The long road to ruin for the Amazon forest

The long road to ruin for the Amazon forest

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  The Observer, Sunday 15 April 2007
  

The 1,100-mile road is the main north-south artery of the Amazon rainforest. It is also the most controversial road in Brazil, built in the 1970s to open up the jungle to colonisation - forgetting, of course, that many indigenous Indians lived there already. It has become a frontier of deforestation. Now President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has announced that one of the major projects of his second term, at a cost of $350m, will be to pave the 600 miles of the road that is still a dirt track.

Roads bring human activity, which has always meant a plundering of natural resources. Yet Lula believes he can develop the region without increasing destruction. The stakes are high, since the area of influence of the BR-163 is a quarter of the Brazilian Amazon. 'The problem in the past is that the government has not had presence in the area,' says Muriel Saragossi, the government's co-ordinator for the Amazon region. 'We now have an integrated vision.' The 'Sustainable BR-163 Plan' involves 20 ministries and is Brazil's most ambitious attempt ever to reconcile growth and conservation.

The road stretches from Cuiaba, near the Bolivian border, to Santarem on the banks of the Amazon. On the first 450-mile paved section the rainforest has been transformed into rolling fields as far as the eye can see. The main crop is soya. Soya - half of it exported to the EU - is the economic force behind the road project. If the BR-163 is paved to Santarem, with its deep water port, farmers could export soya along it. 'This will cut the road journey to the market by 600 miles as well as a similar distance by sea,' says farmer Nelson Piccoli in Sorriso. Piccoli, like other farmers, resents the suggestion that soya is responsible for razing the Amazon: 'We did not destroy this region. We transformed this region from native vegetation to agricultural production. What you are seeing here is how we are supporting humanity. You cannot survive without eating food.'

As I travelled along the BR-163 I was surprised by how much the environmental message seemed to have got through to the timber industry. In Sinop, a lumber town, a building was emblazoned with the words Green Party. Paulo Fiuza, the local Green leader, is a former logger. 'Just because you work in the timber industry it doesn't mean you can't be an environmentalist,' he says. If they carry on destroying the way they have been, he said, they will destroy the land that has brought them wealth.

For almost two-thirds of its length the BR-163, however, is a track. Even though the road is barely passable for several months of the year, settlers came here in their tens of thousands. Here much less of the rainforest is destroyed - but the social problems are much worse. It is not just because buses get stuck in mud; it is that the region is lawless. 'We are completely abandoned here,' says small farmer Irineu Matthes, in Castelo dos Sonhos, a town of about 6,000. 'The government is not present at all. Here we are at the hands of fate.' A week after I left, two local people were assassinated.

Most murders are over land. The government encouraged settlers, but only gave a small minority title. Those who were the most violent kept the largest plots. The largest town on the unpaved section is Novo Progresso (pop. 40,000). The cattle herd here has boomed from 50,000 a decade ago to a million.

'No one put a sign at the beginning of the BR-163 when we came here saying that it was forbidden to destroy the rainforest,' argues Rancher Jose dos Santos. 'Why do we have to pay such a high price because the rest of Brazil - and certainly England - has already destroyed its forests? We just want a little space where we can live and work with diginity.'

For the lorry drivers of the BR-163, the paving will make their lives easier, but at a high cost. 'You used to see tapirs, capybaras - even jaguars - by the side of the road. Now you hardly see anything,' says lorry driver Gustavo Hering. 'When the paving comes, you'll be able to get everything out - and you will finish off the forest completely.

· Alex Bellos's film on the BR-163 will be broadcast tomorrow on Newsnight, BBC2, 10.30pm

Sinking Pacific island Kiribati considers moving to a man-made alternative

The future for Kiribati, one of the low-lying Pacific nations threatened by rising seas, is so dire that the government is contemplating relocating the entire population to man-made islands resembling giant oil rigs.

"We're considering everything... because we are running out of options," the President of Kiribati, Anote Tong, said yesterday in Auckland, where he is attending the Pacific Islands Forum. He said that his small, impoverished country – where the highest land is no more than two metres above sea level – urgently needed the world to take action on climate change.

Vulnerable Pacific nations have acquired a powerful new ally, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who visited Kiribati on his way to the Auckland conference. In a speech on Tuesday, Mr Ban warned: "For those who believe climate change is about some distant future, I invite them to Kiribati. Climate change is not about tomorrow. It is lapping at our feet – quite literally in Kiribati and elsewhere." Beachside villages in Kiribati – which consists of 33 coral atolls sprinkled across two million square miles of ocean – have already had to move to escape the encroaching waves. Water supplies have been contaminated by salt water, and crops destroyed. Erosion, caused partly by storms and flooding, is increasingly serious.

Mr Tong said he had seen models of a man-made floating island, similar to an offshore oil platform and costing US$2bn (£1.25bn). While it sounded "like something from science fiction", he said radical ideas had to be considered. "If you're faced with the option of being submerged with your family, what would you do?" he asked. "Would you jump on the rig... on a floating island or not? I think the answer is yes."

Other ideas included building a series of sea walls, at a cost of nearly $1bn. But Mr Tong said it would be up to the international community to fund such projects, and he complained that Kiribati had received little financial aid despite pledges from wealthier nations.

A former British colony called the Gilbert Islands, Kiribati is home to 103,000 people, most of them crammed into the main atoll, Tarawa, a horseshoe-shaped chain of islets surrounding a central lagoon. Like other pancake-flat Pacific nations such as Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, and Indian Ocean nations such as the Maldives, it faces oblivion as a result of global warming-induced rising sea levels.

Mr Tong said that for i-Kiribati, as his countrymen are known, it was no longer a case of adapting to a changing environment, but of survival. He said Kiribati desperately needed the world to act to reduce carbon emissions.

Mr Ban said his visit to Kiribati had strengthened his view that "something is seriously wrong with our current model of economic development". He said: "We will not succeed in reducing emissions without sustainable energy solutions."

Charts, maps and infographics Daily chart

Gender inequality

Death and the maiden

Sep 19th 2011, 15:08 by The Economist online

OVER a quarter of all excess female deaths occur in China at birth, says the World Bank's annual World Development Report, published on September 19th. The number has risen since 1990 from 890,000 to 1.1m. These are the numbers of extra girls who would have been born if the normal sex ratio at birth (105 boys to 100 girls) had prevailed in China. It does not do so because of the practice of sex-selective abortion. Aborted girls account for the largest single share of excess female deaths worldwide, but other sorts of death have been growing faster, notably those of women of child-bearing age in Africa. The excess deaths of African women aged 15 to 49 (when compared with female death rates in rich countries) rose by 150% between 1990 and 2008. The number of excess deaths in African countries with high rates of HIV-AIDS increased by 760%. Excess female mortality is shifting from birth in East Asia to adulthood in Africa.

Read also: "Growth is not enough"

^{Correction: We mistakenly said that the natural sex ratio at birth is 105 girls to 100 boys when it is, of course, 105 boys to 100 girls. This was corrected on September 19th.}

Space for improvement

6 April 2011 | By Stuart Nathan The Engineer

We’re getting a statue of Yuri Gagarin not far from The Engineer’s offices. To mark the 50th anniversary of the first Cosmonaut’s flight, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, is donating a copy of a statue that stands in Gagarin’s home town to the UK, where the 3.5m high chunk of Socialist-Realist zinc will take up its position near Admiralty Arch, spacesuit-clad and arm outstretched towards the statue of another great explorer, James Cook.

I’m never quite sure about such statues; Gagarin was undoubtedly a significant figure but the UK’s involvement in his achievement (and that of the engineers who put him into orbit) was non-existent. But then, I always wonder about the statues of Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square as well.

However, the event does have some resonance in the first week of the UK Space Agency’s existence as a full executive agency of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. Its launch was accompanied by an announcement of a £10million grant to start a national space technology programme, a reduction in regulations on satellite operators, and a study of the regulations that might be needed for space tourism operators to launch from the UK.

Of course, the modest government support of the UKSA pales into pathetic insignificance next to the munificent French government’s €500million (£440million) handout for space research, which will secure France’s place in the lead of the project to develop a successor to the Ariane 5 rocket. The developers of Britain’s own proposed spaceplane, Reaction Engine’s Skylon, must surely be envying their colleagues across the Channel right now. However, it is an acknowledgement of the importance of the space sector to the UK economy, both as a source of employment and a generator of technology and income — the sector is worth some £7.5billion per year to the economy — and when so many organisations are being deprived of public funds at the moment, it doesn’t do to complain. Not if you’re British, anyway.

The UK point of view is that the new European rockets will carry British instruments to provide lucrative services in telecommunications and valuable insights in scientific discovery. But it doesn’t exactly capture the imagination. In our current issue, we’re featuring another space-related project which is all about enthusing people: the rocket-propelled land speed record contenderBloodhound SSC, whose project director, Richard Noble, talks about the uplift in numbers of physics and engineering graduates inspired by the Apollo programme. The clever satellites and probes designed by UK firms might be inspiring to people already studying for degrees — and we wouldn’t for a moment belittle their contribution — but they’re unlikely to get many 13-year-olds excited.

High flyer: the Skylon spaceplane, being developed in the UK, could b e a next-generation satellite launcher

Seeing the statue of Gagarin, and the spirit of exploration, adventure and risk he embodied, it’s difficult not to get a little wistful about the UK’s space industry. The moves to open up the UK for space tourism give us a little glimpse into what could be. It’s been suggested that RAF Lossiemouth could form a perfect spaceport for space planes, providing a long flightpath over the North Sea (although the BBC thought that was so unlikely it mistook the story for an April Fool); imagine, for a moment, the graceful power of a Skylon space plane streaking along the runway with the majestic peaks of the Cairngorms as a backdrop. Now that’d get the kids lining up for engineering courses, wouldn’t it? And it’d be a better site for a statue of Yuri Gagarin, as well.

As it happens, The Engineer did mention Gagarin at the time of his orbit. Digging back through our archive, I found this short item at the front of the 14 April, 1961 issue:

You can tell the editors of the day were in a rush. Tovarich isn’t a previously-unknown name for Major Gagarin; it’s Russian for Comrade. We did make up for it with an exhaustive feature in the following issue, containing the following passage, unusually lyrical for The Engineer at the time:

Major Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin died when an aircraft he was piloting crashed in March 1968. As deputy training director of the Soviet Union’s cosmonaut programme, he was in the process of requalifying as a jet pilot.

• 
  Government investment funds space-technology programme
  

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  Skylon spaceplane gathers momentum
  

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  UK to lead commercial space travel
  

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  July 1969. Apollo 11
  

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  Space Ltd
  

Read more: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/opinion/comment/space-for-improvement/1008161.article#ixzz1l2xasnul