NOVA ESPERANCA DO PIRIA, Brazil (Reuters) – Alex Lacerda and Paulo Maues drive a silver pickup to an outdoor sawmill near the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Carry-ing 12-gauge shotguns, they step out and approach a shack, knock and enter cautiously. They are agents for Brazil’s environmental police. A stocky man identifies himself as Joao Pereira, owner. The agents ask him for two documents: an operating licence for the sawmill and a certificate of origin for the lumber stacked outside. “I have the licence,” Pereira says. “My accountant has the other.”
Wrong answer. The logs outside lack identification tags required on legally cut wood. And Pereira, like all sawmill owners, is required by law to keep permits on site.
“He’s stalling,” says Lacerda. “There’s no reason not to have the paperwork – you’re either operating legally or not.”
Pereira’s sawmill is one of hundreds like it on the contracting fringe of the world’s largest rainforest. Unlicensed mills are part of a grey economy that has come to define development in the Amazon. The activity spans everything from precious hardwoods to illegally extracted minerals to the bare land left behind, itself a commodity for ranchers and squatters who speculate on its future value. In late September, Reuters accompanied agents from the Brazilian Institute for the Environ-ment and Renewable Natural Re-sources, or Ibama, for the start of a month-long sting against people felling the rainforest. Charged with enforcing the country’s environmental laws, Ibama agents see firsthand the destruction. Many who live here consider the cutting a local right. Environmentalists and scientists, because the rainforest acts as a greenhouse-gas filter, say the activity cripples the fight against climate change.
During the operation, Ibama shut eight sawmills and leveled another nine, demolishing unlicensed facilities whose operators had skipped town – a common tactic when Ibama is nearby. The agents levied more than $1.7 million in fines, seized machinery and confiscated roughly $2 million worth of lumber. Most of that wood came from a nearby Indian reserve, a swath of virgin forest that, like much of Brazil’s protected woodland, is increasingly besieged. After a decade on the retreat, deforestation in the Amazon is on the rise again. The people who profit from deforestation are emboldened by changing environmental legislation, government-sponsored Amazon infrastructure projects and high global prices for soy, beef and other products farmed on cleared woodland. And the methods that in recent years curbed the destruction, culminating in record-low deforestation in 2012, have lost some of their edge. Now that satellites can detect large forest clearings, loggers cut smaller patches. Stricter licensing now organizes the market for legal lumber, but loggers and millers flout rules and forge permits. Ranchers, waiting for new forestry rules to be fully implemented, exploit the uncertainty to clear land. “Brazil let its guard down,” says Paulo Barreto, a forestry engineer at Imazon, a research institute that studies deforestation from Belem, capital of the state where Ibama conducted the raids.
