Letting the Amazon pay its own way - Amazon Basin, Brazil - Special Issue: Environmental Restoration

It's a bit difficult to criticize forestry practices in other countries when we American are allowing the last sizeable temperate-zone rain forest on the planet (the Tongass National Forest in Alaska's Panhandle) to be turned into wood pulp to make Japanese rayon. There, as in tropical rain forests around the world, the future turns more on people and jobs than it does on trees and biomes. Solutions that are sustainable both for people and forests have received little attention so far, but without them, no preservation efforts will be successful in the long run.

Jon Christensen is a correspondent for Pacific News Service. He spent last year on assignment in Brazil who photographer Kit Miller, where they drove 18,000 miles and crossed the Amazon Basin from east to west and north to south.

I spent last year in Brazil, the better part of it in the Amazon Basin. I recently returned home to Nevada and the Great Basin of the United States.

I was concerned by what I saw in the rain forest, but somehow the High Desert Rain Forest Action Group, which I saw listed in a roundup of this year's environmental causes in the local paper, strikes me as too much of an oxymoron. At some point "think globally, act locally" starts to sound a little absurd.

One local rain-forest outfit is trying to get people to adopt trees in the Amazon. The director promises to send me a picture of my tree, somewhere in the Amazon, with a plaque inscribed with my name on it. He says it's a good way to guarantee my supply of oxygen.

In the box of junk mail awaiting my return, I found a whole slew of organizations touting ways I could help "save the rain forest" by writing them a check. I read about debt-for-nature swaps, ecological preserves and international bank campaigns.

Then I read in a back issue of Nature magazine that scientists have already come up with a solution to the burning problem of the year. They studied two and a half acres of Amazon forest and found out that harvesting fruits, nuts, gums, and oils is more profitable than logging or cattle ranching. The Amazon can pay its own way.

What a relief, I thought, as I burned the alerts and appeals in my fireplace for heat and read on.

Charles Peters of the New York Botanical Gardens paddled upriver with another botanist and a forester to inventory a plot of jungle 20 miles from Iquitos, Peru. In the small village of Mishana they talked to the locals to find out what would sell in the local market.

On their small plot, about the size of a suburban lot, they found 842 trees belonging to 275 different species. Despite this riot of life forms, less than half of the trees produced a marketable product. Still, Dr. Peters calculated that leaving the forest standing was a better investment than cutting it down for wood or clearing it for cows. Over one year, he calculated, your average savvy forest dweller could make $697.79 by harvesting nine varieties of fruit, wild chocolate, rubber, and the occasional tree from that little bit of jungle.

In one clear cut of the timber, Dr. Peters figured he might gross $1,000. But in the long run, that wouldn't be a good financial strategy. Calculating the cumulative value of sustainable harvests over 50 years, the researchers discovered that their piece of land was worth $6,280. A nearby tree plantation of the same size was valued at $3.184 while cattle pasture fetched only $2,980.

(These figures were calculated as a current value much as a financial manager would determine the value of a long-term bond. Although how researchers were going to get your average forest dweller to buy that proposition, when he doesn't know how to read or make simple calculations, was never explained.

"Deforestation is a bad investment," Dr. Peters concluded. The most immediate and profitable way of combining the often-contradictory goals of development and conservation, he said, is the exploitation of the natural fruits of the forest.

He rejected the notion of setting up nature preserves in the Amazon. "I don't see any future in simply setting land aside as pristine parks," he told the Washington Post. "Not in the Third World. The local people won't buy it and the local government won't buy it. The forests must be used in order to be saved."

The finding was hailed as "the last great hope for saving the rapidly disappearing rain forests." Environmentalists have long contended that the forest was more valuable standing than down, but now scientists had proved it in dollars and cents. Even the stolid Economics jumped on the bandwagon, enthusiastically endorsing the idea that free-market forces should decide the fate of the forests.

Then I noticed that products seeking to tap a rich vein of rain-forest concern and growing green consumerism are already appearing on store shelves. This year Ben & Jerry's launched "Rain Forest Church" with Brazil nuts gathered by rubber tappers in the Amazon. One can now "eat ice cream and save the rain forest."

"The idea is to stop saying no to everything in the Amazon and start offering a positive alternative to the people who need to make a living there," said Jason Clay, an anthropologist-turned-entrepreneur with the indigenous-rights group Cultural Survival. Early in 1989, Clay primed the rain-forest marketing trend by sending 880 pounds of samples from the Amazon to four companies in the United States and England, including 45 different fruits, nuts, oils, and flours.

The Body Shop, a booming chain of natural health and beauty stores, will soon be offering a Brazil-nut facial scrub. There is even talk of marketing natural-latex condoms with the slogan "protect yourself, protect the rain forest."

These green businesses want to help improve the terms of the Amazon economy for the protest, most powerless forest dwellers - rubber tappers and Indians. By short-circuiting the local elite, which now controls most trade in forest products, they hope to return a bigger share of profits to ecologically sound projects in the Amazon aimed at diversifying and increasing production, and doing some processing on-site capture more of the value locally.

When I was in the Amazon, the rubber tappers were promoting the concept of "extractive reserves" to protect the forest from speculation and deforestation. Chico Mendes died in the fight to establish a reserve in the state of Acre.

"Now we're talking - think globally, act locally," I said to myself as I hopped into my gas-guzzler and drove to the supermarket to scoop up a quart of ice cream. Back at home, my boots in the fire and a spoon in the Ben & Jerry's, I learned of another interesting plan to save the rain forests - by raising iguanas rather than cows, I almost spilled "Rain Forest Crunch" all over myself.

"Lizards," I thought, "Ick."

But I knew that cows are the main culprits behind deforestation; they occupy 85 percent of the cleared land in Amazonia. Then I remembered the crocodile we ate with a family of rubber tappers on a journey up a remote river. It turns out iguanas are also considered a delicacy in parts of Latin America. They call them "gallina de palo," or chicken on a stick.

The Green Iguana Foundation and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Costa Rica extoll the efficiency with which the sedentary, cold-blooded iguana turns food into protein. An iguana consumes less than 5 percent of what a chicken or cow eats to produce an equivalent pound at meat.

Instead of clearing the forest for pasture, researchers are urging farmers to raise animals that do well in the forest. They calculate that a farmer could raise 100 iguanas a year on a typical two-and-a-half-acre plot of forest. At an average 6 1/2 pounds each, the iguanas would produce 650 pounds of low-fat meat, better than the average cattle ranch.

Dr. Dagmar Werner, director of the iguana project, said she tested the idea in two Panamanian villages by giving farmers cages, incubators, and expert advice on nurturing iguanas.

"Nobody burns the forest anymore," she told the New York Times. "The villagers are very enthusiastic and are planting trees like mad."

I wondered how long it would be before mesquite-grilled iguana appeared at the next ecologically hip reception.

THERE IS A CHANGE coming to the Amazon. These visionary explorations of ways of making a living from the rain forest are part of a future for the forest.

But the iguana ranches are still a long way from being a commercial success. And while marketing rain-forest products is a promising avenue, the hype that has surrounded this approach to "saving the rain forest" has obscured some real problems.

Dr. Werner provided too much help to her fledgling iguana farmers for her experience to reflect real-life conditions. And Ben and Jerry are having a hard time guaranteeing the quantity and quality of nuts needed for their high-test ice cream without going through the local Brazil-nut barons who have long exploited gatherers.

Besides, in the Brazilian Amazon where I traveled, trade in "extractive" products supports less than 13 percent of the population, and the sector's contribution to the regional economy has declined steadily since the last rubber boom. Close to 15 million people live in the region now, more than half of them in cities.

I thought about the people in those cities, I found hope in imagining that in the Amazon, like in the American West to which it has so often been compared, the facts of the landscape will still dominate human endeavors in the future. Here it is a desert, there a rain forest, but both environments exact careful human attention to the realities of the land and a heavy price from those who fail to pay attention.

The great Amazon Bason is a landscape changing on a human scale before the eyes of the world. Maybe iguana ranches will be part of that landscape in the future, along with extractive reserves, national forests, parks, and Indian reservations, but so will cities, dams, highways, cattle ranches, farms and mines.

COPYRIGHT 1990 Point Foundation
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