|
A study by Brazil's non-governmental organization, Imazon (the Amazonian Institute for Man and the Environment), indicates growth in Amazonian wood exports together with a reduction in the number of trees cut down. The study will be presented this week in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies.
According to Imazon researcher Adalberto Veríssimo, the diagnosis of the wood sector in the Amazon region in 2004 led to three conclusions. First, the drop in wood consumption in comparison with 1998, when the institute conducted a similar study. In 1998 Brazil extracted 28 million cubic meters of wood from the Amazon region.
"We lowered the volume of logs extracted to 25 million cubic meters; that is, we reduced our raw material consumption," Veríssimo observes; nevertheless, "we maintained the same level of processed wood products, that is, boards, planks, flooring, and decks."
Consequently, 3 million cubic meters of wood were economized in the production of the same final volume. "To give you some idea, this means that we saved approximately 950 thousand trees."
The second piece of information is that Amazonian wood exports, which were worth US$ 350 million in 1998, jumped to around US$ 1 billion in 2004.
The Imazon researcher says that this made Amazonian wood exports equivalent to the Vale do Rio Doce Company's iron ore exports.
The third result, according to Veríssimo, is that "the Amazon region also increased its production of processed wood (flooring, ceilings, and furniture) from something on the order of only US$ 12 million to around US$ 180 million."
The researcher says, however, that the country still needs to deal with the land ownership issue in the region.
"For the Amazon to have an economically competitive level of forest production, we need to have a set of legal regulations that reinforce the legality of wood production in the region."
He is in favor of increasing the international market share of Amazonian wood with products that contain aggregated value and are ecologically correct.
"To accomplish this, the question of land ownership, which is currently the principal bottleneck to the development of the Amazon, must be faced."
Regarding the public forests management bill drafted by the Ministry of Environment, Veríssimo considers it a watershed proposal.
"If it is approved, it will respond to the sense of urgency of the Amazon."
In his opinion, the project has the support of social, environmental, and entrepreneurial sectors in the region.
"It was a broad pact on behalf of legality and the establishment of a regulatory mark that can set a new course for production in the Amazon."
Translation: David Silberstein
Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.