From the forest to the consumer - GVces - Fundação Getulio Vargas

“The first thing I’ve learned is that preserving the Amazon Forest requires
that we assign an economic value to it,” says businessman Fábio Albuquerque,
who directs Ecolog, a company that specializes in producing sustainable, FSC
certified timber. “Without incentives it’s impossible to change the behavior of
someone from Paraná who migrated to the Amazon under the military government
with a mandate to clear the forest,” he says. “This person needs to have
choice, otherwise he will keep selling a tree for 200 reais in order to be able to
afford to buy medicine for his children”.
But there are many obstacles even for entrepreneurs as Albuquerque. Before
his foray into the Amazon, he knew little about forestry. As a civil engineer
and businessman, his first forestry experience took place in Itu, a municipality
in the state of São Paulo, where he reforested an area he had acquired in order
to build a condo. Today the area contains 20 thousand trees in a reserve that is
also used for wildlife rehabilitation. The initiative’s success made him turn his
attention to the Amazon, which he had visited as a child. “Twenty years later,
I realized that the Amazon was disappearing faster than the Atlantic Forest
had,” he says.
He first considered buying an area in order to preserve it in its original state,
but a friend convinced him that by using forest management he would provide
income for the local community to conserve the environment. To do so, he
engaged the help of engineer Tasso Azevedo, one of the founders of the Farm
and Forest Management and Certification Institute (Imaflora), an FSC accredited
certification body. They looked for an area with no land tenure disputes
and settled with a property in Vista Alegre do Abunã, in the state of Rondônia.
Despite receiving social and environmental certification in 2004 that proved
the legal origin of his production, Albuquerque had to go to court against
Ibama to settle improperly assessed fines. “The inspectors used samples to calculate
timber residues without taking into consideration the species of tree,
the fact that logs are of irregular shape, or even how much material was in
fact used.” Albuquerque got tired of fighting with the authorities and ended
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