GEO Brasil - UNEP

annex x 3 - biodiversity
annex 3
The Amazon Region
The Amazon Region presents a great diversity of The Amazon
Region has a great variety of ecosystems, ranging
from dense forests to natural fields, including areas of
open forest and savannahs, besides agriculture areas –
from a wide scale to a small and itinerant form, livestock
and extraction. Overall, the Amazon region is the largest
biodiversity reserve in the planet and it holds almost 10%
of the available fresh water in the world (Rebouças 1999
in MMA 2000c), besides storing valuable sources of natural
services and genetic stock which may result in new
medicine and food.
Although it is the best-conserved biome in the country,
deforestation and burning are constant problems in the
Amazon Region. The clearance of forests is a consequence
of the agricultural border progress, mainly in the
States of Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Pará and Rondônia,
and of timber company work. The low cut for agricultural
purposes in the Amazon Region increased significantly
in the 1980’s because of wrongheaded public policies, as
tax incentives to programs of forest conversion into agricultural
projects. As a result, 11-13% of the vegetable covering
was lost, during that decade alone (MMA 2000c).
The growth of the soy culture is worrying, since the legal
Amazon region already produces more than 1/5 of the
soy cultivated in the country, concentrated in the states
of Maranhão, Tocantins, Mato Grosso and Rondônia. The
cultivation of soybeans has also been growing in the
States of Amazonas, Roraima and Pará, moving upon
deforested areas of dense forest (MMA 2000c).
In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Development Plans for the
Amazon region were aimed at favouring the implantation
of great occupation projects that relied on subsidies and
tax incentives and facilitated access to the land by great
private groups. The agrarian concentration and the conflict
in the countryside, the accelerated deforestation, the
disorganisation of social and cultural space of local communities,
the ecological unbalances caused by hydroelectric
power stations, pollution caused by mercury, the growing
poverty in cities are some of the consequences of
those wrongheaded development policies (MMA 2000c).
The extensive livestock and wood extraction also came
into the process of occupation of the Amazon region, raising
countless environmental problems. The wood extracted
from the forest represents the third exports product in
the line of “paraenses”, with an amount of almost 350
million dollars in 1995, more than twice the value registered
in 1991. In the Amazon area, 80% of the wooden
national production is extracted in logs, which accounts
for 40% of the Brazilian wooden exports. In 1996 the Amazon
region exported 71,166 cubic meters of sawn wood,
generating exchange value of 447 million dollars (MMA
2000a). The wood activity is an important human factor
that may affect the species composition and distribution
in the Amazon forest. The complete devastation observed
in the States of Rondônia and Pará, specially in the south,
is a sign of the need to reorganise soil occupation in the
area.
The Brazilian government’s goal is to restructure and to
create national transport and development axes, whose
objectives are to spur national production and to integrate
Brazil internally and abroad, extending the borders of development
and generating production hubs (Brito 2001).
Highways, rivers, railroads, transmission lines and gas
pipelines will make way to industry, livestock and trade,
which will reach distant places. Those axes will form transport
and production paths, linking the Brazilian Amazon
region to other South American markets and shortening,
therefore, the export road to the American and European
markets (Brito 2001). The direct and indirect environmental
impacts due to current implantation of those projects
in the Amazon region are preoccupying. For instance,
constructing asphalt highways will reduce the costs of
timber transport and will increase the economical reach
of timber exploration. Similarly, the incentives to largescale
agriculture, such as soybeans, will bring modifications
to the use of the soil’s geography. The soybeans
can be planted in forest areas or in areas that are current
pastures, moving the livestock to other forest areas (in
Veríssimo et al. 2001).
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