Gilberto Camara, a scientist who leads Brazil’s national space agency, is more at ease poring over satellite data of the Amazon than being thrust into the spotlight.
But since January, Camara has been at the center of a political tug-of-war between scientists and Brazil’s powerful business interests. It started when he and his fellow engineers released a report showing that deforestation of Brazil’s portion of the rain forest had shot up again after two years of decline.
Since then, Camara, who heads the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) here, has found himself having to defend his agency’s findings against one of Brazil’s richest and most powerful men: Blairo Maggi, who is governor of the country’s largest agricultural state, Mato Grosso, and a business owner known as the “Soybean King.”
Maggi was concerned enough about the report — which led to harsh measures stifling business in his state — that he asked for, and got, a meeting with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The stakes could not be higher for da Silva. Stewardship of the Amazon has always been a touchy subject, with many Brazilians fearful that world powers would try to impose their standards on the rain forest. But in recent years, the debate over the Amazon has intensified, with many outside the country seeing an intact rain forest as a key to controlling global warming. At the same time, Brazil’s economy has taken off — largely because of businesses that are claiming more of the Amazon’s land for crops and livestock, and more of its trees for logging.
Da Silva has spent the last several years walking a careful line, trying to maintain his image as Brazil’s first “green” president, which has gained him international cachet, without threatening Brazil’s agriculture industry at a time of soaring grain and meat prices.
Camara’s findings made the president’s balancing act harder and escalated what had been a long-simmering battle between businesses and environmentalists across the world into a low-grade war.
It did not help that the scientists’ report, released in January, relied heavily on a relatively new measure of deforestation called progressive deforestation, which is widely accepted in the environmental community but which Maggi claims is tantamount to lying. The space research agency argues that this slower-paced deforestation, where parts of the forest are thinned out little by little rather than all at once, can be just as devastating.
The criticism worried scientists in and outside of Brazil, including Camara.
“Science,” he said, “should not bow to authority.”
The president’s answer was more nuanced; he told Maggi that INPE would recheck its work. But the scientist said the agency was not pressured into changing its stance.
“This is not the first time in the larger world where people dispute the numbers because they don’t like them,” said Thomas Lovejoy, president of The Heinz Center in Washington, an environmental research group. “But this is the first time this has happened in Brazil. The pressures from agricultural economic interests are really making a difference in Brasilia.”
INPE reported in January that deforestation had risen by an estimated 11,100km2 from August and December of last year. That is on pace to exceed the approximately 17,900km2 recorded from August 2006 to August last year.
The agency’s data also showed that 54 percent of the deforestation had occurred in Mato Grosso, Maggi’s state, where the scientists said ranchers and loggers pushed further into the rain forest.
Some of the deforestation is legal. Owners are allowed to clear 20 percent of their land in the rain forest. Nonetheless, the report was a headache for the government. Da Silva has received international attention in recent years for the country’s burgeoning biofuels program and for the recent two-year drop in deforestation. Suddenly environmentalists across the world were again criticizing Brazil’s efforts to save the rain forest.
Now that INPE has come under attack, environmentalists worry publicly that the president might cave in to pressure from businesses. The environmental community became even more alarmed when Marina Silva, Brazil’s environmental minister and a respected rain forest defender, resigned this month. While exiting, she cited heavy pressures being exerted by industry-minded governors, including Maggi, to reverse the federal crackdown on destruction of the forest.
Da Silva responded to INPE’s report with tough measures, including imposing credit restrictions on those found to be involved in illegal forest-clearing and creating a multi-agency police operation dubbed Arc of Fire, which is conducting surprise raids to catch illegal loggers.
INPE uses two satellites to gather its data, one that crosses the entire Amazon every 15 days and another that crosses it every month.
The agency has two systems for measuring deforestation. A yearly satellite analysis called Prodes measures deforested areas as small as about 6 hectares, while a lower-resolution system called Deter is designed to map areas greater than about 24 hectares in real time, giving law enforcement information to act quickly to stop further destruction.
The controversy over INPE’s figures have centered on the information provided by Deter.
In the past, Camara said, the agency included mostly large swaths of cleared land in its analysis. But environmental researchers have been clamoring for years for satellite researchers to expand monitoring to include areas thinned-out by logging and surface fires, rather than just areas that have been clear cut.
INPE uses the term progressive degradation to refer to this systemic process of forest degradation that has become increasingly common in the Amazon in recent years. The agency began including it in its analysis in 2005.
The latest deforestation alerts have shown that about one-third of newly deforested areas were from progressive degradation, of which more than 75 percent were “severely degraded,” he said.
“We had to ask ourselves what happened between forest and clear-cut,” said Camara, who is 52 and has been with the agency for 26 years. “With a view that if you are going to do prevention and enforcement, you need to be there as rapidly as possible.”
In other words, if farmers, loggers and others are clearing illegally, but slowly, the government has a better chance to catch them before a large area has been affected if it identifies thinned out areas.
“We are satisfied with the technology we have,” he said. “It is the largest use of remote sensing data for environmental protection worldwide on a systematic basis of any country.”
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY ANDREW DOWNIE
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