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As Amazon Crops Grow, a Forest Shrinks
Last Remaining Tribesman
Kanunxi, chief of the Irantxe tribe in Brazil, looks across corn and soybean fields that surround his tribe's land at the southern end of the Amazon rain forest.
(By Monte Reel -- The Washington Post)
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The members of a government expedition peered through the trees at a partly subterranean dwelling of mud and sticks. They had walked five hours through the Amazon jungle in the state of Rondonia to find the last member of an isolated tribe. Six previous attempts to contact him had failed.
Two members decided to get a closer look. If the man was inside, they would signal they were friendly and then warn him that if he strayed too far, he might encounter farmers and jungle-clearing machines. A lopsided confrontation, they feared, might result in his death -- and his tribe's extinction.
One of the men approached the hut but suddenly turned and sprinted away -- with an arrow in his chest, recounted Orlando Possuelo, 20, a surveyor with the government agency responsible for protecting Amazonian tribes.
"The Indian shot an arrow at him through the opening. It hit him in the chest, but it was above the heart," Possuelo said, describing the expedition from his apartment in Brasilia, the capital. "We all started running, even the guy who was shot. He pulled the arrow out while he ran."
Two years ago, environmentalists cheered when Marina Silva, a longtime advocate of preserving the rain forest, was named to head the environment ministry. Last year, Silva helped enact protective measures that made almost 20 million acres of Amazon land off-limits to developers.
Her agency also placed protections on another 20 million acres surrounding a road project through the forest, and bolstered monitoring activities that doubled illegal-logging arrests in a year.
But the new deforestation figures came as a disheartening blow. In an interview in Brasilia, Silva asserted that the new protections had not had time to show statistical results. Pointing to a map, she traced the "arch of destruction" -- a curved line through the Amazon where the highest concentrations of tree-cutting have occurred, and where new preservation efforts are being focused.
Possuelo's father, Sydney, a prominent Amazon expeditionist who now heads the federal tribal protection agency, is critical of official efforts to slow deforestation. If the sole tribesman in his remote Rondonia hut were to die, he added, the entire surrounding area could be legally opened up to farming.
"When it comes to protecting the Amazon," he said, "the government is getting progressively worse."
Soybean Production Thrives
At the airport in Cuiaba, Mato Grosso's capital, a large billboard greets arriving passengers. Pictures of forest are juxtaposed with those of farms and grazing cattle. There's a lot of land here, it suggests, and much of it is for sale.
Soybeans account for more than 80 percent of the state's exports, fueling an industry that exploded with the development of new seeds that can thrive in humid areas. The boom has created thousands of jobs and helped the national economy grow 4.9 percent last year.
Maggi was elected governor in 2002, and soon announced a goal of boosting the state's soy production to 100 million tons per year. His own business -- Grupo Maggi -- boasts yearly exports of $430 million.
