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