A Dubious Plan for the Amazon

By Michael S. Serrill

Among the world's untamed and unexplored regions, there is none richer than the Amazon Basin. For decades, Brazilian governments have sought to protect from foreign exploitation the vast rain forest's gold and minerals, oil and gas, hardwoods and cattle ranges. The great push to settle and industrialize the Amazon has been propelled in part by the government's determination to prevent neighboring countries and multinational corporations from making off with the riches that Brazilians regard as their national patrimony. Despite the precautions, however, the dreaded foreign invasion has finally come. Its name: environmentalism.

For more than a year, the government of President Jose Sarney has been under relentless attack from environmental activists worldwide. They charge that its policies are not only resulting in the wanton destruction of Brazil's forest, its wildlife and its native peoples, but are also endangering the world environment. Scientists say the fires set by ranchers and homesteaders in the Amazon region are spewing into the atmosphere 7% of the carbon dioxide responsible for the global warming process known as the greenhouse effect.

Last week the Brazilian government sought to quell the outcry with an ambitious new environmental program. The plan, titled Our Nature, was announced by Sarney during a full-dress ceremony at Brasilia's Planalto Palace. To a chorus of applause from Brazil's top military brass and nine state governors, Sarney outlined a program that would be set into motion by 35 new decrees and proposed laws. Among other things, the plan calls for:

-- Establishing a five-year, $100 million program to zone the Amazon region for agriculture, mining and other uses. The zoning scheme would be partly financed by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

-- Suspending, temporarily, raw-timber exports and tax incentives long awarded to Amazon cattle ranchers.

-- Regulating the production and sale of the toxic chemicals used in mining and agriculture.

-- Creating 7 million acres of new national parkland.

-- Studying a possible expansion of the areas set aside for the use of Brazil's 220,000 remaining native people.

In outlining the proposal, which will cost $350 million in its first two years, Sarney angrily denounced what he called the "unjust, defamatory, cruel and indecent" international campaign against Brazil. He defended his government's environmental record and denounced the "alarmist" tone of its ecological critics. He insisted that just 5% of the Amazon has been deforested; the more widely accepted figure is 12%.

Sarney framed the issue as a battle between developed and developing nations. It is the rich countries, he claimed, that create most of the industrial waste, acid rain and carbon dioxide that pollute the atmosphere. "We will not accept tutelage," the President declared. "We will accept responsibility for the defense of our territory." Sarney reiterated his rejection of so-called debt-for-nature swaps, in which foreign debt is forgiven in exchange for conservation efforts, as just one more way for those who covet the Amazon to meddle in Brazil's affairs.

The President's strident nationalism drew a sour reaction from his many critics. "Sarney declared war on the world today," said Fabio Feldman, a Congressman from Sao Paulo who is a vocal environmentalist. "He's trying to - rally public support around a discredited government." Feldman declared the Our Nature program itself "too academic and vague. It won't change a thing." Said another leading ecologist: "It is obvious that the intention of the program is not to save the Amazon but to appease foreign criticism."

If so, Sarney fell far short of his goal. Just days before Our Nature was announced, a group of 28 Latin American intellectuals, none of them Brazilian, issued a stinging open letter to Sarney accusing him of a "policy of ecocide and ethnocide" in the Amazon. The statement called for an immediate halt to "massive deforestation" and other "acts of barbarism." Among the signers were three prominent novelists: Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru.

The protesting intellectuals particularly criticized the Amazon project that is of most concern to ecologists: a proposed road across the western state of Acre to Pucallpa, Peru, where it would link up with a Peruvian highway that stretches over the Andes to Lima. The highway link would provide Acre with a Pacific outlet for its tropical hardwoods, which are much in demand in Japan. It would also open up the western Amazon for the first time to the kind of commercial exploitation that, in the view of environmentalists, would lead to devastation.

Alarm over the Acre proposal, first aired in January, has been so strong that President George Bush reportedly asked Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita to clarify whether his government had any plans to finance the highway. Takeshita said Japan had yet to receive a request from Brazil for funding. As President Sarney's speech last week demonstrated, the proud Brazilians will not be easily deterred. Officials insist that the highway from Acre to Peru will be built in spite of the clamor it has aroused.

With reporting by John Maier/Rio de Janeiro