-Caveat Lector-
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: USA/Urgent: Brazil agrobiz & ranchers in secret forest destruction deal
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 23:20:37 -0600 (CST)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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From: Kenneth Walsh@EDF on 12/07/99 05:33 PM
Subject: Urgent Action: Brazil agrobusiness & ranchers in secret forest
destruction deal
Urgent Action:
Brazil agrobusiness and ranchers in secret forest
destruction deal
Vote to legalize massive new forest destruction could come
tomorrow
-Please fax or email Secretary of the Treasury Larry
Summers with a copy to Brazil President Fernando Henrique
Cardoso
Are Your Tax Dollars Bankrolling Disaster?
December 7, 1999
Brazil's large landowners and ranchers last week cut a
secret deal to roll back environmental regulations and
allow greatly increased forest destruction. Only quick
action from Brazilian environmental organizations and
Senator Marina Silva held off the concerted attack on
forest protection. The proposed changes to Brazil's
Forestry Code would open up tens of millions of acres of
rainforest to destruction. Help stop this disastrous deal
for good! Only last year, the US spearheaded a $41 billion
financial bailout from the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), World Bank, Inter American Development Bank and the
US Treasury to keep Brazil's currency strong. Should US
taxpayer dollars bail out a government whose President
condones backroom deals to undo environmental legislation
that he himself signed so that latifundistas can ravage the
forest at will? Fax or email Secretary of the Treasury and
ask that he relay your concerns to the government of
Brazil.
At the end of 1997 and beginning of 1998, thousands of
concerned citizens around the world gave their support to
Brazilian environmentalists and parliamentary leaders such
as Marina Silva to encourage the Brazilian government to
pass the legislation needed to give Brazil's environmental
agency, IBAMA, the authority to assess fines, shut down
environmental law-breakers --- in short, to enforce
Brazil's environmental law. Specific regulations (e.g.,
the amounts of fines) were only issued earlier this year.
IBAMA issued a string of record fines for illegal
deforestation and burning, seized illegal timber and
logging equipment.
Faced for the first time with effective environmental
regulation, Brazil's powerful rural elite resorted to back-
room politics to try and gut the law and get back to
business as usual. The proposal designed in secret by the
ranchers' lobby and the government, was sent to the Senate
for a vote November 23rd, and would, among other abuses,
have:
* amnestied illegal deforestation
* increased the areas of Amazon forest and tropical
savanna available for deforestation by 30%
* severely limited environmental agency authority over
large parts of private land
Environmentalists blocked the vote, and are pushing for
withdrawal of the bill and a broad public discussion of
changes in the Forestry Code.
Please fax:
Secretary of the Treasury
Larry Summers
Fax 202- 622 0073
cc
Presidente da Republica
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
fax - 011 55 61 411 1456 or 011 55 61 224 0289
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sample:
Secretary of the Treasury
Lawrence Summers
Department of the Treasury
Dear Mr. Summers:
Our government has committed substantial
taxpayer funds to the $41 billion International
Monetary Fund package to support Brazil's
economy. Having taken this step, we should
expect that Brazil's government not renege on
its repeated commitments to forest protection,
in the context of the publicly funded G7 Pilot
Program for Protection of Brazilian Tropical
Forest as well as other international forums.
The Brazilian government recently agreed to
gravely weaken its forest protection laws in a
proposed reform of the Forestry Code, in a
secret negotiation with large ranchers. Please
inform your counterparts in the Brazilian
government that the American people favors
openness and transparency in decisions that
affect the public interest and supports forest
protection, as do most Brazilians. Please urge
your counterparts to withdraw proposed changes
to the Forestry Code until an informed public
discussion of the issues can be held.
Thank you for your attention to this.
Sincerely
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++
Chicago Tribune Article
BRAZIL RAINFORESTS FACE
NEW THREAT
PROPOSED LAW WOULD LET
LANDOWNERS SKIRT CUTTING
RESTRICTIONS
By Laurie Goering
Tribune Foreign Correspondent
December 7, 1999
RIO DE JANEIRO -- A bill that would allow
landowners to cut the Amazon rainforest and
replant the land with eucalyptus while
continuing to count it as forest "reserve" is
expected to come to a vote this week in
Brasilia, environmentalists said Monday.
The measure, if passed, would represent the
strongest effort yet to undercut Brazil's tough
new environmental crimes law, which went into
effect in September.
That law, passed in February 1998, has for the
first timeallowed IBAMA, Brazil's leading
environmental agency, to collect fines against
powerful landowners who illegally cut the Amazon
or coastal Atlantic rainforest.
Those landowners, who have strong political ties
in Brazil's Congress, have struck back,
demanding thepassage of the new law, which would
cancel fines for past forest destruction and
allow conversion of privately-held native forest
to working eucalyptus and pine farms.
"If this law passes, it will change the entire
environmental legal framework and expose all
remaining Brazilian forests to massive
deforestation, as it prioritizes land conversion
into agriculture above all," warned Robert
Buschbacher, the World Wildlife Fund's
conservation director in Brasilia.
The forestry bill, created through the National
Council for Agriculture, has raised hackles
among environmentalists in Brazil, in part
because it bypassed a congressional commission
set up to revamp the country's outdated 1965
forest laws.
That commission, known as CONAMA, or the
National Council for the Environment,
incorporates businessmen, government
representatives and non-government
organizations.
"Everybody agrees the forest code is old and
needs tobe reformed. But (CONAMA) is the forum
where that's supposed to happen," said Stephen
Schwartzman, a senior scientist with the
Environmental Defense Fund in Washington. "The
problem is the large landowners don't want to
discuss this there. There want to bypass all the
public mechanisms that have been set up to
discuss these issues."
The bill, which is expected to come up for a
vote Tuesday or Wednesday in Brasilia, is not
certain to pass, though representatives of the
National Council for Agriculture reportedly
believe it could win significant government
backing as a payback for earlier rural votes
on government-sponsored bills.
Jose Sarney Filho, Brazil's minister of the
environment, has said he does not back the bill,
and a variety of opposition environmentalist
legislators, led by Acre state Sen. Marina
Silva, are now working to halt its passage.
The proposal comes after the collection of
record fines for deforestation in Brazil by
IBAMA, an agency that until September had no
authorization to collect the fines it had
issued.
Last year, before the law went into effect,
IBAMA issued $11 million in fines but collected
only 6 percent.
This year collections are up sharply,
environmental officials say, though final
numbers have not been released.
Under the proposed law, the landowners would be
allowed to convert privately held rainforest-
which constitutes much of the Amazon--into
eucalyptus and pine plantations without
government permits.
Small landowners also would be allowed to count
such plantations as forest set-asides,
potentially dramatically reducing the amount of
protected Amazon rainforest.
"Environmental law enforcement in Brazil was
starting to work," Schwartzman said. Now "this
new bill could open up a very large amount of
forest to completely uncontrolled legal
deforestation."
In a study earlier this year, Daniel Nepstad, an
ecologist with the Woods Hole Research Center in
Massachusetts, estimated that 16 percent of the
Amazon has been lost to deforestation and
logging. The Brazilian government puts the loss
at 13 percent
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