Industrial development on logging frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon
Frank
Merry, Woods Hole Research Center, fmerry@whrc.org
(Presenting)
Eirivelthon
Lima, Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia, elima@ipam.org.br
Gregory
Amacher, Virginia Tech, gamacher@vt.edu
Simone
Bausch, Virginia Tech, sbausch@vt.edu
Daniel
Curtis
Nepstad, Woods Hole Research Center, dnepstad@whrc.org
Whether following or creating new roads, logging is amongst the first economic activities to spring forth on emerging frontiers in the Amazon. This opportunism, however, is not always rewarded. The term “boom and bust” is used continually to describe the process of industrial organization in the forest sector of the Brazilian Amazon, depicting an industry dependant on the predatory harvest of a finite natural resource. This portrayal of the industry is perhaps oversimplified and masks the underlying causes behind dramatic increases in wood production on logging frontiers, and the role of the timber industry in economic development, skewing policy decisions and making solutions to the current mishandling of the forest resource elusive. In this paper we review the concept of forest sector industrialization and technology adoption, looking for reasons that have shaped the organization, or lack thereof, in the Brazilian forest sector. We discuss the need to examine the industry from a multitude of perspectives and to correctly identify the determinants and obstacles to change. We argue that we must be cautious in providing over-simplified answers to what is obviously a complex problem, and must pay careful attention to the recent history of the sector in any policy analysis. To provide a backdrop to the discussion, we update the information of the industry by presenting the results of a large survey (n=527 mills) throughout the Amazon.