A summit on Amazon bristles with challenges

Eight Latin American countries which contain the vast Amazon forest and river in the heart of the continent – Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, Ecuador and French Guiana – are meeting in the Brazilian city of Belem on Tuesday and Wednesday, under the auspices of Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation, which has met only thrice in the 45 years of its existence, and twice during Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva’s terms in office.

The eight countries, especially Brazil, have ambitious plans to make this summit a success by adopting a radical programme of lowering deforestation, which is the greatest threat. It is a known fact that saving Amazon means a lot in the global climate change agenda. The Amazon forest can serve as the great sink of carbon dioxide.

President Lula is willing to do it in several ways, first by declaring much of the forest areas to be called Indigenous Territories. He plans to create 14 of them, though so far only six have been established. The complaint against Lula is that he not involving the indigenous people in the protection of the Amazon forest. Colombian President Gustavo Petro wants to take charge of the protection of the Amazon. At a meeting of the environmental ministers of the eight Amazon countries, it has been decided to evolve a common strategy from Amazon’s environmental degradation from reaching a point of no-return. Peru is keen to fight drug trafficking and illegal activities in the Amazon. Brazil’s Lula has announced he will create an international police centre in Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon.

Scientists say that if deforestation reaches 20 per cent to 25 per cent of Amazon, then the whole region will turn into a grassland and cease to be a forest, and this will have grave implications for Latin America as well as for the global climate. The Amazon rainforest is twice the size of India, and it has 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water resources, and it has amazing biodiversity with around 16,000 species of trees.

Amazon has lost 85 million hectares (211 million acres) of its original area, or about 13 per cent of its forest cover in the last 50 years, and most of the loss has happened in the Brazilian section of the Amazon, which occupies two-thirds of the rainforest. And it occurred to the largest extent in the Brazilian state of Para, where ranching, highways and agriculture have made deep inroads into the Amazon territory. Forty-one per cent of the deforestation had happened in the Para state, which is home to 27 million cattle, reared for selling beef. Other threats include logging, mining, and oil drilling.

It is not easy for political leaders of the eight countries meeting in Belem to set out goals to save the Amazon. There will always be reasons for balancing development with environment, which can be a dangerous trade-off, where developments edged out environmental guarantees. But half-way measures would not be of much help in rescuing the Amazon.

There will hard decisions to make, and much more harder ways for implementing the decisions. But it remains to be seen whether the Amazon summit will reach any big conclusions and those conclusions will be implemented to save the Amazon.

Though the leaders of the eight countries are taking the threat posed to the Amazon forest seriously, it is not clear whether they will have the political will to implement the decisions to protect the Amazon, where the encroachments by miners and industrialists is relentless, and many of the governments in these countries are forced to make compromises with the lobbyists in the name of economic development.