Deforestation In Brazil's Amozon Rainforest

8 Pages 2086 Words

gulations that restrict logging. Politics cannot be successful in areas where people don’t care, or where there is so much bribery that it makes the government powerless (F.C.O., “Brazil…”).
As part of the national interest, Brazilian government shrunk the Amazon rainforest between the 1960s and 1990s. Brazil was trying to solve problems of overpopulation, landlessness, and poverty in the country’s crowded coastal region by moving people in their border regions. By doing this, they also created the so-called safety valves, populated buffer zones taking off the pressure on their vulnerable borders. The Brazilian government saw the thinly inhabited Amazon as an invitation for foreign invaders and, by moving the people, this thread was not eliminated but its constant threat was greatly downgraded. In order to get more people in these regions, the authorities gave ownership of the land to newcomers, if they would simply clear the trees on it. The government also built roads and schools to attract even more people for their “the land without people to the people without land campaign” (Rotnem, 1998, 27).
The government had firms pouring into this region and setting up giant cattle ranches by offering tax breaks to the companies. The same tenure of insecurity also means that the chances for plantation forestry, although sensible in theory, do not stand a chance in practice. Besides, it would take trees at least 20 years to grow and return a profit, while there is always a chance of accidental fires that might destroy the whole investment (F.C.O., “Brazil…”). On another political note, the tough laws of the early 1990s (prohibiting landowners from logging more than 50% of their land) were also softened (down to 20%), and deforestation reached an all-time high in the Brazilian Amazon in 1995 (29,000square kilometers - an area of about the size of Belgium). The government estimates tha...