Graft Driving Amazon Deforestation - Campaigners
Date: 06-Jun-05
Country: BRAZIL
Author: Axel Bugge
More than 90 people were arrested in the sweep launched by Federal authorities on Thursday. Nearly half were from the government's environment protection agency Ibama, including its chief for Mato Grosso.
The state's environment secretary, Moacir Pires, was also arrested. As a result he was suspended by Mato Grosso governor Blairo Maggi -- who is also the world's largest soybean farmer and is himself accused by environmentalists of hastening the exploitation of the Amazon.
Government officials said the crackdown was evidence of its seriousness in beating corruption. But activists said graft by public environment authorities, especially Ibama, has been legendary for years and it was high time something was done if near-record Amazon destruction was to be reversed.
"These things have been going on with impunity, everybody knew that. What changed was the decision to make arrests," said Roberto Smeraldi, director of Friends of the Earth in Brazil.
Police said the sweep was aimed at the Amazon's biggest illegal logging operation, which has cut down an estimated $370 million of Amazon timber since the early 1990s.
Arrested officials are accused of running a widespread scheme of falsifying permits to transport illegally cut wood -- a practice environmentalists said was common across the Amazon.
Destruction of the world's largest tropical forest reached its second-highest level on record last year, or 10,088 square miles (26,130 sq km) -- an area larger than the US state of New Jersey, according to government figures. The Amazon is home to up to 30 percent of the planet's animal and plant species.
Much of the deforestation focus has been on Mato Grosso state because it accounted for 48 percent of all Amazon destruction last year and has a fast-growing farm sector, which has spread into new areas of deforested land.
In 2002 Friends of the Earth produced a study which found that about two thirds of the cost of wood bought by sawmills in Para, Rondonia and Mato Grosso states was due to corruption, Smeraldi said.
Those costs would basically go to pay off officials to forge documents to make illegal timber 'legal'.
"The corruption involving loggers and public officials in Mato Grosso is not an isolated case," said Paulo Adario, Greenpeace's Amazon director.
Environmentalists said that the real challenge for Brazil's government was to tackle the root causes of corruption at agencies like Ibama, such as low pay and dangerous work in remote places where loggers or farmers can wield great power.
"It's not surprising that you find corruption in places like Ibama," said David Cleary, who heads The Nature Conservancy's Amazon program. "The point is more to understand the reasons for it and then to do something about it."
If Amazon deforestation is to be turned back, environmentalists said, the key thing was to take advantage of the political will created by the latest destruction figures.
"I see this as the beginning of an investigation that should reach a much bigger scale," Smeraldi said. "The important thing is that this goes forward now so that momentum is not lost."
(Reporting by Axel Bugge, Editing by Alistair Scrutton)