Brazil launches 'war operation' on mahogany loggers
Date: 05-Feb-02
Country: BRAZIL
Author: Axel Bugge
Ibama's "Operation Rescue" aims to recover an estimated $16 million worth of the wood waiting at ports to be shipped abroad and to set up road and river controls in the Amazon to block the smuggling routes of the loggers' lucrative trade.
"With this effort we are prioritizing the question of illegal mahogany because society no longer accepts this type of activity that damages all society," Ibama President Hamilton Nobre Casara said.
The operation, which will involve the police and army as well, aims to patrol major mahogany smuggling routes - most of them along rivers or roads out of the Amazon - using helicopters, planes and boats. There will also be reinforcement of controls at major Brazilian highways.
Another part of the plan will be the seizure of up to 225,000 square feet (21,000 cubic meters) of cut mahogany that has been detected at sites in the south of the Amazon state of Para. Located deep in the forest, transporting the mahogany out on river barges could take up to 80 days.
Environmental groups fear that at current logging rates, Brazil's Amazon mahogany reserves could disappear in eight years.
PLANET'S PLANT LIFE
The world's largest tropical forest, which covers an area larger than all of Western Europe, is home to up to 50 percent of the planet's plant and animal life and is already disappearing at unsustainable rates, environmentalists fear.
Amid increasing evidence that mahogany is one of the main woods suffering from Amazon deforestation, Brazil banned mahogany logging last October. Only a handful of companies with permits guaranteeing replanting can now cut down mahogany.
The ban came after intense lobbying by environmental group Greenpeace, which had obtained pictures and video images of large clearings in mahogany forests on Amazon Indian land.
Worth up to $1,500 per 10.76 square feet (one square meter), mahogany is the most expensive wood in Brazil and smugglers make hefty profits by shipping it abroad to markets like the United States, Great Britain and Japan.
Casara traveled to the United States this week to ask U.S. authorities for help in preventing illegal mahogany shipments from Brazil entering the U.S.
A recent study by the World Wildlife Fund found that 4.23 million cubic feet (120,000 cubic meters) of mahogany from Latin America reaches global markets every year, mainly from Brazil, Bolivia and Peru.