sustainable forestry in the Brazilian Amazon

The question of sustainable forestry is one that has both socioeconomic and environmental/biological aspects. If you're interested in these things, you might want to look at a journal such as Forest Ecology and Management and, in particular, at an article in Vol.256, No.7, which deals specifically with sustainable forestry in the Brazilian Amazon.

If, once you've opened the article, you scroll down to Section 5.2, you'll find a discussion of extractive reserves in Rondonia, one of the Brazilian states we'll be visiting. (Indeed, the concept of extractive reserves is one you should all be familiar with before we arrive.) You might also want to browse elsewhere in this long article.

soybeans and the Brazilian Amazon

Old images of Brazil as a country covered with jungle from top to bottom are in danger of being replaced by images of Brazil as one enormous field of beans.

This article, from the US Department of Agriculture, gives you some background into the changing place of soybean cultivation in the Brazilian Amazon. The report is from January 2004, but may well give you some valuable context for our travels. After all, one of the reasons for the road we're studying is to enable Brazil to export its beans to China more easily than by shipping them to the distant Atlantic coast.

who owns the Amazon?

Brazilians are often concerned that other countries have designs on that part of the Amazon basin which falls within its borders; they fear that Americans and Europeans are starting to think of the Amazon as "too important to leave to the Brazilians". That particular quote actually comes from a recent editorial in The Independent, a leading English newspaper.

If you read the whole editorial (which I hope you will), you might find a different way of reading that phrase which sounds a bit less threatening to Brazilian sovereignty. After all, Brazilians themselves have said for years that their forests provide vital services to the rest of the world, and the editorial could be read as agreeing with that stance - saying, in effect, that the rest of the world ought to pay the Brazilians for keeping their forests intact. But the wording is such that it's hardly surprising that Brazilians are sensitive on this score (just as Canadians are nervous about American refusal to recognise their sovereignty over much of the Arctic).

The New York Times ran a similar article not long ago quoting, I believe, Al Gore to the effect that the Amazon was an international asset. What do you think of this idea? If the Amazon belongs to the world, where do you stop?