Brazil's illegal logging hard to combat

[May 17, 2008]  TAILANDIA, Brazil (AP) -- Acrid smoke from charcoal-making blankets this Amazon logging town with the smell of business as usual. Less than three months ago, federal agents swooped in to close sawmills, confiscate wood and smash charcoal furnaces in a government crackdown on illegal logging.

But tractors are moving logs again in Tailandia, as Brazil's renowned environment minister resigned this week, and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva met Friday with Latin American and European leaders seeking to combat climate change.

Locals are back to turning wood scraps into charcoal.

"It's starting up again, but it's not like it was, and nobody knows for how long," said Zenito Santiago de Souza, 44, who lost his job in the government raid. "They're saying the police are coming back on the 20th."

Operation Arc of Fire was rolled out after satellite data in January projected a 34 percent spike in Amazon destruction - a political embarrassment for Silva after three consecutive years of decline.

But with 70 percent of jobs in the area tied to logging, the raid left behind widespread unemployment and crime.

Environment Minister Marina Silva, no relation to the president, resigned Tuesday, apparently in despair over the obstacles she faced in policing places like Tailandia. She also criticized the government's failure to provide sustainable alternatives to illegal logging.

Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon region, an area larger than Western Europe, releases an estimated 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, making Brazil the world's sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

February's crackdown initially enraged residents. About 2,000 protesters burned tires, blocked roads and forced environmental workers to flee before heavily armed federal police restored order.

Sawmills working without registration lost their machinery or were shut. Registered sawmills that could not prove the origin of their wood were fined, and the wood was seized.

"Pretty much everyone was fined. Only one guy wasn't fined, but I think they came back and fined him later," said Flavio Sufredini, who runs a sawmill caught with illegal wood.

It's nearly impossible to work legally in a region where the majority of land has no clear owner, he said. Loggers must provide land titles to receive logging permits.

"The guy who doesn't have any title to the land just cuts it all down because the land doesn't even belong to him, and so there's nobody to fine," Sufredini said. "It's the guys trying to operate legally that are punished."

Federal police has seized 15,500 tons of illegally logged wood, 19 chain saws, 10 firearms and 95 vehicles.

Brazil's environmental agency, Ibama, handed out more than $25 million in fines. It now reports an 80 percent drop in deforestation in the three Amazon states where the operation continues.

But environmentalists warn that the number is unreliable because little logging occurs between December and June, when conditions are too wet.

While few people spoke openly about the sawmills returning to work, Tailandia was bustling on a Saturday night. Hoteliers and restaurant owners said things were back to normal after an initial slowdown.

Tractors could be glimpsed through the unpainted gates of reopened sawmills hauling tree trunks through the mud in preparation for cutting.

Meanwhile, the town's poor are using the detritus of the raid to earn a meager living.

Sergio Tavares Araujo, 40, gathered scrap wood off the floor of the Santo Antonio sawmill, shut down in February for operating without a license.

Araujo, his wife and a couple others stoked makeshift dirt ovens resembling smoldering graves, turning the scraps into charcoal that would earn them about $7 a day.

"It's enough to scrape by, but if I had a little more money I'd have already left town," Araujo said.

The government program Arc of Green will provide credit and assistance to rural landholders seeking to develop their land in sustainable ways, said Gov. Ana Julia Carepa of the Para state, where Tailandia is located.

"It's important that government comes and provides financing to keep the forest standing," Carepa said. "Because only economic forces can stop logging, when the forest is more valuable standing than it is cut down."

But Joao Medeiros, president of the Tailandia Union of Logging Industries, said the government should have offered those measures before the crackdown.

Many loggers have been waiting for two years now for the government to approve their management plans, which are required to legally cut rain-forest wood.

"I'd say seven out of 10 loggers want to work legally, but the government doesn't have enough staff to approve management plans quickly," Medeiros said. "And people are not going to go hungry waiting."

[Associated Press; By MICHAEL ASTOR]

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.