A natural wonder teeming with life, Brazil's Pantanal has been largely untouched for thousands of years. Now widespread logging could destroy it. Tom Hennigan reports
Brazil's Pantanal is one of the world's lesser-known natural wonders, a hidden sanctuary for the planet's wildlife but one facing a rapid demise as man's encroachment threatens to wreck its unique ecology.
Spread out across the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul and reaching into parts of neighbouring Bolivia and Paraguay, the area gets its name from the Portuguese word for swamp, which is what the first European explorers thought they had stumbled across as they pushed deeper into the New World in the 16th century.
But unlike a swamp, which is permanently wet, what they had found was a huge internal delta which, with the arrival of the annual rainy season, floods to create the world's largest wetlands.
A remote region, much of which is still inaccessible, the Pantanal sits in the upper basin of the Paraguay River, one of the great waterways that runs through the heart of the continent before flowing into the River Plate estuary between Argentina and Uruguay. A geological depression in the heart of South America, this upper basin drains all the higher land around it.
During the annual rainy season, which runs from December to March, the flow of water from the surrounding highlands into the basin is far greater than the flow of water out, causing rivers to break their banks, turning this low-lying plain into a vast expanse of islands, lakes and flooded forest more than twice the size of Ireland.
As these waters, teeming with fish, start to recede with the arrival of the dry season in April, the fish become trapped in shrinking lakes and pools, making them easy prey for the birds and animals that crowd into the region.
This abundant source of food makes the Pantanal one of nature's most intensely populated regions and one where the wildlife is openly on display for the visitor, unlike the often densely forested Amazon to the north.
Along the water's edge throughout the region, caiman - the small, timid South American version of the alligator - can be found sunning themselves along with capybaras, a large water rodent whose old, shaggy-dog looks makes it hard to imagine he is related to the rat. More elusive is the jaguar, the big cat young local Indians by tradition must hunt in order to become men. But the stars of the show are the birds - the Pantanal hosts some of the world's most exotic species. Among them is the Guinness mascot, the toucan. There is the comical looking jabiru stork which looks about as likely to fly as a penguin until it opens its two metre wingspan and turns into a powerful flier and also the inky blue hyacinth macaw, the biggest and most endangered member of the macaw family.
Within the Pantanal are found species from the Amazon, close by on the Bolivian side of the border, as well as from the dry Chaco scrub to the south in Paraguay, and the cerrado, the savannah-like high plain that covers much of Brazil.
'THE PANTANAL IS a mixture of various ecosystems and because of this it functions as a wildlife refuge, especially as its inaccessibility and seasonal flooding, along with the intense heat and mosquitoes, mean that people have not viewed it as an area ripe for economic development," says George Camargo, an ecologist working in the Pantanal with environmental group Conservation International.
But this is changing as Brazil's agribusiness and industrial sectors increasingly see the Pantanal as ripe for development. In an extensive recent study using satellite images, Conservation International warned that the original surface vegetation of the Pantanal - mainly forest - is being cleared at a far faster rate than previously thought and that if sustained would mean the clearing of all the original cover within 49 years, an outcome that would have devastating consequences for the region.
Low-intensity cattle ranching has existed in the Pantanal since the arrival of the Portuguese. But now native habitats are being destroyed by loggers clearing areas for new ranches, putting increased pressure on wildlife already victim to excessive and often illegal hunting and fishing.
These new ranches, many of them owned by absentee landlords and syndicates from Brazil's big cities, hope to overcome the historically low returns from Pantanal ranching by clearing and grazing land more intensely. Many of these new ranches are cleared in co- operation with small charcoal operators, who move in and slowly burn the cleared wood in ovens to make charcoal for nearby pig iron smelters.
Once the charcoal producers have cleared an area they move on while the ranchers move their herd in, often planting alien African species of grass they consider better for grazing and which have started to push out the traditional Pantanal grasses. The current scale of the charcoal operators is relatively small, but that could soon change. In Corumbá near the Bolivian border, EBX, a Brazilian firm, is seeking a licence to open a large iron smelter which will be fuelled by charcoal.
The firm was recently expelled from Bolivia after trying to open the plant on that side of the frontier. The Bolivian government said the company failed to meet the most basic environmental standards.
Local environmentalists say the size of the proposed plant means it will require an amount of charcoal that poses a grave threat to the native forests of the Pantanal. "If EBX gets the go-ahead the estimate of 49 years by Conservation International can be reduced by up to 20 years," says Alcides Farias of Rios Vivos, a coalition of green groups dedicated to defending the ecosystems along the Paraguay River.
Brazilian governments have long talked passionately about preserving their natural wonders but have refused to back words with money. Brazil's environment ministry receives one of the lowest budgets of all government departments. The Pantanal also receives far less protection than the more famous Amazon. Whereas in the Amazon the law mandates that all private landowners preserve 80 per cent of their land, the figure in the Pantanal is just 20 per cent. And far more land is in private hands in the Pantanal than the Amazon, home to some of the world's largest protected areas.
IBAMA, BRAZIL'S ENVIRONMENTAL protection agency, lacks a single aircraft in the states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, an area more than twice the size of France and which includes much of the Pantanal.
"We receive tip-offs about illegal logging but often by the time we arrive the deed has already been done. We cannot do preventative work because we do not have the means to do so," says Nereu Fontes, head of Ibama in Mato Grosso do Sul. But even if all activity were to be halted in the Pantanal the area would still undergo damaging changes due to the arrival of intensive agriculture on the high cerrado that partially surrounds the basin.
Mato Grosso means thick forest in Portuguese, but in the past 50 years most of the two states has been felled for cattle grazing, corn and soy. Without the forest cover the rainy season is washing more of the cerrado topsoil into the Pantanal basin, silting up the Paraguay River's tributaries. Some have gone from a depth of five metres to just one metre, pushing the waters further out in the rainy season resulting in the increased erosion of riverbanks which provide a vital habitat for much of the wildlife.
Brazil's governments have passed laws requiring cerrado farmers to start re-foresting at least 20 per cent of their land in a bid to slow the build-up of sediment in the Pantanal and avoid turning the cerrado into a dustbowl. But enforcement is almost non-existent.
"We have to respect the minimum taxes nature is imposing on us," says Vito Comar of Mato Grosso do Sul's Institute for the Environment and Development, or Imad. "The environment is already saying enough in many areas." In order to prevent the destruction of the Pantanal, environmentalists are calling for greater action from the government.
"We need greater incentives for private landowners to conserve their land," says Elaine Pinto of Conservation International. "Currently landlords who try conservation are seen as mad, willingly limiting their income. We have to change this using ecotourism and other means."
But most of all environmentalists want the government to enforce the laws already on the books. "Brazil has beautiful environmental laws, very well framed," says Senhora Pinto. "But they are not implemented. Economic development is always prioritised but we have to recognise the value of the environment as well and acknowledge that it is the environment that sustains us."
• On Monday, Tom Hennigan reports on the Guarani Indians of Pantanal, who face violent ranchers and an indifferent state as they fight to have their ancestral lands returned to them