By Glen Barry
Asian industrial loggers are poised to significantly impact the world's largest rainforest wilderness, the Amazon. Within the past year, several of south-east Asia's biggest forestry conglomerates — known for abysmal environmental records at home — have greatly increased their control of Amazonian rainforests. The heart of the Amazon is being opened to wholesale industrial logging and increased rates of deforestation.
Prior to the recent onslaught of Asian loggers and despite government initiatives, annual deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon have increased from about 1.1 million hectares in 1991 to nearly 1.5 million hectares in 1994. A small group of Asian companies is threatening at least an additional 15% of the Amazon.
The Asian timber industry represents a concentrated core of rainforest-destroying capital characterised by an aggressive efficiency.
Timber companies in the state of Sarawak, Malaysia, have practised highly intensive industrial logging, harvesting much of the state's timber resource in only a decade with major environmental consequences including silted rivers, eroded soils and declining forest diversity and health. Indigenous Dayak tribes have experienced severe social dislocation.
After exhausting much of Asia's timber supplies, the multinationals have expanded operations throughout the tropics.
Malaysia's biggest logger, Rimbunan Hijau, first moved to Papua New Guinea, where they control at least 60% of the country's forestry concessions. Their arrival coincided with a tripling of log exports from 1991 to 1994.
Industrial logging has been blamed for social upheaval and extensive environmental damage. The 1989 Barnett Inquiry into the Timber Trade stated, "It would be fair to say, of some of the companies, that they are now roaming the countryside with the self-assurance of robber barons; bribing politicians and leaders, creating social disharmony and ignoring laws in order to gain access to, rip out, and export the last remnants of the province's valuable timber".
Historically, the Amazon rainforest's size, inaccessibility, typically poor soils and potent diseases have protected it against large-scale logging and development. Things are changing rapidly as major new highways dissect the basin, providing a major artery for timber companies to access north-central Amazon.
One new highway runs from the city of Manaus northward to Venezuela, making Manaus a major hub for new timber development. The number of timber mills there has increased from 10 to nearly 100 in five years.
Multinational Asian timber companies have entered the Amazon either through long-term harvest leases or by purchasing major interests in Brazilian timber firms.
The Associated Press reports major players include the Malaysian companies WTK Group, Samling, Rimbunan Hijau and Mingo, Fortune Timber of Taiwan and several companies from China which are expressing interest.
Brazil's national environmental protection agency, Ibama, estimates Asian multinationals have gained control of about 4.5 million hectares.
The Wall Street Journal estimates that Asian firms control about 12 million hectares in the wider South American tropical forest region, having quadrupled their interests in a few months in late 1996. The figure is expected to increase rapidly in the next two years.
"It's the last great resource grab", says Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International.
Loggers are targeting countries with financial problems that are technically and politically unable to monitor logging. Brazil has about 80 environmental inspectors for an area the size of western Europe.
Though sound forest laws and harvest practices may exist in theory, they are frequently flaunted. A recent survey of 34 logging sites in Para state, Brazil, revealed that none have met International Tropical Timber Organisation harvesting requirements that Brazil has agreed to comply with by the year 2000.
Illegal logging is common in the Amazon. A 1996 raid by Ibama found over 30,000 cubic metres of illegally cut timber floating down the Purus River towards waiting sawmills.
According to Ibama's chief, Eduardo Martins, "Multimillion dollar investments in the Amazonian logging industry would spell disaster ... We don't want that kind of investment."
The federal government has launched an investigation into the Asian timber purchases. Amazonino Mendes, the pro-logging governor of Amazona's state, has stated that logging will be regulated to limit environmental damage.
However, even in the unlikely event that the loggers do follow forestry laws, the excessive scale of their operations could easily accelerate the pace of Amazonian deforestation by greatly increasing forest access to hunters and slash-and-burn farmers.
By opening up the heart of the Amazon to large-scale logging, the Brazilian government risks accelerating rates of deforestation. Brazil has not demonstrated that it can control or regulate timber harvests.
The arrival of aggressive multinational timber firms will be a decisive test of Brazil's forestry policy. The stakes are high — the fate of the world's largest rainforest ecosystem.
[From Ecological Enterprises; more information at http://forests.org/.]