Index:

–Brazil: 31) Google helps Surui tribe that lives on a 600,000 acre reservation, 32) Agreement to ban soya purchases from amazon, 33) How poverty and bad governance destroys the forest, 34) Scientist study species diversity in regrowth, 35) Cool Earth is bewildered to discover it has become the enemy,
–Peru: 36) Small farmers are not the problem, timber giants are!

Brazil:

31) Google is providing Google Earth software to help a tribe living in Brazil to map the Amazon rainforest and to show where there is illegal logging and gold mining.
The Surui tribe lives on a 600,000 acre reservation in Brazil. Members have already mastered Global Positioning System devices to map their land. Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui figures that many of the 1,200 members will soon be adept at computers and satellite internet connections to make use of Google Earth. Some got their first introduction to Google Earth Sunday night. The chief said he got the idea after seeing evidence of deforestation on his reservation on Google Earth. Another benefit to the Suruis is that they will be able to chronicle their lives and describe their culture on the internet. The chief said he is hoping that his tribe will receive donations of computers and other equipment to help them save their culture as well as the rainforest. Some 40 years ago, the Surui tribe was using stone tools. Indian reservations are the best preserved areas of the Amazon region which has lost about 20 per cent of the rainforest to loggers and ranchers in recent years. Approximately 400,000 Brazilian Indians live on reservations. http://www.ktvu.com/news/16638798/detail.html

32) Brazil’s new environment minister reached an agreement with the grain processing industry to ban purchases of soy from deforested Amazon until July 2009, winning praise from environmentalists. “This same initiative will be extended to two other sectors — the timber sector and the beef sector,” Environment Minister Carlos Minc said while praising the grain industry and non-governmental organizations for a “pioneering” initiative. Environmentalists called Minc’s initiative essential to the protection of the world’s largest rainforest. Deforestation in the region quickened in the past months as world grain prices continue to set record highs. The moratorium is a commitment by the local Vegetable Oils Industry Association (Abiove), which includes big crushers such as Cargill Inc, Bunge Ltd (BG.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), ADM Co (ADM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Louis Dreyfus, and the Grain Exporters Association (Anec) to extend the expiring, one-year ban that began in July of 2006. Rising prices are reviving the local soy sector out of its worst crisis in decades. In 2004 through 2006, the rise in the real BRBY against the dollar and production costs like fuel and fertilizers pushed many producers to the brink of insolvency. Brazil is the world’s second largest soy producer after the United States. Abiove and Anec control about 94 percent of Brazil’s soy trade. “The decision today is very important as it shows a leading sector in Brazilian agribusiness can guarantee food production without the need to cut down one more hectare of Amazon,” Paulo Adario, Greenpeace Amazon campaign director, said in a note. http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN17348316

33) Brazil is an excellent example of how poverty and inappropriate government policies have led to massive deforestation in the Amazon. Beginning in the mid-1960s, large numbers of landless peasants began moving into the region in search of land and employment. The government attracted them to the region by providing generous tax and credit incentives. The settlers found that the soils in the region were fragile and could withstand intensive cultivation and livestock management for only a few years. By the 1970s deforestation in parts of the Amazon, particularly Rondonia, had reached alarming proportions. By 1998, almost 25 percent of Rondonia’s tropical forest had been cleared. Despite the vast amounts of forest cleared and the numerous agricultural and ranching operations in the region, Amazonia is still desperately poor and contributes only 3 percent of Brazil’s national income. In 1988 alone, Brazil may have burned as many as 20 million hectares of forest and scrub, an area the size of Nebraska, to clear the land for farming and cattle ranching. The fire caused massive air pollution and probably accounted for about one-tenth of all carbon dioxide emissions from human activities during 1988. Brazil our neighbour has always experienced extensive flooding with about 20 percent of its land area under water during an average year. http://www.stabroeknews.com/?p=14946

34) The Jari landholdings have no shortage of large-scale disturbance. Peres, who grew up in the Brazilian Amazon, had visited the plantations as a teenager. Looking for a new research project in 2002, he recalled their vast size and set up shop there to assess the local biodiversity. Working primarily with his Ph.D. students Gardner and Jos Barlow, Peres initially surveyed a half-dozen major kinds of animals. But as collaborations flourished with Brazilian taxonomists from the Goeldi Natural History Museum in Belém, Brazil, that number swelled to 16 groups of vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants.Half the battle was logistical: It was a struggle to keep the team’s cars running given the daily 200 kilometers of off-road driving between field sites. Another strain was cutting transects through dense thickets of regrowth–hot, humid forests dominated by 10-meter-tall palms. “It was a crazy few years in the field,” recalls Barlow, now at Lancaster University in the U.K. Unlike many other tropical researchers, the team was able to set up multiple field sites, five each of primary forest, secondary forest, and Eucalyptus plantations. The sites were also extremely large–averaging 26 square kilometers for the secondary forest plots, up to 1000 times larger than field plots in previous studies. Large plots allowed the team to minimize so-called edge effects. If animals spotted by observers are simply visiting the secondary forest from nearby primary forest, they will inflate the estimate of biodiversity that would exist, say, in a forest tract that is isolated in “a sea of soy,” Gardner explains. “We maximized our ability to understand what lives in the landscape.” And because the primary forest study sites are both large and surrounded by many more hectares of intact forest, they could get an accurate baseline of prelogging biodiversity. The study’s good news was that the secondary forests restored some of the ecosystem functions of the primary forests. The rate of decomposition of fallen leaves, which replenishes the soil, was about the same in primary and secondary forests (it was much lower in the plantations), the team reported with Leandro Ferreira of the Goeldi Museum in the August 2007 issue of Forest Ecology and Management. But for many creatures, the news was bad (see chart). Secondary forests had less than 40% of the bird species found in the Jari primary forest, and those present were those that prefer disturbed areas. http://www.mydeadspace.cn/blog/?p=237

35) Cool Earth, a British environmental group, has declared itself to be “bewildered” at reports that the Brazilian authorities were investigating the activities of its founder Johan Eliasch for allegedly urging foreigners to buy up the Amazon rainforest. Hopelessly naive might be a better description. Eliasch, a Swedish-born businessman, is a former deputy treasurer of the Conservative party, and now serves as Gordon Brown’s special representative for deforestation. His organisation, Cool Earth, invites people to donate money to “secure one area of land that would otherwise be sold to loggers and ranchers and to price deforestation out of the market”. The charity says that it puts its money into a local trust and that it “employs local people to do the work, helping them to get income from the forest without cutting it down, and make sure the rainforest is worth more standing than cut down”. “For as little as £70 you can protect a whole acre” it tells potential donors, while £35 protects half an acre. On Monday one of Brazil’s main newspapers reported that the police and intelligence services were investigating Eliasch for his claim about buying the forest and Carlos Minc, Brazil’s new environment minister, said he was shocked by the report. He announced that one of his first acts in his new post would be to open an inquiry into the matter and it has also been raised within the ministry for external affairs. Brazil’s most popular television show, Fantastico, conducted an interview with Eliasch in which the reporter asked him to explain how Cool Earth came up with its costings for saying that “£35 saves 22 trees, six threatened animals, 11,000 insects and so on”. She also asked whether he considered the attempt to buy up the natural heritage of another country to be a form of neo-colonialism. Eliasch refused to say how much he had paid for the land that he has already bought, but denied that he intended to buy up the forest “piece by piece”. “I am just a person who adores trees“, he told the journalist. Matthew Owen, the director of Cool Earth, has issued a statement saying that the organisation “does not own any land in Amazon, we fund conservation projects but we are not interested in owning lands which we think would be an inappropriate use of a UK-based charity.” He added, “the ownership of the Amazon is a very politicised topic and understandably the government wants to understand what all players are doing. http://thiedu.edublogs.org/2008/06/16/they-really-want-to-buy-our-amazon/

Peru:

36) The small farmers are not the source of massive deforestation but rather—along with the native rainforest ecosystems, plants, and animals—its victims. During my time in Peru, I saw traces of the real problem in the piles of Red Mahogany logs being shipped upriver—for processing in the jungle city of Iquitos. The timber giants may employ local people, but their activities are carried out in response to demand by US consumers. The same holds true for the petroleum companies devastating the rainforest—over 50% of Peru’s remaining forestland is under concession to oil and gas companies (think LNG, Northwesterners)—and for the Agribusiness giants as well. So far as I’m concerned, Big Timber, Big Oil, and Big Agribusiness make up the Terrible Trio of rainforest destruction in South America. So what’s to be done? To save the rainforests—and as a step toward rescuing the climate for all of us—we have to get Corporate America out of Peru and other forested countries. This means fighting the corporate giants on their home turf—individuals boycotting their products is a start (I have boycotted bananas in the US for years), but in the end we’ll need so much more than that. We need to get entire universities, entire store chains, to stop selling products from the rainforests. Even now, I have plans for a campaign this fall that would eliminate palm oil—a food ingredient produced by leveling forests around the world—from the Pacific University cafeteria. And at the national level, we need to strengthen laws that would prevent importation of illegally harvested wood. A massive push to save the rainforests should be as important to the climate movement as the effort to freeze construction of news coal plants, or to make our cars more fuel efficient. A hopeful development, to my mind, is the Rainforest Action Network’s use of some of the same techniques used by the highly successful anti-coal movement to begin pushing Agribusiness to get out of the rainforests. A year from now, could the rainforest movement be where the anti-coal movement is today? It’s possible. http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/06/17/climate-trees-and-people-in-the-peruvian-amazon-towar
d-a-sustained-rainforest-movement/