Timber giants eye the Amazon region

Timber giants eye the Amazon region

Asian timber giants are moving into the Amazon, raising fears
of massive damage to the world's largest tropical rain forest.
Haider Rizvi reports for Inter Press Service.

WASHINGTON: Their appetite for profits unsated by massive
deforestation in Southeast Asia, multinational timber companies
have now set their eyes on South America's tropical forests.

Equipped with advanced technology and huge financial power, a
number of timber barons have already moved into the Amazon region
in Brazil, Guyana, and Suriname, raising fears among
environmental groups that these ventures will result in
unprecedented damage to the world's largest rain forest.

In Brazil, two Malaysia-based giant companies -- the TWK group
and Samling Organization -- await a green light from authorities
for large-scale logging concessions, while the Canada-based
Buchanan Group continues pressuring the Guyanese government for
the same.

The Buchanan Group is also seeking logging concessions in
Suriname, where it is competing with the Berjaya Group from
Malaysia, Suri Atlantic from Indonesia, and two Chinese
companies.

Logging industry analysts warn that the concessions offered by
Suriname to Asian loggers will cause social and environmental
upheaval, as the annual loss of hundreds of millions of dollars
in revenues given away as tax incentives.

Environmental groups trying to resist the implementation of
multinationals' logging plans say clear-cutting and
indiscriminate logging in the Amazon cannot be ruled out, despite
recent official moves to strengthen forestry laws in Brazil and
Guyana.

"These companies have an extremely bad record of environmental
devastation in Asia," said Nigel Sizer of the U.S.-based World
Resources Institute. "They are very secretive about their plans."

Sizer and other environmental researchers say TWK, Samling and
other Asian timber giants are chiefly responsible for the
destruction of forests in the east Malaysian state of Sarawak and
tropical forests in Cambodia.

If permitted, activists say, TWK and Samling will log millions
of acres of virgin forests in the Brazilian Amazon, in the
process causing massive displacement of indigenous people and
irreversible damage to the environment.

TWK has already bought more than one million hectares of
forests in Brazil along the Jurua River and over 200,000 hectares
along the Uatuma River, driving local loggers away from the
industrial competition, according to the U.S-based Environmental
Defense Fund (EDF).

"These companies are financially so powerful and
technologically so advanced that their local competitors are
almost terrified," remarked Steve Shortsmen of the EDF, who
recently returned from Brazil.

The Brazilian Amazon is the world's largest remaining tropical
rain forest. Home to 20 percent of the animal and plant species
in the world, it supplies wood, fiber, game, fish, gums, oils,
and genes.

Logging industry monitors say the presence of mahogany trees
is one of the major factors motivating multinational loggers to
turn to Amazon. "Mahogany is now the most expensive lumber in the
world market," said Shortsmen, estimating that one cubic meter
mahogany sells for a thousand dollars.

"Pressure on mahogany has grown faster in recent years because
of the depletion of Southeast Asian forests," he added. "That's
why Asian lumber companies are increasing their presence in the
Amazon region."

Nearly half of the mahogany cut in Brazil is exported. In
1993, Brazil exported nearly 200,000 cubic metres of mahogany
planks, with the United States and Britanian receiving 80 percent
of the total exports.

Brazilian authorities concede that they have failed to control
tropical lumber exports from the Amazon region and that illegal
logging is rampant despite a two-year ban on mahogany logging
imposed by the government in July.

Environmental groups in Brazil are currently pressuring the
government to pass legislation that would place a five-year ban
on the logging and sale of mahogany. Experts say the demand for
mahogany has intensified with the depletion of Brazil's Atlantic
forest and, as a result, lumber production in the Amazon jumped
from just 14 percent of the country's total in 1976 to 70 percent
in 1989.

Recently, the Brazilian National Space Research Institute
(INPE) released a report that revealed that during the past four
years deforestation in the Amazon increased by 34 percent, and it
warned that the trend will continue if no steps are taken to
implement more sustainable logging practices.

In addition to the harm done to indigenous Amazonian
communities, logging has brought a dangerous potential for
genetic erosion and the extinction of plant species, experts say.
Citing findings of a recent report published by the Brazilian
Agricultural Research Company, they warn that mahogany may become
extinct in the entire Amazon region within the next 30 years.

"Beyond the risk to the species' own survival, each mahogany
tree felled in the middle of the forest brings an average of 27
other trees down with it," the report says, adding that
mahogany's future will not be different from that of rosewood and
brazilwood, both of which are now nearly extinct.

"We are extremely concerned about it," says Debra Delvin of
the U.S.-based Amazon Coalition, an umbrella group comprising a
number of environmental and indigenous rights organizations.
"Brazil must not repeat the Asian experience. It's dangerous."

The Geneva-based World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF)
expressed similar concerns, describing the Asian companies'
latest ventures as a "major threat to tropical rain forests and
their tremendous biodiversity and eco-system function."

-- IPS