Land reform agency sanctions logging in Amazon rainforest park

[JohnWxy]

The greatest threat to rainforests is from logging operations. While other factors play a part the INITIAL deforestation is usually done by commercial interest logging the rainforests. Local farmers do not have equipment to cut down the very large rainforest trees nor to haul them out to sell them. It's the logging companies that do make the initial "hit" on the rainforests.


http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0821-amazon.html

Under the guise of a sustainable development scheme, a Brazilian land agency has granted large tracts of Amazon rainforest to colonists who quickly resold the forest to loggers, alleges a new report from Greenpeace. Some of the concessions were in the Amazon National Park, a national park.

Inequality of land distribution has long been a problem in Brazil, with a small number of wealthy landowners controlling a large share of the country's most productive land. The National Institute of Colonization and Land Reform (INCRA) is the agency charged with helping poor communities find land to settle and develop.

An eight-month investigation by Greenpeace found that INCRA may be working with logging firms to profit from land reform initiatives.

The land reform agency allegedly collaborated with logging companies to identify areas of interest for timber extraction then set up large settlements in these tracts of rainforest instead of placing them in already deforested areas. Timber firms then purchased the land on the cheap for logging. Greenpeace says the scheme gave loggers access to attractive timber, while helping INCRA meet President Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva's land reform targets just prior to his re-election campaign. Settlers won land and payments for selling holdings to loggers.

(more)

[NNadir]

1. Let me see, our ethanol boy is unaware that Francisco Anselmo de Barros

burned himself to death, soaked in ethanol, to protest the destruction of the Pantanal, the world's largest wet land, by ethanol barons?

Bull.

I pointed it out several times here, and your faux interest in the fate of Brazil is entirely disingenuous and cynical.

http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1114-globo.html

You couldn't care less what's destroyed in Brazil, as long it serves the Western car CULTure and your pals in the ethanol industry.

[jwirr]

2. IMO a license to turn another part of the world into a dry hole that

will not produce anything but sand.