Environmental Ranking of Amazonian Development Projects in Brazil

Abstract

The premise of an Amazonia full of immensely rich potentialities awaiting development to yield copious and abundant profit and lasting benefit, has only recently emerged as being tragically false. The most important environmental consideration in Amazonian discussions has been to convince the controllers of the enormous risks of the prevailing course of development.People in Brazil and elsewhere who were concerned with various foreseeable dangers, intensified efforts to persuade the Government about them when the Transamazonian Highway programme was announced in June 1970. This programme, and the associated colonization scheme in 100-km strips on either side of the road network, subsequently was largely abandoned or postponed, as the harvests failed and roads deteriorated. The next development thrust—agro-industrial livestock—was even more damaging, and so the environmental movement in Brazil grew. Almost simultaneous announcements towards the end of the Geisel Government, of accelerated emancipation of Amerindians and risk-contracts to extract timber on unprecedented scales with no limit placed on area, were shelved with the change in government early in 1979 (cf. Schmithusen, 1978).