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domingo, 26 de maio de 2013

AMAZON: 'NO NEED TO MOVE INTO FOREST', WORDS FROM A CATTLEMAN

Yes! That's really quite simple!!!

[Reproduced from www.planetasustentavel.abril.com.br]

Rodrigo Baleia


In the environmental park of Paragominas, school children have environmental education. The place was an abandoned private property, reconstructed and vegetation was recovered.


PROSPERITY


Paragominas: the turning point

In the years of 1970 Paragominas, Pará state, northern Brazil, was under accelerated process of deforestation due to the construction of the highway Belém-Brasília. Today with 100 thousand inhabitants, Paragominas is taken as a model of sustainable development for other cities of the Amazon

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In 1990, Paragominas was the main producer of Brazil wood pole to house 400 sawmills - today are less than 20. During the same period, was also the largest producer of cattle. Currently, the herd of 300 thousand heads - who suffered gradual reduction in recent years -  is not even among the top five in Pará state. And the changes go far beyond the pasture.

 The past - and their fame - stayed behind. A local project, created in 2008 and called the Town Green, served as a basis for a state program with the same name, coined in 2011 by the Government of Pará and initial adhesion of 74 municipalities. In addition to the partnership with NGOs, universities and research institutes, the main initiatives are reforestation project (in the last three years, the city planted 55 million trees), livestock and sustainable agriculture (they invested in soil fertility rather than proceed on deforestation), environmental education and forest management (action that minimizes the impact on the forest in withdrawal of logs with economic importance).

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Environmental initiatives in the municipality of Pará state,  involve a series of public and private projects. The Hydro, which extracts bauxite mining within the area of the city, has a nursery of native seedlings for the reforestation of land already explored


In general, the logging and ranching are carried out for at least three decades in the municipalities of the region. Grain farming and ore extraction (in the local case, bauxite) are more recent. Thus, the city of Pará tried all the productive activities of the Amazon, explains Paulo Amaral, researcher at Imazon ['Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazônia' = Institute of Man and Environment of Amazon] . produtivas da Amazônia", explica Paulo Amaral, pesquisador do Imazon.

With 20 thousand square kilometers of area (almost the size of Sergipe state, northeastern Brazil), the town has large forest remnant: 66 per cent of its territory. Overflying Paragominas reveals all the sovereignty of treetops, 'studded' here and there by deforested areas. From the top, however, the superficial look fools anyone. This is not pristine forest, but a woods which had much of the trees removed, with commercial value, explains Fábio Niedermeier, a non-governmental organization The Nature Conservancy (TNC).
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The President of the Union of Rural Producers, Mauro Lucio Costa propagates the investment in soil quality. 'You do not need to move into the fores't, ensures the cattleman
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The partnership with TNC, in itself, shows the unusual profile of that city: in a region marked by agrarian conflicts and clashes between environmentalists and 'ruralists'. TNC now have a special room in the building of the Union.
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This type of innovation is the result of changes driven by previous economic infeasibility of Paragominas. With the entry of the municipality in the 'champions list of deforestation in the Amazon', published in January 2008 by the Ministry of the Environment, the producers were prevented from accessing credit lines.

That same year, in March, a joint operation of the Federal Police, the IBAMA (Brazilian Institute of Environment) and national public security force arrived in the city. Called Arc of Fire, the initiative has resulted, especially in closing illegal sawmills. The reaction of Adnan Demachki, still mayor, was to convene  businessmen and 50 local class  for signing a Pact for Zero Deforestation.

Later that year, in November, another operation, called the Black Trail, headed by the Military  Police and by IBAMA, ended 120 irregular coal ovens, in addition to seize trucks with logs from areas exploited illegally. The reaction of the people linked to these activities was violent, and, on November 24, the IBAMA office in Paragominas was torched.

The persistence in good practice brought results. Problems such as illegal removal of logs still exist, but in reduced scale. The partnership with Imazon, since 2008, provides the satellite monitoring of the territory.

The monthly reports are sent to Municipal Environment Secretary, which, with the geographic coordinates in hand, send officers to the exact locations, who will confirm whether or not there is deforestation. The other partnership, with the TNC, ensures the implementation of Rural Environmental Register ('CAR - Cadastro de Atividade Rural', in Portuguese) almost all city properties are included, a legal tool with information on the perimeter and a mapping of native vegetation and open areas of each farm


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