Edition: 1 - All-round Country
Section: World, pg. 008
WEALTHY nations should pay dozens of the world's poorest countries
up to pound stg. 19 billion ($47.6billion) a year to preserve their
rainforests, according to a report commissioned by British Prime
Minister Gordon Brown.
The cash would fund a scheme that rewarded tropical countries for
preserving the stock of carbon in their remaining forests. Proceeds
would go to local communities.
``We are living on borrowed time,'' said the report's author, Johann
Eliasch, a Swedish multi-millionaire businessman and anti-deforestation
campaigner who was appointed as Mr Brown's special representative
on deforestation and clean energy last year.
``Deforestation will continue as long as cutting down trees is more
economic than preserving them.''
Rainforest destruction is a key contributor to global warming, accounting
for one-fifth of carbon emissions.
The British proposal is similar to a $200 million Australian initiative
to reverse deforestation in developing nations, announced in
2007 by the then federal environment minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Mr Eliasch, who owns a 162,000ha tract of the Brazilian Amazon and
is a former deputy treasurer of the British Conservative Party,
said the scheme would be monitored using satellite imagery.
The project would need to raise between $17 billion ($24.4billion)
and $33 billion a year to halve the destruction of the world's forests
by 2020. Current funding to tackle global deforestation is
about $564 million, the report added.
The goal would be to make the global forest sector carbon neutral
by 2030, in other words, to balance all the forest lost annually
with the planting of new forest.
Green groups, however, criticised the plans for failing to respect
the rights of indigenous forest peoples, and for creating an opportunity
for polluting nations simply to pay their way out of commitments
to cut their own carbon emissions.
Andy Tait, head of biodiversity at Greenpeace, said the proposals
risked allowing forests ``to become a get out of jail free card for
the big polluters''.
Other critics said the system would be vulnerable to corruption and
could prompt human rights abuses as governments and landowners
resorted to force to protect forests.
``This scheme has the potential to cause even greater conflict over
forests,'' said Tom Pickens, of Friends of the Earth.
Mr Eliasch said the scheme would take five years to start up in 40
nations, including Cameroon, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. He
proposed that it be included in any carbon trading agreement reached
at a meeting of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen
next year.
Since 1980, global forest cover is estimated to have fallen by 225
million hectares because of human action. In the tropics, an area
about the size of England is cleared every year.
Edition: 1 - All-round Country
Section: World, pg. 012
RIO DE JANEIRO: Deforestation in the Amazon **//rainforest//** is slowing,
with new figures showing clearfelling in the vast tract of wilderness
dropped by 25per cent in the 12 months to July last year.
In his weekly radio address yesterday, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio
da Silva said he expected to see a further drop in destruction
rates for the 12 months to July this year.
``I am plainly convinced that it is possible to grow while **//preserving//**
the environment,'' Mr da Silva said. ``The challenge that we
face is how to use the forest and environmental preservation to improve
the lives of people.''
On Friday, the environment ministry announced that the Amazon had
lost 14,000sqkm of forest cover between August 2005 and July last
year, a 25 per cent reduction on the same period the year before.
Environmental officials said they expected deforestation to drop by
about one-third in the period to July this year, to about 9600sqkm.
Brazil's economy grew by 3.7per cent last year.
Environment Minister Marina Silva joined Mr da Silva on his radio
address and attributed the drop largely to increased government enforcement
of Brazil's strict environmental laws.
Environmental groups concede that the Government has advanced in the
fight against deforestation. But they said much of the reduction
was due to a drop in the price of soybeans and the strengthening
of Brazil's currency, making it less profitable to clear forest
to grow the crop.
``The Government should take advantage of this favourable moment to
deepen the program to combat deforestation,'' said Greenpeace Amazon
campaign co-ordinator Paulo Adario.
Greenpeace said a rise in soy bean as well as beef prices was likely
to fuel more deforestation this year and next. An upswing in Amazon
burning since June seemed to support this trend.
Another factor is the growing international interest in biofuels such
as ethanol, which in Brazil is made from sugarcane, and biodiesel
made from grains, oily fruits and seeds. But Mr da Silva denied
that demand for agriculture land inevitably resulted in **//rainforest//**
destruction.
Loggers and green lobby strike deal to save vast rainforest
Section: Overseas news, pg. 36
British Columbia agreement is seen as a model for preserving the Amazon and
other wildernesses, writes Tim Reid
A VAST swath of forest, filled with grizzly bears, eagles and 1,000-year-old
cedar trees, is to be protected after an unlikely deal between loggers,
environmentalists and native tribes.
The agreement, struck after compromises on all sides ended an often bitter
ten-year battle over the wilderness, will protect 4.4 million acres from
logging, with strict controls preventing destructive logging in another 10
million acres.
The deal, announced yesterday by the provincial government in British
Columbia, secures the future of the territory known as the Great Bear
Rainforest, an area so lush and unspoiled that it can be seen from space as a
green smudge. It is the largest expanse of coastal temperate rainforest in the
world.
Because the deal involved the future co-operation of groups normally at war -
logging companies and environmentalists -analysts hope that it may serve as a
model for the preservation of the Amazon and other threatened rainforests.
The agreement covers more than 250 miles of coast and islands along British
Columbia's central and northern coast, up to the Alaskan border.
Because the area receives up to 15ft of rain a year, it has never suffered a
severe fire, resulting in some of the tallest and oldest trees on Earth and an
abundance of spectacular wildlife.
It contains about 20 per cent of the world's wild salmon, and a dazzling array
of other animals, including black and grizzly bears, a rare white bear called
the kermode, mountain goats, wolves, peregrine falcons, swans, seals and bats.
Rather than a refusal to compromise, which marked much of the past decade's
failed negotiations, an alliance of the area's native tribes, known as First
Nations in Canada, and environmentalists agreed to let logging companies
exploit 10 million acres, but with strict limits.
Until the deal was struck, the entire 15 million acres, owned by the British
Columbia government, was earmarked for logging.
Over recent years environmentalists from across the world travelled to the
area to protest, chaining themselves to logging equipment. They also persuaded
many companies to boycott wood and paper made from the forest, which eventually
brought the logging companies to the negotiating table.
Under the deal, loggers will not be allowed to touch land near critical
waterways or near breeding grounds. They will also have to avoid highly
destructive clear-cutting, and be more selective about the trees they fell.
The tribes, part of the 25,000 people scattered across the wilderness in tiny
communities, also agreed to forest-friendly development including eco-tourist
lodges.
In return, environmentalists and the native tribes get total protection for
another 4.4 million acres. The tribes' interests will also take priority in
many areas.
"This really represents conservation in the 21st century," Steve McCormick, of
Nature Conservancy, a group involved in the deal, told The Washington Post.
"It's not an all-or-nothing proposition -all protected, or all used. To
conserve globally important natural habitat worldwide on a scale that will be
meaningful, we have to contemplate human use."
Section:NEWSVIEW ECOLOGY
Current efforts to preserve South America's diverse plant and animal life are seriously flawed and are likely to fail if they're not re-evaluated, warns Douglas Southgate, associate professor of natural resources and agricultural economics, Ohio State University. "Tens of millions of dollars are being devoted to biodiversity conservation projects. Unfortunately, there's little reason to expect major payoffs from these projects in the future."
The biodiversity conservation campaign in South America is faltering because it focuses far too narrowly on the Amazon rainforest, ignoring other threatened habitats, he maintains. "The Amazon has a lot of popular appeal. But it's actually more intact than other areas. It's not where tropical forests are under the most threat."
No more than 10% of the Amazon River basin trees have been cleared, and deforestation there has slowed in recent years. In contrast, more than 90% of the forests of western Ecuador and Brazil's Atlantic coast have been chopped down. These forests have many endemic species--plants and animals found only in that region--but it's hard to overcome the selling power of the Amazon and generate interest in preserving the dry forests.
Another aspect of the faulty conservation strategy is the over-emphasis on Integrated Conservation Development Plans. Under the ICDP system, conservationists and donor agencies go into threatened areas and establish national parks and "buffer zones" around the parks. Conservationists try to get communities in the buffer zones to abandon destructive timber harvesting and cattle ranching in favor of more environmentally friendly activities, such as ecotourism and collection of forest products other than timber. Presumably, this keeps communities from encroaching on parks and damaging other natural resources.
Southgate cites many flaws in this approach: "It's unrealistic to expect that giving local communities some alternative to depleting the ecosystem will guarantee [its] survival. That assumes that the locals are satisfied with their current incomes and that they will earn the same income either through the destructive activity or something else. In reality, what's to keep them from doing both?"
He believes the best solution to the problem of habitat destruction may be for South American countries and donors to invest in agricultural development and education. For example, if investments were made in agricultural research and extension, and South American agriculture became more productive, demand for farmland would fall.
Investing in education is equally important. "The bottom line is to give people better alternatives where they already live so they won't become agricultural colonists in tropical forests. Conservation depends more on economic development than on anything else. Unless this is recognized, the campaign to save South America's biodiversity will fail."
Section:Science & Technology Environmentalists thought they could save the rain forest and make money at the same time. They were wrong.
This time last decade, the world was worried sleepless over the fate of the Amazon rain forest. Beatriz Saldanha decided to do something about it. So she shut down her beachwear business in Rio de Janeiro and grabbed a backpack. Her plan: to bring an isolated community of Amazonian forest dwellers into the global economy. It was a loopy idea. And it worked. By bathing sheets of raw cotton in latex, gently milked from wild rubber trees, she came up with "vegetable leather," a tough, pliable fabric that could be fashioned into jackets, jeans and tote bags. Today her company, Amazon Life, is an international brand, with upmarket clients like Hermes, the Dutch bicycle maker Giant and the British cosmetics label Lush. But all that may soon collapse. Despite a modest operating profit, Amazon Life is $1 million in the red. Now its major creditor, the government-owned National Social Development Bank, is threatening to foreclose. "To us," the bank told her recently, "your company has failed."
The tale is sobering, not just for Saldanha and the small band of rubber tappers she employs but also for anybody concerned with the state of the Amazonian wilderness. For more than a generation, environmentalists, policy wonks and conscientious capitalists have locked arms to find a sustainable way of preserving the wilderness--sustainable for both trees and people. The idea was to help forest dwellers and rural settlers profit from the wilderness without destroying it. Tread gently, the wisdom went, and untold wealth could be had, plucked so lovingly from the wild that not even God would miss it.
By this thinking the Amazon, the world's biggest tropical rain forest, was not a shrine to nature but a living emporium, worth more in dollars and cents upright than uprooted. The steamy 10-story forest canopy had it all--herbs, oils, perfumes and elixirs, and perhaps someday even cures for AIDS or cancer. To Saldanha and countless other "ecocapitalists" who followed, such ventures were living proof of a bold conviction: that man and forest were fated to be not enemies but partners. Now she--and plenty of environmentalists--are wondering if it was all a dream.
Saldanha's saga is just one sign that this whole way of thinking about the business of conservation is in trouble. For one thing, it obviously hasn't put a dent in the destruction of the Amazon. Poring over satellite photos taken last year, Brazilian scientists discovered that 25,500 square kilometers of forest--an area the size of Belgium--had disappeared in 2002. Twelve years after the world pledged to mend its ruinous ways at the much-ballyhooed Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the alternatives are also failing. Selective timber harvesting--culling mature trees without clear-cutting the forest--has proved costly and inefficient. Even bona fide "ecologically friendly" activities--such as collecting wild fruits, rubber and nuts--are money-losing propositions, or worse. The Switzerland-based Worldwide Fund for Nature warns that galloping global demand for "natural" remedies has pushed 4,000 to 10,000 plant species to the brink of extinction. Successful businesses take a heavy toll on the wilderness, while the most environmentally benign sustain only the trees.
That's not what Chico Mendes had in mind when he rallied a ragged band of rubber tappers to stop cattlemen from chopping down trees for pasture in Acre, in western Amazonia. The backwoods labor leader was shot and killed by an angry rancher 15 years ago for his trouble and became the world's first ecomartyr. His disciples understood that the power brokers in Brasilia wanted progress rather than conservation, and they thought they had figured out a way to have both. Scores of forest-friendly projects like Amazon Life bloomed. The New Age beauty boutique the Body Shop bought natural dyes and nuts from Indian villages. Brazil nuts culled from the forest floor were stirred into Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch ice cream.
What's become clear over time is that such projects are rarely profitable. Just getting forest goods to the grocer's shelves is an epic task. When the precarious Xapuri forest cooperative failed to deliver enough Brazil nuts, Ben & Jerry's had to rely on Amazonian agrimoguls for extra crunch, and then added cashews grown on plantations. Rainforest Crunch is no longer made. In other cases agreements have foundered over questions about the division of spoils. The Body Shop's celebrated agreement with the Kayapo Indians disintegrated after a nasty row over royalties. For all the environmentally correct initiatives, Brazil culls fewer fruits, nuts and oils from the wilds today than it did half a century ago.
Even those companies that don't rely on local partners have had little luck in the Amazon. For a time big drug companies were excited by the research possibilities held out by the medicinal roots and plants long used by rain-forest shamans. The truth is, it's rarely worth the time and money it takes to turn a plant into a useful pill or potion. It's easier to use computers to simulate the chemical makeup of medicinal plants in the laboratory. "They say there's a trillion dollars hidden in the rain forests, but so far few companies have seen any of that," says Eric Noehrenberg, trade director of the Geneva-based International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers. "I call it the green-gold myth."
Socially responsible investing is all the rage; just look at the surging Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, which list businesses with racially diverse work forces or clean energy technology. Despite official blessings and a Switzerland-size swath of Amazon rain forest set aside for only the gentlest sort of enterprise, the forests themselves have seen little of this windfall. But myths die hard. In the late '90s John Forgach, a onetime senior executive at Chase Manhattan Bank, launched the "concept fund" A2R, hoping to lure investors to "biodiversity" ventures. "I'm not out just to save the forest," he once declared. "I want to make money." With cash from the World Bank and other lenders, he scoured the planet for environmentally correct companies in need of capital, funding things like low-impact timer harvesting, ecotourism and organic agriculture. His assets reached $27 million, and he talked of reaching half a billion. By last February, with the stock market flat and many of his companies failing, the creditors "simply pulled the plug," he says. "I believe in sustainability. It's a much more intelligent way to do business. But this concept business is for better times." Forgach now teaches forestry at Yale.
Acre Gov. Jorge Viana still holds out hope. In his state, the biggest source of income is the federal treasury, which underwrites 84 percent of local spending. In the real economy only cattle ranchers have flourished, and as their pastures spread, so does deforestation. Still, Viana, a trained forestry engineer, believes that the salvation of the Amazon lies in managed tropical forestry: prized woods like mahogany and cedar are cut carefully to allow new trees to sprout for future harvesting. Viana is handing out tax breaks and sprawling logging concessions to big lumber combines and settler communities alike that have earned certificates, or "green seals," from international forestry authorities. "Once people see the rain forest is valuable," Viana claims, "they will defend it."
But will they? The record on managed logging in the tropics is dismal. "We should have seen second-, third- and fourth-generation timber on the market by now, and there isn't any," says Niro Higuchi, a forestry expert at Brazil's National Amazon Research Institute, or INPA. Now Asian loggers are heading to Brazil, Higuchi says, "because their own reserves are gone." Only a handful of Amazonian lumber companies have met international "sustainability" standards, and the most famous one of all, MIL/Precious Woods, is running out of timber well ahead of its planned 25-year logging cycle. "After you harvest those big, valuable 100-year-old trees, it gets a lot harder," says Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at INPA. No wonder the vast majority of timber falling in the rain forest is bootleg.
The big question behind the struggling eco-enterprises is whether preservation should be seen as a business at all. Three years ago Pirelli, the Italian tire maker, launched the Xapuri, a truck tire made from latex from the wilds of Acre. Pirelli loses money on the deal, but it reaps a social dividend for assisting impoverished rubber tappers, who, but for subsidies, might have disappeared long ago. "If you apply the law of the market, you are going to create false expectations," says Beatriz Saldanha. Saving the wilderness, she knows, is a worthy effort in its own right, and one that society must underwrite. The rest is a green illusion.
Robin Pagnamenta. "`Rich must pay to save forests'." Australian, The (n.d.). Newspaper Source. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation].
5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nfh&AN=200810161008223910&site=ehost-live>.
`Rich must pay to save forests'
Copyright 2008 / The AustraliaWorks Cited
"Amazon rainforest clearing rate falls." Australian, The (n.d.). Newspaper Source. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation].
5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nfh&AN=200708151012135458&site=ehost-live>.
Amazon rainforest clearing rate falls
Copyright 2007 / The AustralianWorks Cited
Tim Reid. "Loggers and green lobby strike deal to save vast rainforest." Times, The (United Kingdom) (n.d.). Newspaper Source. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation].
5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nfh&AN=7EH3993938720&site=ehost-live>.
Loggers and green lobby strike deal to save vast rainforest
Copyright (C) The Times, 2006Works Cited
"Saving rainforests may be doomed." USA Today Magazine 122.0 (Apr. 1994): 15. MAS Ultra - School Edition. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 10 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ulh&AN=9405241519&site=ehost-live>.
SAVING RAINFORESTS MAY BE DOOMED
Section: NEWSVIEWECOLOGY
Current efforts to preserve South America's diverse plant and animal life are seriously flawed and are likely to fail if they're not re-evaluated, warns Douglas Southgate, associate professor of natural resources and agricultural economics, Ohio State University. "Tens of millions of dollars are being devoted to biodiversity conservation projects. Unfortunately, there's little reason to expect major payoffs from these projects in the future."
The biodiversity conservation campaign in South America is faltering because it focuses far too narrowly on the Amazon rainforest, ignoring other threatened habitats, he maintains. "The Amazon has a lot of popular appeal. But it's actually more intact than other areas. It's not where tropical forests are under the most threat."
No more than 10% of the Amazon River basin trees have been cleared, and deforestation there has slowed in recent years. In contrast, more than 90% of the forests of western Ecuador and Brazil's Atlantic coast have been chopped down. These forests have many endemic species--plants and animals found only in that region--but it's hard to overcome the selling power of the Amazon and generate interest in preserving the dry forests.
Another aspect of the faulty conservation strategy is the over-emphasis on Integrated Conservation Development Plans. Under the ICDP system, conservationists and donor agencies go into threatened areas and establish national parks and "buffer zones" around the parks. Conservationists try to get communities in the buffer zones to abandon destructive timber harvesting and cattle ranching in favor of more environmentally friendly activities, such as ecotourism and collection of forest products other than timber. Presumably, this keeps communities from encroaching on parks and damaging other natural resources.
Southgate cites many flaws in this approach: "It's unrealistic to expect that giving local communities some alternative to depleting the ecosystem will guarantee [its] survival. That assumes that the locals are satisfied with their current incomes and that they will earn the same income either through the destructive activity or something else. In reality, what's to keep them from doing both?"
He believes the best solution to the problem of habitat destruction may be for South American countries and donors to invest in agricultural development and education. For example, if investments were made in agricultural research and extension, and South American agriculture became more productive, demand for farmland would fall.
Investing in education is equally important. "The bottom line is to give people better alternatives where they already live so they won't become agricultural colonists in tropical forests. Conservation depends more on economic development than on anything else. Unless this is recognized, the campaign to save South America's biodiversity will fail."
Works Cited
Margolis, Mac. "Jungle Economics." Newsweek (Atlantic Edition) 143.7 (16 Feb. 2004): 44-46. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 10 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=12319821&site=ehost-live>.
Jungle Economics
Section: Science & TechnologyEnvironmentalists thought they could save the rain forest and make money at the same time. They were wrong.
This time last decade, the world was worried sleepless over the fate of the Amazon rain forest. Beatriz Saldanha decided to do something about it. So she shut down her beachwear business in Rio de Janeiro and grabbed a backpack. Her plan: to bring an isolated community of Amazonian forest dwellers into the global economy. It was a loopy idea. And it worked. By bathing sheets of raw cotton in latex, gently milked from wild rubber trees, she came up with "vegetable leather," a tough, pliable fabric that could be fashioned into jackets, jeans and tote bags. Today her company, Amazon Life, is an international brand, with upmarket clients like Hermes, the Dutch bicycle maker Giant and the British cosmetics label Lush. But all that may soon collapse. Despite a modest operating profit, Amazon Life is $1 million in the red. Now its major creditor, the government-owned National Social Development Bank, is threatening to foreclose. "To us," the bank told her recently, "your company has failed."
The tale is sobering, not just for Saldanha and the small band of rubber tappers she employs but also for anybody concerned with the state of the Amazonian wilderness. For more than a generation, environmentalists, policy wonks and conscientious capitalists have locked arms to find a sustainable way of preserving the wilderness--sustainable for both trees and people. The idea was to help forest dwellers and rural settlers profit from the wilderness without destroying it. Tread gently, the wisdom went, and untold wealth could be had, plucked so lovingly from the wild that not even God would miss it.
By this thinking the Amazon, the world's biggest tropical rain forest, was not a shrine to nature but a living emporium, worth more in dollars and cents upright than uprooted. The steamy 10-story forest canopy had it all--herbs, oils, perfumes and elixirs, and perhaps someday even cures for AIDS or cancer. To Saldanha and countless other "ecocapitalists" who followed, such ventures were living proof of a bold conviction: that man and forest were fated to be not enemies but partners. Now she--and plenty of environmentalists--are wondering if it was all a dream.
Saldanha's saga is just one sign that this whole way of thinking about the business of conservation is in trouble. For one thing, it obviously hasn't put a dent in the destruction of the Amazon. Poring over satellite photos taken last year, Brazilian scientists discovered that 25,500 square kilometers of forest--an area the size of Belgium--had disappeared in 2002. Twelve years after the world pledged to mend its ruinous ways at the much-ballyhooed Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the alternatives are also failing. Selective timber harvesting--culling mature trees without clear-cutting the forest--has proved costly and inefficient. Even bona fide "ecologically friendly" activities--such as collecting wild fruits, rubber and nuts--are money-losing propositions, or worse. The Switzerland-based Worldwide Fund for Nature warns that galloping global demand for "natural" remedies has pushed 4,000 to 10,000 plant species to the brink of extinction. Successful businesses take a heavy toll on the wilderness, while the most environmentally benign sustain only the trees.
That's not what Chico Mendes had in mind when he rallied a ragged band of rubber tappers to stop cattlemen from chopping down trees for pasture in Acre, in western Amazonia. The backwoods labor leader was shot and killed by an angry rancher 15 years ago for his trouble and became the world's first ecomartyr. His disciples understood that the power brokers in Brasilia wanted progress rather than conservation, and they thought they had figured out a way to have both. Scores of forest-friendly projects like Amazon Life bloomed. The New Age beauty boutique the Body Shop bought natural dyes and nuts from Indian villages. Brazil nuts culled from the forest floor were stirred into Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch ice cream.
What's become clear over time is that such projects are rarely profitable. Just getting forest goods to the grocer's shelves is an epic task. When the precarious Xapuri forest cooperative failed to deliver enough Brazil nuts, Ben & Jerry's had to rely on Amazonian agrimoguls for extra crunch, and then added cashews grown on plantations. Rainforest Crunch is no longer made. In other cases agreements have foundered over questions about the division of spoils. The Body Shop's celebrated agreement with the Kayapo Indians disintegrated after a nasty row over royalties. For all the environmentally correct initiatives, Brazil culls fewer fruits, nuts and oils from the wilds today than it did half a century ago.
Even those companies that don't rely on local partners have had little luck in the Amazon. For a time big drug companies were excited by the research possibilities held out by the medicinal roots and plants long used by rain-forest shamans. The truth is, it's rarely worth the time and money it takes to turn a plant into a useful pill or potion. It's easier to use computers to simulate the chemical makeup of medicinal plants in the laboratory. "They say there's a trillion dollars hidden in the rain forests, but so far few companies have seen any of that," says Eric Noehrenberg, trade director of the Geneva-based International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers. "I call it the green-gold myth."
Socially responsible investing is all the rage; just look at the surging Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, which list businesses with racially diverse work forces or clean energy technology. Despite official blessings and a Switzerland-size swath of Amazon rain forest set aside for only the gentlest sort of enterprise, the forests themselves have seen little of this windfall. But myths die hard. In the late '90s John Forgach, a onetime senior executive at Chase Manhattan Bank, launched the "concept fund" A2R, hoping to lure investors to "biodiversity" ventures. "I'm not out just to save the forest," he once declared. "I want to make money." With cash from the World Bank and other lenders, he scoured the planet for environmentally correct companies in need of capital, funding things like low-impact timer harvesting, ecotourism and organic agriculture. His assets reached $27 million, and he talked of reaching half a billion. By last February, with the stock market flat and many of his companies failing, the creditors "simply pulled the plug," he says. "I believe in sustainability. It's a much more intelligent way to do business. But this concept business is for better times." Forgach now teaches forestry at Yale.
Acre Gov. Jorge Viana still holds out hope. In his state, the biggest source of income is the federal treasury, which underwrites 84 percent of local spending. In the real economy only cattle ranchers have flourished, and as their pastures spread, so does deforestation. Still, Viana, a trained forestry engineer, believes that the salvation of the Amazon lies in managed tropical forestry: prized woods like mahogany and cedar are cut carefully to allow new trees to sprout for future harvesting. Viana is handing out tax breaks and sprawling logging concessions to big lumber combines and settler communities alike that have earned certificates, or "green seals," from international forestry authorities. "Once people see the rain forest is valuable," Viana claims, "they will defend it."
But will they? The record on managed logging in the tropics is dismal. "We should have seen second-, third- and fourth-generation timber on the market by now, and there isn't any," says Niro Higuchi, a forestry expert at Brazil's National Amazon Research Institute, or INPA. Now Asian loggers are heading to Brazil, Higuchi says, "because their own reserves are gone." Only a handful of Amazonian lumber companies have met international "sustainability" standards, and the most famous one of all, MIL/Precious Woods, is running out of timber well ahead of its planned 25-year logging cycle. "After you harvest those big, valuable 100-year-old trees, it gets a lot harder," says Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at INPA. No wonder the vast majority of timber falling in the rain forest is bootleg.
The big question behind the struggling eco-enterprises is whether preservation should be seen as a business at all. Three years ago Pirelli, the Italian tire maker, launched the Xapuri, a truck tire made from latex from the wilds of Acre. Pirelli loses money on the deal, but it reaps a social dividend for assisting impoverished rubber tappers, who, but for subsidies, might have disappeared long ago. "If you apply the law of the market, you are going to create false expectations," says Beatriz Saldanha. Saving the wilderness, she knows, is a worthy effort in its own right, and one that society must underwrite. The rest is a green illusion.