GOVERNING THE AMAZON TIMBER INDUSTRY FOR MAXIMUM SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS

ABSTRACT The timber industry in the Brazilian Amazon is currently supplied primarily with timber from private properties. Each year, hundreds of informal contracts are made between Amazon logging companies and small-holders. Loggers receive timber, while farmers receive cash and/or improvements in their road networks. The proposed Brazilian National Forest Programme emphasizes the development of concession-based forestry within an expanded system of National Forests, explicitly avoiding the forests that are occupied by people. It will therefore miss important opportunities for the timber industry to improve the livelihoods of millions of low-income farmers, extractivists, and indigenous people. Recent partnerships between industry and farmers in agricultural settlements demonstrate the pivotal role that progressive timber companies can play in assisting farm communities with their development. Such alliances are favoured by current environmental and agrarian reform policies, including the generous government funding for road construction and housing that accompanies new settlements. Communities in extractive reserves and in the floodplain forests of the Amazon estuary have similarly demonstrated the direct benefits that can accrue to forest residents through control, management, processing, and sale of their wood resources. The policy challenge is to foster a new generation of relationships among the rural poor, timber companies, and environmental and social agencies in order to enhance the How of benefits to the rural poor, while avoiding large-scale logging- and fire-induced impoverishment of Amazon forests.