Wood as an economic catalystic to ecological change in Amazonia

Uhl, C., VERÍSSIMO, A., MATTOS, M., BRANDINO, Z., & TARIFA, R. (1990). Wood as an economic catalyst to ecological change in Amazonia. Economic catalysts to ecological change, 7-27.

Introduction

The Amazon is blanketed in green and beneath this mantle lies billions of cubic meters of wood whose overall value before sawing might be some six hundred billion dollars.1 After sawing, the value of this wood could easily approach two trillion dollars.2

The eastern Amazon began to be aggressively developed in the early 1960s with the opening of the Belém-Brasilia highway, but it was not a wood crisis that spurred Brazil to open its frontiers. Indeed, the first government-sponsored settlers were not loggers, but farmers and ranchers. They regarded the forest as an obstacle and used the age-old technique of cutting and burning to clear the land. Immense quantities of wood were wasted in this clearing process. Browder (1988) estimated that between 1966 and 1983. SUDAM (Superintendency for Amazon Development) subsidized ranchers, alone, destroyed an estimated 193 million m³ of marketable roundwood (48) million trees). He concludes that this was four times greater than the total volume of industrial roundwood extracted from the Brazilian Amazon between 1975 and 1980.

While this seems like strange economic behavior on the surface, Amazon settlers have responded in a rational way to a peculiar set of government incentives (Mahar 1989; Hecht 1985). The only way to acquire title to land in Amazonia has been through clearing. Hence, newcomers to Amazonia rush to lay claim to as much land as possible. INCRA, the government agency that oversees land titling, initially established that one could claim 6 ha for every ha cleared thereby providing a built-in incentive to clear ever-larger tracts. Moreover, land speculation has been an imposant part of the deforestation dynamic. Once land is titled the owner is free to sell it–frequently at substantial profits while paying minimal land-sale taxes.

It has only been in the 1980s that the value of the forest for its wood is coming to be appreciated. Two developments have catalyzed this awakening. First, it has taken some 20 years to establish a reliable transport and communication system in the eastern Amazon making the establishment of sawmills and marketing of sawn products easier and less risk prone. Second, wood supplies in the south of Brazil have been steadily declining in recent years. For example, in the twelve-year period, 1976-1988, total roundwood production in Brazil’s Southern States (Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul) decreased from 15 million m³ (47% of Brazil’s total roundwood production) to 7.9 m³ (17% of total) (Anuário Estatístico). During this same period, roundwood production in the North region (Amazonia) has increased from 6.7 m³ (21% of Brazil’s total) to 24.6m³ (54% of this total) (Fig. 1A).