According to the United Nations, 74 million acres of farmland in the developing world were acquired by foreign governments and investors over the first half of 2009 – an amount equal to half of Europe’s farmland.

A new tool from the Center for Global Development, Forest Monitoring for Action (FORMA) tool, uses satellite data to monitor tropical deforestation on a monthly basis. Using publicly available feeds from NASA and other sources, FORMA detects the spread of deforestation in areas as small as 1 square kilometer. The video above uses FORMA to animate the rapidly growing damage in Indonesia over the last four years.

The city of Rio de Janeiro’s plan to erect a 650-meter long, three-meter high concrete wall between the 7,500 residents of the Dona Marta slum and the surrounding rainforest signals the government’s reluctance to address the underlying causes of environmental degradation. Although it is heralded by authorities as an “eco-barrier” that will protect the rainforest and “improve living standards and protect slum residents from the armed gangs that control many of Rio’s 600 or so slums,” the wall does not address the issues of acute poverty and lack of access to affordable housing that keep many Brazilians living in slums, harvesting resources from the rainforest.

Without access to decent housing and living-wage jobs, many slum residents will continue to encroach on the hillsides, warn Brazilian environmentalists. “It is hypocrisy to talk about protecting the Atlantic rainforest without considering the issues of housing and transport to take the pressure off the forest,” said Sergio Ricardo, a leading environmental campaigner in Rio de Janeiro, in an interview with the Jornal do Brasil.

Slums have often stalled Rio’s efforts to improve its environmental report card, as slum residents tend to be focused more on daily survival than on the environmental consequences of their actions. But slums do not have to be a thorn in the side of the government’s eco-friendly image. In fact, Rio’s previous attempts to reverse deforestation through grassroots reforestation projects have been extremely successful.

According to a 2005 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, municipal reforestation projects around Rio employed several hundred slum residents to plant millions of trees surrounding their communities. The projects “resulted in the return of dozens of species of birds, monkeys and other animals—many not seen in decades,” as well as cooler air temperatures, writes William Bennett. At the same time, the municipal projects became a source of steady work for residents. “Before this job, I worked as a day laborer; one day I would have work—the next day nothing,” said Carlos Alberto Ribeiro, a reforestation worker who earned about $200 a month planting trees. By 2005, community reforestation projects had employed 914 slum residents in 93 projects that had restored a total of 4,500 acres of native-species trees to the region.

Rather than segregating slum residents from the rest of the city in what some critics have called “social apartheid,” perhaps Rio should scale up community forestry projects, employing greater numbers of slum residents to improve the health of the Atlantic rainforest. While the government still has far to go in providing affordable housing, a steady wage could help residents secure access to adequate housing and reduce pressure on the region’s delicate environment.

Photo: Rocinha, one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest slums with an estimated 200,000 residents, is one of hundreds of slum neighborhoods surrounding Rio, putting extreme pressure on the region’s environment. Courtesy of flickr user andreasnilsson1976.

Modern-day slavery, also known as human trafficking, is the third most lucrative form of organized crime in the world, after trade in illegal drugs and arms trafficking. Today, 27 million people are enslaved—mostly as a result of debt bondage. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns found that Brazil is the third-largest source of human trafficking in the Western hemisphere, after Mexico and Colombia. According to the U.S. Department of State’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2008, 250,000-500,000 Brazilian children are currently exploited for prostitution, both domestically and abroad. NGOs estimate that 75,000 Brazilian women and girls—most of them trafficked—work as prostitutes in neighboring South American countries, the United States, and Europe.

What does the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) have in common with Brazil’s Urucu natural gas fields? They both epitomize the struggle to balance energy independence and environmental conservation.

Located in the southern Amazon region and discovered in 1978, the Urucu fields are the largest onshore natural gas reserves in Brazil. Exploration began in 1988, but not without controversy. The Amazon rainforest, like ANWR, is a sensitive, biologically unique environment. Plans for exploration of the Urucu fields sparked heated debate over the extent of the environmental damage caused by such exploration—much like the current debate over oil drilling in ANWR.

Conservationists’ arguments revolved around two main issues: preservation of the environment and local communities’ livelihoods. The extraction complex will consist of three pipelines (map): Urucu-Coari (in existence); Urucu-Manaus; and Urucu-Porto Velho. The two new pipelines, which will total 621 miles of additional pipe, will also require the clearing of a 65-foot-wide strip along the entire pipeline. For the pipeline to reach Manaus, it needs to cross the six-mile wide Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon river. The project’s critics argue that even a small oil spill, especially in the stretches of the pipeline in the river, would harm the region’s biodiversity and the livelihoods of indigenous communities and others who depend on the river.

Petrobrás has sought to assuage activists’ concerns over the pipeline’s impact on local communities by assuring them that the Urucu gas fields will employ at least 3,800 local workers. In addition, Petrobrás is sponsoring community development projects to stimulate alternative economic activities.

Bolivia’s political crisis triggered Brazil’s decision to build the gas extraction pipelines, in spite of environmentalists’ misgivings. The December 2006 “nationalization” of natural gas in Bolivia, which provided Brazil with approximately half of its natural gas supply, made energy security and diversification of energy suppliers priorities for the government, and prompted Petrobrás to jumpstart a natural gas independence project in which Urucu features prominently.

While environmentalists may not have succeeded in stopping the development of the Urucu fields, their efforts have forced Petrobrás to significantly diminish the project’s environmental footprint. In conjuction with local universities and research centers, Petrobrás carried out an impact and risk analysis (Piatam) that led to the implementation of several environmental precautions. For example, the pipeline must be built eight feet under any river it crosses and permanently monitored by a cable embedded within the pipes. In addition, the extraction wells are very small, taking up very little forest area, and a remote control center that tracks any leaks in the pipeline is able to isolate and disable leaking pipes or valves, according to Jeff Hornbeck, an international trade and finance specialist at the Congressional Research Service (via email).

Moreover, all equipment is transported to the site by helicopters in order to avoid building roads, which frequently open up areas to logging and wider-scale development. Petrobrás also plans to use robots to monitor changes in environmental conditions, including the level of oil in the water; and to gather information to help prepare for emergency situations (e.g., flooding or other natural disasters) that threaten to damage the pipelines.

If Petrobrás executes the development of the Urucu fields successfully—with minimal negative consequences for communities and the Amazon—it could serve as an example for other energy projects in sensitive habitats. As growing energy needs increase demand for more exploration, environmentally conscious projects will become even more important.

By Brazil Institute Intern Ana Janaina Nelson.

Video: You can glimpse unspoiled forest outside the window of a plane landing at the Urucu fields, the product of Petrobrás’ efforts to minimize damage to the Amazon.

Last month, in an effort to prevent further deforestation of the Amazon, Brazil announced the creation of the Amazon Fund, which aims to make preserving the world’s largest tropical rain forest more lucrative than destroying it. Norway was the first country to contribute to the initiative, offering a pledge of $100 million. Officials project that the fund may receive up to $1 billion in its first year and may accrue as much as $21 billion by 2121.

By creating an endowment open to international investors, Brazil appears to have shed some of its usual suspicions of foreign encroachment on the Amazon and acknowledged that conservation efforts will only be sustainable with considerable outside support. Yet the funds will still be controlled by Brazil’s National Development Bank (BNDES)—which, according to BNDES environment director Eduardo de Mello, means “donors will have no say over the use of [the Amazon Fund’s] resources.” Within BNDES, a steering committee made up of federal and state officials will be in control of the funds. According to the proposal listed online by BNDES, the Amazon Fund will target the following areas: Brazilian sovereignty; infrastructure development; combating deforestation; indigenous rights; sustainable development; and government, business, and civil cooperation.

The Amazon Fund is guided by the Brazilian government’s Plano Amazônia Sustentável (PAS), or Sustainable Amazon Plan, which was issued in May 2008. Carlos Nobre, a senior climate scientist at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, was one of the principal architects of this plan, and presented it to an American audience at a January 16, 2008, conference at the Woodrow Wilson Center. PAS offers a holistic vision for protecting the Amazon that goes beyond conservation efforts, calling for the creation of a new economic paradigm centered on sustainably “globalizing the development capacity of the Amazon and producing value-added goods and services.” Nobre told Reuters that while the Amazon Fund is a positive initial step, it nevertheless “just postpones deforestation…the final fix is to create a new economy that can give jobs to several million people.” This “paradigm shift,” he explained, requires the entrepreneurial capacity to “translate biodiversity wealth into economic wealth.”

Response to the Amazon Fund has been generally positive, albeit guarded. According to Paulo Gustavo Prado, environmental policy director of Conservation International’s (CI) Brazil program, the Fund is a helpful move in the fight to combat deforestation in the Amazon, but is still a work “under construction” (e-mail exchange with Alan Wright). For instance, it is possible that the resources will be used to fill “gaps in governance”—in other words, to fund additional enforcement actions against illegal logging in the Amazon—and therefore have little direct impact on Amazonian society as whole. He observed that the prospect for private-sector involvement seems limited by the fact that funders will have no influence over the use of funds, so the initiative is unlikely to draw money for carbon-offset projects. Prado remarked that by reducing the cost of conservation-related activities, it appears that the Amazon Fund will encourage the work of organizations such as CI. He also stressed CI’s commitment to see that the Fund will be made available to researchers and scientists, and that indigenous and local communities and state and municipal governments will be involved in the decision-making process.

It remains to be seen how other issues—such as the ambitious Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), lingering land rights issues, and Brazil’s commodity export boom—will affect the Amazon Fund’s overall efficacy.

By Brazil Institute Program Assistant Alan Wright and Brazil Institute Intern Matthew Layton.

Photo: Area deforested for agricultural use in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. Courtesy of flickr user leoffreitas.

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The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently issued Fuelling exclusion? The biofuels boom and poor people’s access to land, a report that examines how the biofuels boom is likely to affect access to land. “Policy and market incentives to turn land over to biofuels production will tend to raise land values. While in some cases this could give new opportunities to poor farmers, it could also provide grounds for displacement of poorer people from land,” explain the authors. They conclude that “biofuels are not necessarily bad news for small-scale farmers and land users” but that this depends on the “security of land tenure.”

The Brazilian experience with biofuels and land tenure deserves further attention. Traditionally, land tenure has been fairly insecure in Brazil, as it is difficult for the federal government to exert its authority over the nation’s periphery.

The authors cite evidence that large-scale Brazilian soybean and sugarcane outfits have concentrated their land holdings at the expense of small-scale farmers. These findings are consistent with Brazil’s long-term trend of acreage concentration, which has diminished the participation of small-scale farmers in the country’s agro-industry. Since smaller family farms tend to employ more workers than more-efficient large-scale producers, acreage concentration may increase inequality in Brazil and further strain the provision of public goods and services in urban areas, where displaced farmers tend to migrate. Given the recent surge in biofuel production, this trend is likely to continue.

Although the report itself is fairly neutral, some of the specific claims the authors make regarding biofuels, land concentration, and violence in Brazil are undermined by weak supporting evidence. The report’s section on violence and land concentration in Brazil cites Van Gelder and Dros’ (2006) description of a 2004 labor inspection raid that “freed an unknown number of slaves” who worked in soy fields. Yet Van Gelder and Dros lack a citation for this event and provide no information regarding whether or not these soy fields were being used to produce biodiesel. We also don’t know whether this soy farm was on newly acquired land (i.e., we don’t know if it relates to the expansion of biofuel production). Slave labor exists in Brazil and is a serious problem, but it is not identical to the violent land conflicts generated by the expansion of biofuel production—the subject of this report.

Moreover, the authors of Fuelling exclusion? cite another source regarding land concentration and violence—Noronha et al. (2006)—that seems a bit questionable. A rural exodus from certain parts of Brazil is well-documented, but Noronha et al. try to argue that biofuel expansion has driven this migration, relying on macrodata showing increasing urbanization and decreasing rural populations. There is certainly some overlap between increases in biofuel production and this internal migration, but these data are not sufficient to substantiate a causal relationship. Even more troubling is that Noronha et al. maintain that over a 12-year period, there were 16 assassinations linked to the biofuels industry, citing an op-ed written by a union leader as their source. Yet the op-ed only cites the occurrence of 13 deaths—and not by assassination, but from illnesses possibly related to working in the fields. It’s not that there haven’t been deaths associated with the biofuels industry, it’s just that the sources cited by the authors of Fuelling exclusion? don’t prove as much.

There are real concerns about the social consequences of increased ethanol production in Brazil, particularly for the workers who harvest sugarcane by hand. Nevertheless, ethanol production has given Brazil a unique degree of energy independence and economic vitality. To the extent that this vitality is responsible for Brazil’s ability to (thus far) weather the latest international economic storm, it is possible to argue that it is at least indirectly responsible for the nation’s economic stability and the recent rise of the middle class. Yet until the government uses this stability to provide better land security for its rural population, the benefits of biofuels are likely to continue to accrue mainly to Brazil’s middle and upper classes.

By Brazil Institute Program Assistant Alan Wright and Brazil Institute Intern Matthew Layton.

Photo: Sugarcane plantation near Capixaba in Acre, Brazil. Courtesy of Flickr user visionshare.

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“Lessons in Governance From Urban Brazil,” a recent event co-sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute and Comparative Urban Studies Project, highlighted how Curitiba, the capital city of the southern state of Parana, has used urban planning to strengthen environmental security.

Following a rapid wave of industrialization in the 1960s, small Brazilian cities were overwhelmed by urban growth. In anticipation of growth’s negative outcomes, the city of Curitiba established the Urban Planning Institute of Curitiba (IPPUC), led by urban visionary Jamie Lerner. Concerned about degradation due to urban sprawl, Lerner created an affordable, extensive, efficient bus system—and completely altered existing road infrastructure to allow for it. Its success is unprecedented. While Curitiba has one of the highest rates of personal car ownership in Brazil, more than 70 percent of the population uses the bus to commute to work, translating into less traffic congestion and lower levels of air pollution.

Due to its flat terrain, Curitiba suffers from poor drainage and dangerous flooding. Lerner and his team established numerous urban parks to absorb floodwater and stem the damage it inflicts upon poorer city residents, who often live in more vulnerable parts of the city. Since 1965, Curitiba has broken ground on 26 separate parks.

Curitiba was also the first city in Brazil to establish mandatory recycling. Profits generated through resale of recovered material are funneled into social programs; the city often employs its homeless to help with the separation of recyclables. In one of the strongest examples of how helping people and their environment can be mutually beneficial, Curitiba encourages its favela residents to collect garbage from their neighborhoods and exchange it at designated centers for food and bus passes.

Responding to whether or not Curitiba’s plan was replicable, speaker Ivani Vassoler insisted that imitating the details of the plan was not the point—urban planners must emulate the overall approach. For determined leaders committed to what Vassoler termed a “dynamic blueprint,” the sky is the limit.

By Wilson Center Intern Bronwen DeSena.

Photo: Curitiba’s bus system, courtesy of Henri Bergius and Flickr.