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Brazil Pursues Crackdown on Loggers After Surge in Cutting
SOURCE: | By Gene Thorp - The Washington Post - March 21, 2008 TOOLBOX
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It was an old sign. The sawmill was shrouded in smoke from charcoal ovens that burned near the line of the forest. Open fields were littered with scrap wood. Truck beds were piled high with cut logs.
The lumberyard's manager soon arrived to find dozens of police and inspectors eating lunch on the property. When they asked to review his permits, he appeared irked. The papers showed that the site had permission to operate 49 charcoal ovens -- not the 79 that were burning nearby.
"And these licenses have expired," explained one of the inspectors, pointing to a date written near the top.
In addition, the inspectors said they strongly suspected that the company had been exceeding its cutting limits. All around the grounds, vast stretches of forest had been recently cleared.
Police and inspectors have been assessing the area by helicopter, trying to spot such cutting. It's not difficult.
From the air, patches of light green can be seen among the darker patches of dense forest. As the aircraft descends closer to the tree cover, random stacks of hardwood come into view in the middle of the "virgin" forest. Narrow roads have been cut through the forest to reach those harder-to-spot areas. This type of specialized extraction is not included in Brazil's current deforestation statistics, which track only clear-cutting.
"The loggers are getting so good at this that they also fly over the areas, spot areas where a few expensive noble woods -- like mahogany and peroba -- grow, and then they mark the locations with GPS," said Bruno Versiani dos Anjos, the environmental protection agency's coordinator for Operation Arc of Fire. "They calculate whether or not it is financially sensible to cut a new road through the forest that exists solely for the purpose of getting to those few trees. And then they do it."
The inspectors drove the lumberyard manager to Tailandia to officially serve notice that the company would be investigated for possible criminal charges. The convoy of police trucks rolled through town, attracting suspicious stares from residents.
Later, they arrived at the police and environmental inspectors' temporary headquarters. A sign on the building used to label it as the town's Hall of Justice. Now that sign is unreadable. Residents had torn down most of the letters.
