Deforestation In Amazon Is Worst Ever

The Brazilian National Space Research Institute (INPE) announced Monday that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 1994 and 1995 nearly doubled, reaching its greatest extent in recorded history. INPE calculates that 29,000 square kilometers was cut and burned in 1995, based on the analysis of LANDSAT satellite photographs. This is nearly double the 15,000 square kilometers recorded for 1994, and far above the approximately 21,000 square kilometers per year average of the 1980s which brought the burning of the Amazon to international attention. According to INPE, the rate in 1996 fell to 18,611 square kilometers, less than in the previous year, but sharply up from the average annual levels in the rest of the decade.

“Twenty-nine thousand square kilometers per year is a gap between rhetoric and reality the size of Connecticut and New Jersey put together,” said Stephan Schwartzman, senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund. “It’s clear from the amount of increase, and the fluctuations in it, that Brazilian government environmental policy has had precious little influence on this process in the 1990s.”

As news of the massive upswing in forest destruction was released, the so-called “environmental crimes act” is slated for voting today in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Brazilian Congress. This critical piece of legislation would give the Brazilian Environmental Agency, IBAMA, statutory authority to enforce environmental law for the first time since 1989. Government leaders in the Congress however were said to have substantially weakened the law to mollify ranching and industrial special interests opposed to it. Proposed language to make corporations liable for environmental crimes was removed, leaving the law applicable only to individuals. With liberalized investment rules and the establishment of a dozen southeast Asian logging firms in the Amazon, exempting companies from environmental regulation may prove ill-advised.

Earlier this month, a special commission of the Brazilian Congress on the Asian loggers released a report estimating that some 58,000 square kilometers of the Amazon is being destroyed or degraded annually, counting not only deforestation but also groundfires, logging damage, and the “edge effect” of fragmenting previously continuous, closed stretches of forest. Researchers in the region agree that an area roughly equal to that deforested is damaged by these processes every year. Most troubling is a tendency to drying of the forest detected by the Woods Hole Research Institute, aggravated by El Ni