Download Report - Independent Evaluation Group - World Bank

3
The Economic Importance
of Brazil’s Forests
The Bank’s 1991 Forest Strategy identified smallholder farming as
the most important source of deforestation. This was based on an assumption
that much of the urban industrial demand for wood products
would be met by imports from temperate countries. Unlike the Bank’s
1978 forest strategy, this assumption underestimated the power of domestic
urban and manufacturing demand for wood products and its
implications for forest policy. Most of Brazil’s domestic needs for wood
products have been filled from its own forests.
Size of the Forest Sector
Brazil is a larger consumer of timber than all of western Europe,
with much of the timber going to the manufacturing sector. In 1997,
Brazil was the largest consumer of tropical wood in the world (34 million
m 3 in logs), followed by Japan (28 million m 3 ), Indonesia and Malaysia
(19 million m 3 ), and China (11 million m 3 ). The forest sector,
though, is only 6.9 percent of Brazil’s GNP. This figure includes silviculture
and extraction from natural forests (0.32 percent), processed
wood and furniture (0.86 percent), iron and steel (0.89 percent), 6 and
pulp and paper (1.06 percent). The overall forest sector (forest production,
services, equipment, and industry) generated an estimated annual
revenue of US$53 billion in 1993–95 (Bacha and Marquesini 1999). 7
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