state official on a boat trip to try to interest the ribeirinhos in taking a short
course in cultivating the trees to maximise yields of fruit and palm hearts. You could be
earning 8,000 reais (about $4,000) a year from this plot, Mr Schnyder tells Raimundo and

Rubens, a father and son who live nearby. The two smile politely but disbelievingly
incredulous that what is a small fortune by local standards might be within their grasp. The
company already owns and tends its own plots of land on the island, but Mr Schnyder says
he would rather leave the cultivation and processing to the locals and stick to being a
distributor.
Like the lumberjacks in Paragominas, Mr Schnyder is seeking the FSC's certificate of
sustainability, seeing it as a way to add value to his products. Despite the PPG7's poor
progress, Mr Schnyder believes such schemes to find sustainable livings for forest dwellers
can be made to work. But, he grumbles, environmental groups could do more to help: they
seem keener on sitting in their offices writing damning reports than on setting up local
branches in forest villages to foster sustainable development by offering training and
advice.
Political pressure points
Politicians must change their ways too. Though many of the incentives that led to chopping
have gone, some persist. Amazonia's state governors opposed the recent decision by
Brazil's president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, to abolish Sudam, a corruption-riddled
Amazonian development agency, whose handouts have sponsored much futile forest
clearance.
The military dictators who ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985 were obsessed with populating and
developing Amazonia, convinced that otherwise another power might seize it. Such
paranoia has died down (though many Amazonians believe that America is plotting to
invade on the pretext of saving the trees) but Advance Brazil, the government's 776
billionreais economic-development plan, still assumes that Amazonia needs to be opened
up with new roads and waterways. Yet a study published by William Laurence of the
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and his colleagues, in Science in January,
argued that such transport links, when built near forests in the past, triggered massive
deforestation. Extrapolating from past patterns to forecast the effects of the proposed roads
and highways, the study said, at worst, only 5% of Amazonia might remain as pristine
forest in 2020, with a further 24% being lightly degraded and the rest badly damaged or
gone.
There are good reasons for hoping that things will not turn out so badly. Brazil's growing
fiscal prudence may mean not all of Advance Brazil advances. It may also lead to further
cuts in the remaining incentives to chop trees. Past deforestation may not be a guide to the
future, because it was mostly in the drier fringes of Amazonia rather than the really rainy
rainforest, where agriculture would be even harder. The government has stopped settling
landless peasants in forested areas, which until recently had been a smaller but significant
cause of deforestation. And the reaction in Brazil and around the world to
the Science paper helped, by forcing the government to submit Advance Brazil to an
independent environmental-impact assessment.

Dr Laurence agrees that things may not turn out as badly as the paper's bleakest
prognostications. But, he argues, it is not so much Advance Brazil that threatens the forest
as the thinking behind the project. It assumes that economic development depends on
extensifying, ie, extending the amount of land in economic use, rather than intensifying
the use of land already exploited. Maybe so, says Raul Jungmann, Brazil's land-reform
minister, but the trouble is that extensifying is cheaper and simpler than intensifying. If
richer countries want the Amazon rainforest saved (and, he correctly points out, they are
lecturing Brazil on preserving its forests after destroying much of their own and their
colonies'), they could offer more technology and capital to intensify the return on Brazil's
existing agricultural land.
Though economic development has often been depicted as the environment's enemy, the
richer a country gets, the more its people tend to worry about environmental matters. It is
encouraging that it was mainly Brazilian greens, not foreign ones, who successfully
campaigned last year against a plot by the big landowners' lobby in Congress to weaken
the forest code, and are mobilising against a similar attempt this year.
Brazil has already lost one tropical forest: the Mata Atlantica, which used to run all the way
down the country's southern coast, but of which only 7% now remains, and that divided into
small fragments. It is too early to guarantee the survival of the bigger, more famous one in
Amazonia. Much more needs to be done to stop it being eaten away by 1/2% or so each
year. But its chances are improving, especially now it is increasingly being seen as a
valuable economic asset, something that could produce returns forever