Managing the Amazon Timber Industry

Abstract

Timber is a strategic resource in Amazon frontier development, providing 250,000 jobs and up to one-fourth of the region's gross domestic product (Uhl et al. 1997; Verissimo et al. 2002a, 2002b). Since the 1980s, timber sales have replaced government subsidies as the main economic force behind frontier expansion, financing roads deep into forest wilderness areas and providing funds to invest in forest clear-cutting and pasture formation (Mattos & Uhl 1994; Nepstad et al. in press). Timber obtained through contracts with individual property owners, large and small, accounts for most of the annual roundwood production. Unfortunately, most of the benefits of these agreements have accrued to loggers rather than landowners, and predatory logging practices have led to forest degradation. If properly managed, however, these accords could significantly reduce the expansion of logging activities into the region's large blocks of sparsely inhabited forests and could provide a strong incentive for landholders to conserve and manage their private forest holdings. But this opportunity will be missed if the new Brazilian government's forest policy proposal concentrates on government-administered timber concessions in an expanding network of publicly owned forests, as proposed by the previous administration (Verissimo et al. 2002a, 2002b). The major government proposal for managing the Brazilian Amazon timber industry and for diminishing the extensive ecological damage it causes (Uhl & Vieira 1989; Nepstad et al. 1999) seeks to isolate the industry from the process of frontier settlement. Amazon timber companies complain that it is difficult to acquire and maintain the large areas of forest needed to implement management systems with 30to 50-year cycles of timber harvest. The proposed policy seeks to address this problem by expanding the national forest system in the Amazon from 8 to 50 million ha (from 2% to 12% of the Brazilian Amazon),