Whose Rain Forest Is This, Anyway? in New York Times

RIO DE JANEIRO — For as long as most can remember, Brazil has gazed nervously at maps of the vast, mostly uninhabited territory of the Amazon rain forest.

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: May 18, 2008

In the 1960s and ’70s, generals here saw the colonization of the Brazilian Amazon, which is half the size of Europe, as a national security priority. Ocupar para não entregar — “occupy it to avoid surrendering it” — was the slogan of the day. Highways were built, and Brazilians were offered incentives to conquer the land in the Amazon and transform it in the name of development.

There was more behind the nervousness than idle conspiracy theory. Even then, such a unique and vast repository of riches stirred imaginations worldwide. Herman Kahn, the military strategist and futurist, pushed the idea of establishing a freshwater lake in the Amazon to transform the area into a center of agricultural production.

Now, with the world focusing on the promises of biodiversity and the perils of global warming, a chorus of international leaders have ever more openly declared the Amazon part of a patrimony far larger than that of the nations that share its territory. “Contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon is not their property, it belongs to all of us,” Al Gore, then a senator, said in 1989.

Such comments are not taken lightly here. In fact, they have reignited old attitudes of territorial protectionism and watchfulness for undercover foreign invaders (now including bioprospectors).
The government of President Luiz Inácio da Silva is pushing a law that would restrict access to the rain forest, requiring foreigners and Brazilians alike to obtain a special permit to enter it. Brazilian officials say it would separate bad non-governmental organizations from good ones, and deter so-called “biopirates” — those who want to patent unique substances discovered in the forest.

“The Amazon is ours,” Justice Secretary Romeu Tuma Jr. said in an interview. “We want to know who is going there and what they are going to do. It’s a question of national sovereignty.”
But that question is not as straightforward as it may seem. One man’s savior of sovereignty can be another’s despoiler of the forest.

And many Amazon experts say the proposed restrictions conflict with Mr. da Silva’s own efforts to give Brazil a greater voice in global climate change talks — an implicit acknowledgment that the Amazon is critical to the world at large. In addition, his critics have seized on a report in January of a spike in deforestation, as proof the government has not been safeguarding the region well.

Last week, Marina Silva, a fierce advocate of rain forest preservation, resigned as Mr. da Silva’s environmental minister after losing a series of political battles to him over development programs.

Seen in a global context, the restrictions reflect a larger debate about sovereign rights versus the world’s patrimony. International companies, for example, vie with nations to claim and develop resources in virgin territory in the Arctic, as melting ice reveals potentially vast oil and mineral deposits. There is also a struggle over who is entitled to grant access to international scientists and environmentalists seeking to protect such areas, and to companies seeking to exploit them. It is a struggle likely only to become thornier in coming years, in the face of two conflicting trends: rising demand for energy resources and increasing concern about climate change and pollution.

Here in Brazil, which contains 60 percent of the Amazon’s territory, this new debate is cast in terms recognizable from the past — notably the long-held suspicion by conservatives and the military that the real goal of foreigners is to take control of Brazil’s tropical wilderness and its riches.

The Amazon’s global importance is well established. It acts as a climate regulator, directly affecting rainfall patterns in Brazil and Argentina. Its winds, recent studies say, may even affect rainfall in Europe and North America. The burning and decomposition of trees cut down for development makes Brazil’s chunk of the Amazon responsible for about half of the world’s annual greenhouse-gas emissions from deforestation, says Meg Symington, Amazon director for the World Wildlife Fund in the United States.

Brazilian fears that the Amazon would be occupied by thieving foreigners go back at least to 1876, when Sir Henry Alexander Wickham took seeds from Brazil’s rubber-bearing trees back to London, from where they were sent to what is now Malaysia, as well as Africa and other tropical locations, dooming the Amazonian rubber boom.

Since then, there have been only scattered documented cases of what the Brazilians think of as biopiracy. The pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb, for example, found that the venom of the jararaca snake could help control high blood pressure and used it to create the drug Captopril. But by and large, said Thomas E. Lovejoy, president of The Heinz Center, a supporter of environmental research, “Biopiracy is a real red herring.”

Still, Brazil has extreme sensitivity to foreigners doing scientific work in the Amazon. Marc van Roosmalen, a Dutch-born primatologist and naturalized citizen, was arrested in 2002 and sentenced to 16 years for possessing monkeys in captivity without proper authorization, according to Brazilian newspapers. He is appealing the sentence.

Mr. Lovejoy and others in advocacy organizations worry that the Amazon restrictions will discourage science, hurt ecotourism and shield Brazil from scrutiny. “The government is not interested in more people going to the Amazon to address the incompetence it has shown in slowing deforestation,” said Marcelo Furtado, campaign director for Greenpeace Brazil.
Mr. Tuma said the authorizations for access will be decided by the justice and defense officials. Foreigners in violation without a permit could be fined $60,000 or more.

“We are not looking to criminalize the activities of the N.G.O.’s,” he said. “We want to give prestige to the serious N.G.O.’s, the serious international groups that have contributions to make to Brazil and to the world.”

But José Goldemberg, a former environmental secretary for the state of São Paulo, echoed many environmentalists in calling the strategy “paranoid,” and evoked the way the cold war Kremlin sealed off whole areas from prying eyes.
“If you try to control it, this will end up like the Soviet Union,” he said.