The cost of saving the rainforest

FROM THE ROAD they look like ruined giant tombstones, the last remains of some ancient graveyard. As you approach the Brazilian town of Castanheira many of the lush green fields contain these charred stumps of giant hardwood trees that have been felled and burned to make way for the cattle that are this town’s lifeblood.

If at any time in the past quarter-century you have seen images of swathes of jungle being bulldozed into huge pyres and burned, there is a good chance they came from somewhere off the stretch of Brazilian highway BR-163 that runs between the city of Cuiabá and the Amazonian port of Santarém, 1,700km to the north.

Since it was built, in the 1970s, the road, which cuts the southern Amazon jungle in half, has been a route into the forest for hundreds of thousands of loggers, miners and ranchers, and out of it for timber, gold and cattle. In the process it has become one of the worst corridors of environmental destruction running through the world’s biggest tropical rainforest, and for environmentalists it is the front line in the battle to save the planet’s green lung.

For decades it seemed a losing struggle, as the annual dry season led to the setting of fires that burned away ever more of the jungle’s southern rim. But now there is tentative hope that this decades-long cycle of destruction is drawing to a close. In the past three years Brazil’s government has finally moved to control the region and is clamping down on deforestation. Jungle is still being cleared, but at just half the rate of before. Last year was the Brazilian Amazon’s best since 1988. Even many environmentalists are cautiously hopeful that the rainforest now stands a chance.

The ranchers of Castanheira, 800km north of Cuiabá on the western edge of the BR-163’s corridor of destruction, all agree that times have changed. Today only a foolish or desperate man would burn down a patch of forest without a permit, and the authorities are no longer handing those out. “The government is watching too closely now. If you clear land then you get fined, and the fine is worth more than the land you clear,” says the town’s former mayor Genes Oliveira Rios.

Locals know they have been vilified both elsewhere in Brazil and abroad for their role in clearing the forest. Not that they are apologising – or think they have anything to apologise for. Gathering in the spartan office of the town’s cattle trader to do deals and swap news, they dismiss the green movement as a plot by rich countries to halt Brazil’s march to become the world’s food superpower – and demand to know what other country in the world still preserves as much of its native cover as Brazil.

“If I wanted to hide with Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest today I wouldn’t be able to. It is gone. Here half our lands are still forest while you in Europe have already destroyed most of yours. Yet the European Union is paying for environmental groups to come here and demand we reforest our farms. We should demand that Europe reforest its territory and leave us alone,” says rancher Plinio Queiroz Junqueira. Men like Queiroz resent being branded environmental terrorists, pointing out that they were brought to the region precisely so they would cut down the forest.

Brazilian governments long feared that the largely uninhabited Amazon was vulnerable to covetous outsiders, and in the 1970s the military dictatorship decided it was time to settle it. Under the banners “Integrate or Forfeit” and “A Land without Men for Men without Land” it handed out chunks of the forest for a pittance to anyone who wanted them. The only condition? To secure their claim settlers must clear half their property of jungle.

The scheme sparked a wave of migration from southern Brazil into the interior. Smallholders could sell up in states such as Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná and carve out far larger holdings in Mato Grosso and Pará, farther north. They struggled up the BR-163 and set to work with bulldozers and chainsaws, carving settlements out of the jungle.

“I heard the stories about foreign powers wanting Amazonia, so we felt proud to be securing it for Brazil. We were protecting something that is ours,” says Jorge Marcantonio, a quiet, courteous rancher who takes an afternoon off to show me around Castanheira’s back roads. He is one of the many who sold up his small farm in Paraná and moved to Castanheira. But then in the 1990s he started to hear that burning the forest was harmful. “At first I didn’t believe it; we were making the region fertile.” But gradually it dawned on the region’s settlers that, whatever their own thoughts, the wider world was increasingly frowning on their activities. Now that their government is, too, they feel betrayed – “turned from patriots into criminals”, according to Marcantonio.

And all without breaking the law, say landowners such as former mayor Oliveira. “We understand that half our land must be forest, and in Castanheira most landowners comply with this. But the law is confused, and our biggest preoccupation is that the government could come in and demand that instead of 50 percent we preserve 80 percent. The cost of that would bankrupt us all,” says the owner of almost 7,000 hectares (of which, he is keen to emphasise, half is jungle: “Where in Europe do they preserve as much as we do here?”).

Ranchers are afraid the government will bend to international pressure and order them to reforest chunks of their land. But the government clampdown across the region is probably more driven by domestic disquiet at deforestation and the realisation that forest burning is the single largest source of the country’s carbon emissions, which it has committed to slash as part of the search for a global climate-change agreement.

It is long overdue. In the years of the government’s absence a free-for-all took hold in the Amazon. With the pioneers who founded towns like Castanheira came loggers to whom they would sell the valuable timber on their land before burning the rest. But many unscrupulous loggers did not confine themselves to legal timber and took what they wanted, buying permits for their plunder from corrupt environmental-protection agents.

Many ranchers cleared far more of their land than the 50 per cent required by law. Others cleared areas they did not even have a title for. Then there was a gold rush that saw hundreds of thousands of the poorest Brazilians pour into the region; they used high-pressure hoses to blast away the topsoil in search of the precious metal, creating an environmental disaster viewable from space.

The gold craze has abated, and since the government moved to exert itself illegal logging can no longer be carried out in broad daylight.

On the bus from Castanheira to the city of Sinop, one of the most successful boom towns on the BR-163, we pass a truck hauling a double trailer loaded with massive tree trunks. It is 2am on a dirt road fringed by impenetrable forest, and the truck has its lights off. At the next rest stop we see similar loads parked up: illegal timber is now moved at night, to try to avoid detection. Often these loads have valid permits, but if they can make it to the mill unobserved then the permits can be reused.

Even though illegal logging continues, many law-breaking timber mills have been closed along the BR-163, with towns suffering harsh economic times as laid-off workers move away. Houses with for-sale signs or just boarded up and abandoned are a common site. In the past five years the amount of timber taken from the Brazilian Amazon has halved. Near the border of Mato Grosso and Pará, in the town of Guarantã do Norte, the mill belonging to Antônio Cozer is still open for business, though he, too, has had to lay off workers, as new restrictions have limited the amount of timber he can extract from the forest.

He is clearly suspicious of a foreigner asking questions about his operation, but, given a chance to defend his industry, he is quickly into his stride. “We are being made to carry the blame for what has happened to the forest, but we only take mature trees and leave the forest standing. It is ranchers who raze and burn it, not loggers. We know the forest needs preserving, and so our work is ecologically correct.” That his mill is still open means Cozer can make such a claim with confidence. The same could not be said for many of those that have shut down.

But the Brazilian government is intent on promoting what it says is sustainable Amazonian logging. It plans to license out preservation areas in the region to companies for their sustainable development. This will allow them to take out mature trees for timber, a controversial policy among environmentalists. But locals in Guarantã do Norte are sceptical about whether the scheme will benefit them. “All the companies bidding for these contracts are big outsiders. This is not designed to benefit us here, that’s for sure,” says Cozer.

Leaving Guarantã and heading north, the BR-163 crosses into the state of Pará and becomes a dirt track. Here the jungle feels closer, more omnipresent than in Mato Grosso, where it always seems to be just a presence on the horizon. From the top of the Serra do Cachimbo hills you see it stretch out in front like a dark-green ocean, and for hours the bus rolls through wilderness. It is not surprising to learn that it was here Brazil planned to test its nuclear bombs before abandoning the programme in the 1980s.

And yet the forest breaks again and we reach the cattle town of Novo Progresso, long ranked near the top of Brazil’s deforestation tables and once nicknamed the Queen of Timber. But it, too, is suffering from the region’s new order. Like those of Castanheira, Sinop and Guarantã do Norte, its founders came from the south, modern-day pioneers who saw themselves as planting Brazil’s flag in wilderness and who now wait to see what future their government decides for them.

They have been told that their days of clearing the forest are over, and so they are abandoning their low-intensity farming, which relied on limitless supplies of land, and, like their peers in Castanheira, looking to boost productivity on land cleared already – just 13 per cent of the municipality.

Local officials and ranchers hope a government plan to pave the Pará stretch of the BR-163 will make it easier to export their produce through the port of Santarém; they also hope to have their beef certified as environmentally sound, so it can be sold internationally.

They view it as a quid pro quo for the halt to clearances, but one that would require much re-education abroad, where Amazon beef is associated with environmental catastrophe.

But still the fear lingers that the outside world wants to force them from their homes, an idea reinforced when a leading official in Brazil’s environment ministry once told them that if they wanted to remain cattle ranchers they would have to move out of Amazonia.

“The government doesn’t understand us and Europeans do not know our reality. We are not leaving this land,” says local community leader Lincoln Brasil Queiroz. “We are here now 30 years. Our whole lives are here. We have buried our parents here, and some of us have buried our children. We are linked to this land emotionally. We now are tradition.”

‘We will cut off white man’s arms’

The pioneers along the BR-163 say the Amazon they first encountered was a wilderness, “a land without men for men without land” in the phrase of the military government that encouraged them to settle the region.

But it has been occupied for centuries by indigenous tribes, and today Brazilian Amazonia contains more than half of the country’s native peoples, an estimated 250,000 in 80 ethnic groups, including several still “uncontacted” tribes.

Twenty per cent of Brazil’s Amazon is reserved for them. But, with increased penetration by settlers, conflict has flared up, and Indians have reserved a special hostility for miners, the most daring, desperate and violent of the new arrivals.

In Novo Progresso tribal leaders from the Pucanu people have gathered from their far-flung villages to discuss their dealings with the “white man’s government”. Speaking through a translator, elder Ytum-Ti of the Cubekokre tribe says for now his community is untroubled in the forest.

“From here it is an hour’s flight to my village, so it is hard to reach, and we have no problems with ranchers invading our territory. But I am worried. The young are learning white-man ways, and we hear the paving of the road will bring more people from outside to the area. If one day a white enters our lands and will not leave, we will cut off his arms and send him back to where he came from.”