Exploitation of Amazon may lead to extinction

Press, 26 February 1987, Page 41

Exploitation of Amazon may lead to extinction

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BERND DEBUSMANN

NZPA-Reuter Brazil The scale of it boggles the mind and baffles planners. It tickles the fancy of “thirik-big” industrialists and lures flamboyant adventurers, ragged peasants and earnest missionaries.

The Amazon, the world’s largest rain forest, stretches more than five million square kilometres from the foothills of the Andes to the Atlantic and straddles nine countries.

It holds the biggest known mineral deposits on Earth, including tonnes of gold, and its huge river system lends itself to hydro-electric dams. As governments and private enterprise move in to exploit the riches, the rain forests of the Amazon are falling at a rate which has stung scientists into warning that the jungle with its rich fauna and flora is headed for extinction.

Amazonian development has also had a harsh impact on native Indians, some of them still with a Stone Age culture, living in scattered communities throughout the Amazon basin.

According to experts the forest is being cut at the rate of a football field every minute. In Brazil alone, every three years an area the size of Switzerland is stripped of trees.

Such statistics are difficult to imagine for anyone flying across Amazonia, looking down hour after hour on an endless expanse of dark green vegetation only occasionally broken by the red, pencilstraight line of a road or a bald patch where a mining or colonisation

project is under-way. There are only two big cities in the Amazon, both in Brazil — Belem, on the mouth of the Amazon River, and Manaus, 1600 km to the west.

But at the present rate of destruction, an area roughly the size of West Germany will have been stripped bare by the year 2000.

Planners trying to reconcile conflicting needs of economic development and ecological preservation face tough questions in the nations of the Amazon: Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guiana, and Surinam.

"What is more important, jobs and a living for hungry people or protecting trees, plants and monkeys?” said Alfredo Oliveira, the owner of a small transport company who plans to move to the Brazilian state of Rondonia.

On the western fringe of Amazonia, Rondonia is a classic example of Amazonian development and the difficulties controlling it.

Progress and destruction followed the road. In September 1984, paving was completed for the BR-364 highway connecting the Rondonia state capital, Porto Velho, with the town of Cuiaba and from there to the road system of Sao Paulo state. As construction gangs moved west, new settlements sprang up. Once the work was completed, the trickle of immigrants swelled to a stream.

Some were lured by the prospect of jobs on a big hydro-electric project near Porto Velho. Others came to settle on land

parcelled out by Government agents. Thousands were drawn by gold prospecting. Some 300 immigrants flooded in each day. As settlers took over land, they felled and burned trees, using the ashes as fertilisers.

Torrential rains washed the nutrients away, reducing the yield of the land in a few seasons and forcing the farmer to move on or turn the area to pasture. “Along with the immigrants,” said a municipal official in Porto Velho, “have come violence, drugs, and prostitution.”

While Rondonia has been struggling to cope with the adverse side-ef-fects of good road links, neighbouring Bolivia has been pressing ahead with the construction of a 1150 km road to connect the capital, La Paz, with the Amazonian towns of Trinidad and Santa Clara.

Scheduled for completion by 1989, the road project will be followed by the construction of several dams to provide energy for new industries in l Bolivia.

In Colombia, whose Amazon rain forest has been shrinking by about one per cent a year over the last 20 years, officials admit that economic development has priority over preservation. According to Roberto Franco, of the Colombian National Institute of Renewable Resources, um controlled colonisation of the nation’s Amazonian forests has led to soil erosion and the disappearance of many plants and animals.

He said there were no controls on the activity of

some 15,000 settlers in the Macaranes region, the area richest in mineral resources and in fauna and flora. But Colombian officials said that while they were trying to control migration to the region, the chief task was the link with the national economy through roads and extended services.

Some mineral discoveries in Amazonia were so gigantic that they dwarfed ecological concerns, for example in Carajas, where the mountains rise 7000 m above the canopy of the jungle 550 km south-west of Belem. In 1966, a mineral-com-pany pilot who landed his helicopter atop one of the mountains was baffled by the instruments’ behaviour, as needles and gauges were swinging wildly.

His report led to the discovery of one of the world’s most remarkable mineral deposits. The President of Brazil, Jose Sarney, recently said, “Carajas (has) 18 billion tonnes of iron ore, as well as huge quantities of silver, nickel, niobium, manganese, and bauxite.”

With resources of that size and Brazil’s need to export to service its 110-billion-dollar foreign debt, there was no contest in the race between development and ecological concerns. Brazil constructed a huge iron ore mine which began production last year.

The mine’s output was carried to ports on the Atlantic along a newlybuilt 900 km railway. Near the mine, two cement factories were under construction.