Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ABSTRACT (ENGLISH)
[...]that is tackled, nothing else will work The pickup trucks left before dawn. Not counting the effect on biodiversity,
the social costs of Amazonian deforestation are about 30 times the benefits, estimates Dr Nepstad. Brazil has seen
the most destruction in absolute terms (see chart 1), but is now full of hope. [...]January it was led by Jair Bolsonaro,
a president who actively sabotaged efforts to curb illegal logging and mining. During his time in office, deforestation
in the Amazon jumped 60%. Since Lula came back to power, he has started to enforce the law again.
FULL TEXT
Until that is tackled, nothing else will work
T
he pickup trucks left before dawn. Their occupants—six military police and nine agents from Brazil’s national parks
service—wore bulletproof vests. Their target was an illegal gold mine deep in the Amazon. To save the rainforest,
Brazil’s new government is trying to catch the criminals who cut it down.
First, though, it must find them. Satellite images had revealed the location, 140km from Itaituba, a city in the state of
Pará. After seven hours of driving, two men on a motorbike spotted the convoy and sped off to alert the miners. The
trucks gave chase, but got stuck in knee-deep mud. Five kilometres from their target, the forces of law and order had
to turn back.
That gave the wildcatters time to hide their excavators and hydraulic jets, which the agents would have torched. The
chances of a follow-up raid are slim. The Pará office of ICMBio, Brazil’s national parks agency, oversees 9m
hectares of protected forest—an area the size of Hungary. There are perhaps 2,000 illegal mines (known as
garimpos) on its patch.
The Amazon “has been blackened over the [past] half-century by the dual flames of fire and lawlessness”, argues
Heriberto Araujo, a Spanish journalist, in “Masters of the Lost Land”, a new book. Josiclaudio, one of the agents on
the failed raid in Pará, agrees. “It’s easy to beat the system,” he said, as the trucks passed a stretch of federal land
dotted with burnt tree stumps, evidence of recent illicit forest-clearing. An opportunistic rancher had already plopped
down several hundred cows on it.
The destruction of the world’s rainforests is not only a scandal; it is a colossal market failure. Rainforests brim with
biodiversity and help regulate the water cycle. Most importantly, the forests are giant carbon sinks. Deforestation
accounts for 7% of global carbon-dioxide emissions. Daniel Nepstad of the Earth Innovation Institute, an American
non-profit organisation, estimates that clearing and burning a hectare of the Amazon pumps 500 tonnes of carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere. If each tonne causes $50 of harm by accelerating global warming (an official American
estimate), then the total damage is $25,000.
Set against this, the profits are puny. The soil under the Amazon is not particularly fertile. A typical hectare of freshly
cleared pasture sells for about $1,200. Not counting the effect on biodiversity, the social costs of Amazonian
deforestation are about 30 times the benefits, estimates Dr Nepstad. Yet still the chainsaws whirr. The area of Earth
covered by primary tropical rainforest has dwindled by 6.7% since 2000. The problem, of course, is that the benefits
of conservation accrue in imperceptibly thin slices to everyone in the world, whereas the benefits of deforestation go
in large, lucrative chunks to the men wielding the chainsaws.
Just words on paper
DETAILS
Subject: Gold mines &mining; Rainforests; Estimates; Carbon; Enforcement; Biodiversity; Rule
of law; Forests; Property rights; Satellites; National parks; Deforestation
Business indexing term: Subject: Gold mines &mining; Industry: 21222 : Gold Ore and Silver Ore Mining 71219
: Nature Parks and Other Similar Institutions
Classification: 21222: Gold Ore and Silver Ore Mining; 71219: Nature Parks and Other Similar
Institutions
Section: International
Copyright: Copyright The Economist Newspaper NA, Inc. Feb 27, 2023