|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 06/03
Foreign Policy
The Taming of the Amazon
By Elizabeth Johnson*
Estudos Avançados (Advanced Studies), Vol. 16, No. 45, May/August 2002
Vol. 16, No. 46, August/December 2002, São Paulo
In the early 1970s, Gen. Emílio Médici, then president of Brazil, launched the multimillion-dollar Trans-Amazon Highway, boasting he would tame the forest and bring civilization to the country’s most undeveloped region. Today, most of the highway is barely passable. But the costly failures of the past have not killed the dream of dominating the Amazon. Late last year, Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo and then Brazilian leader Fernando Henrique Cardoso inaugurated the first leg of the “Highway to the Pacific,” which will link the western Amazon with the Pacific Ocean. Under a dense canopy of trees, Cardoso and Toledo, like Médici, celebrated the arrival of “progress” in an area that some argue is best left undisturbed.
The Amazon basin covers more than 60 percent of Brazil and shares 9,000 kilometers of border with seven countries. It is one of the world’s most biologically diverse regions, home to 55,000 plant species, 428 mammal species, and 1,600 bird species. But deforestation and environmental degradation are increasing; 14 percent of the forest area has been lost since the 1970s, compared with only 2 percent between 1498 and 1970.
Brazilians view Amazonia as a symbol of national pride and their economically prosperous future. But despite isolated efforts to preserve the region’s unique environment, Amazonia remains an afterthought to the Brazilian government.
Environmentalists and foreign policy specialists fear Brazil’s policies leave the area vulnerable to continued threats from poachers, miners, and drug traffickers. Such critics also question the environmental effects of government programs to increase economic development (by aiding soy farmers and ecotourism) and to alleviate poverty in the region.
The complex problem of reducing poverty and respecting native communities while preserving the environment is the subject of two recent issues of Estudos Avançados, a bimonthly journal published by the Instituto de Estudos Avançados, a think tank associated with the University of São Paulo.
People from outside the region have long viewed the Amazon as a natural resource to be exploited, argues Violeta Refkalefsky Loureiro, a scholar at the Federal University of the Amazonian state of Pará. From colonial Indian slaving expeditions to the recent programs to relocate landless peasants, the Amazon has always given more to its colonizers than they have offered in return. Loureiro calls for a development model that respects both the region’s peoples and resources—such as creating protected areas for local communities practicing sustainable forest management.
Guerrillas and illegal mining and logging expeditions are genuine threats to the region, but Pará-based journalist Lúcio Flávio Pinto argues the Brazilian government has exaggerated “national insecurity” to militarize the Amazon. Exhibit A is the Amazon Vigilance System (Sivam), an electronic surveillance and air-traffic-control system. After canceling the open bidding process, the government awarded the $1.4 billion contract for the program to U.S.-based Raytheon. Without any public debate, Sivam—originally designed to control deforestation—has become the focal point of Brazil’s military operations, involving more than 20,000 troops that occasionally expel paramilitary guerrillas from inside Brazil’s porous borders. This program, Pinto argues, has threatened Brazilian sovereignty by giving foreign powers, particularly the United States, access to strategic information about the region.
Sivam is just another example of policies imposed by outsiders, either from Brasília or Washington, Pinto writes, who fail to consider local interests or knowledge. The military runs the program with limited participation of scientists, precluding the possibility of true preservation. Likewise, Pinto maintains that Brazilian universities and industry have developed technologies that could replace Raytheon’s and that the money spent on Sivam and the knowledge gained through the program must remain in Brazilian hands.
Will Brazil’s new administration end the cycle of exploitation? Environmentalists have welcomed the appointment of Marina Silva as President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s new environment minister. (Silva, daughter of a rubber tapper, worked alongside Chico Mendes, the slain union leader who organized workers to protest the cutting of trees in the Amazon by cattle ranchers.) But she will face difficult decisions that will pit the interests of local communities against national development plans, such as the $6.6 billion Belo Monte hydroelectric project, which will flood more than 150 square miles of one of the Amazon’s most diverse ecosystems. If Silva sides with locals against the project, her greatest challenge will be to convince Lula that allocating precious resources to protect the Amazon is a worthy investment.
Elizabeth Johnson is a historian and freelance journalist based in Sáo Paulo.