maio, 05 2010

By Lígia Barros, Felipe Lobo and Isadora de Afrodite

Renascer Extractive Reserve was created in July 2009 in Prainha municipal district in Pará State to protect 400,000 hectares of Brazilian Amazon forest inhabited by some 600 families grouped in 14 communities.  They are not alone.  There are also sawmills, licensed to operate before the creation of the sustainable use protected area and refusing to leave the area now.

According to the 1st paragraph of article 23 of the National Protected Area System, “the Extractive Reserve is public domain and its use is granted to traditional population living on the extraction of natural resources, (...) through specific regulation, and the private areas within its boundaries should be expropriated (...)”. That is not what happens with the Renascer Resex (Resex is the Portuguese acronym for Extractive Reserve).

Given the situation, a permanent patrol service is needed.  Therefore, on March 22 the Fire Arch Operation was initiated.  It is a joint action by Ibama, the Federal Police and National Security.  One week later, patrol rangers were surprised to find some 41,000 cubic meters of illegal timber hidden in the forest. The high amount became larger and the last estimates reach 60,000 cubic meters.

“This may be that raw material greatest seizure in all of Brazilian history”, stated Federal Police Chief Paulo Teles, who in charge of this task force.  According to Teles, the timber underwent selective cut, for there were logs from high economic value trees, such as Ipê (Tabebuia), Jatobá (Hymenaea courbaril), Maçaranduba (Manilkara) and Angelim (Andira). “The operation in the reserve will go on and we shall find a lot more illegal timber.  We are investigating the liable ones for felling those trees”, says Teles.

This seizure called the attention to the complex reality in the Brazilian Amazon, where illegal activity in protected areas is not Renascer Resex exclusivity.  Illegal timber extraction is one of the activities contributing to deforestation in Brazil – thus contributing to carbon emissions –, as well as to ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss.

The main deforestation cause in the Amazon, however, is the illegal land market, which is the combined result of real estate speculation and land grabbing plus illegal occupation. A second element to be taken into account is the expansion of agriculture and cattle ranching, as well as the search for new suitable plantation areas. Together with those two factors, illegal timber extraction is the first step for new area occupation.

Such a process causes severe damage to the ecosystems and, therefore, to biological diversity.  In this International Year of Biodiversity, finding predatory activities within protected areas is an alert signal that Brazil needs to strengthen its conservation actions in order to achieve its biodiversity loss reduction target.


Possible solutions

Recent studies show that protected areas – both strict use and sustainable use ones, as well as indigenous lands – are highly efficient in stopping deforestation from reaching certain areas.  What we have in Renascer Resex, however, is a reality that needs to be changed.

“It is unacceptable to have illegal timber exploitation within a protected area”, says WWF-Brazil’s Conservation Director Cláudio Maretti. “Protected areas are generally efficient in fighting deforestation; nevertheless, they can only fulfill their role completely if their creation is followed by an adequate implementation and good management”, stated Maretti.

Besides investing in protected area implementation and management, combined with patrolling and punishment for those violating the law, one possible answer to this problem is to add value to the sustainable forest economy: to ensure sustainable forest management within and in the surroundings of protected areas, plus certify the timber.

“Forest management projects, such as the ones developed by WWF-Brazil in some protected areas, have proven to be efficient in greatly increasing community income,” stated Mauro Armelin,  WWF-Brazil’s Officer for the Sustainable Development Support Program.  “Furthermore, we have examples of a great many business companies which are now working with certified timber and are happy with market reception”, said Armelin.

“One of the great problems still faced by sustainable forest economy is that illegal timber companies continue to operate in the Amazon and are selling their products in the market with a smaller cost, therefore competing in an unfair manner with companies doing legal forest management.  Furthermore, protected area communities – as the ones in Renascer Resex – suffer direct damage, for with deforestation they lose an area that has great value for forest management and the extraction of forest products”, said Maretti.  He added:  “I hope this seizure will be an example for illegal loggers to stop destroying the Amazon and start doing forest management in a legal and sustainable way”.

Renascer Resex

Renascer Extractive Reserve is located in Prainha municipal district in the state of Pará.  The 400,000 hectare area shelters 14 communities.  The 600 families dwelling in the area and the loggers are involved in several controversies and conflicts.

Renascer Resex area has great environmental relevance because it includes flooded forest (varzea) ecosystems and other areas protecting aquatic ecosystems.  These are extremely vulnerable and matter a great deal for the livelihood of local Amazon communities and even for the urban population, because of fishing.  The areas are also poorly represented in the Brazilian protected area system.

Dwellers live mostly on fishing and there is a great variety of fish, such as Pirarucu (Arapaima gigas), Tambaqui (Colossoma macropomum), and catfish like Surubim (Pseudoplatystoma coruscans), Dourada (Brachyplatystoma flavicans) and Filhote (Brachyplathystoma filamentosum). Among the forest tree species found in the area there are valued timber species such as Mahogany, Ipê, Cedar, Jacaranda and Brazil nut trees.

Renascer Extractive Reserve was created in 2009, following a long period of documentation processing at the Presidency’s Chief of Cabinet Office (Casa Civil).  In that period, there were fights directly involving dwellers and loggers, in a constant threat to community leaders.