Illegal logs seized after riots in Brazil

Heavily armed Brazilian federal police have retaken control of an Amazon town and seized more than 500 truckloads of illegally cut hardwood that were abandoned last week when rioting residents and loggers drove out environmental authorities. About 450 officers retook the town of Tailandia on Feb. 23 patrolling on horseback and in pick-up trucks and standing guard outside sawmills. At least 2,000 residents burned tires, blocked roads and forced Environmental Protection Agency workers to flee the area days before. The police force sent in allowed the seizure of the wood to resume while preventing any new violence, federal police officer Fernando Alberto Silva said. "Order was reestablished peacefully," he added. Huge trunks of precious hardwood were loaded onto flatbed trucks to be taken away and auctioned off by the government, which plans to spend the proceeds on rainforest protection. So much wood was seized that it will take authorities nearly three weeks to cart it all away. The Tailandia campaign is part of a larger government push to prevent an apparent rise in illegal logging and burning that threatens to reverse three successive years of declines in deforestation in the Amazon. Many of last week's rioters work in the area's sawmills, which could suffer as a result of state efforts to audit companies and mills suspected of illegal logging, the Environmental Protection Agency said. Before the unrest, government inspectors had audited ten of Tailandia's estimated 140 sawmills, fining seven for stocking wood of unknown origin and selling lumber without authorization, the agency said. To help keep the peace, an additional 157 officers from Brazil's elite National Security Force were sent to the area on Feb. 24. A government report released in January detailed a suspected rise in deforestation, prompting the country's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to send extra federal police officers and environmental agents to Tailandia and 35 other areas where deforestation seemed to have jumped dramatically. "The operation in Tailandia will be completed," Lula told the government news service Agencia Brasil. "We don't want a confrontation with the people. We're fighting criminals, and these people unfortunately manipulate the local residents." Environmentalists say increased demand for agricultural products, particularly soy and beef, has prompted farmers to raze rainforest to gain land for fields and pastures. Brazil is the world's biggest beef exporter, and second to the US in soy exports. Lula insists his government is taking illegal deforestation seriously, but said noone could be blamed for the increase until investigations were concluded. Other measures announced last month include a ban on new logging permits, fines for people who buy anything produced on illegally deforested land and the forcing of thousands of farms to re-register to ensure they do not sit on illegally cleared land. The January report indicated as much as 2,700 square miles of rainforest were cleared between August and December 2007. At that pace, Brazil would lose 5,790 square miles of forest during the year ending in August 2008, a 34 percent increase over the previous 12-month period. Lula da Silva has said that land in the Amazon region will not be used for the production of biofuels. Lula said Brazil was doing its part to combat ecological devastation in the Amazon brought on by logging and land-clearing for cattle and soy, but angrily denied accusations from critics in Europe that the sugarcane Brazil uses to produce ethanol could end up carpeting the planet's largest forest. He said Latin America's largest nation had millions of acres of land outside of the Amazon that could be used to cultivate biofuel crops and help Brazil build its role as the planet's largest ethanol exporter. "It is unthinkable that biofuel needs to go to the Amazon," Lula said. But Anders Wijkman, a Swedish member of the European Parliament, said there was a reason for the fears, citing deforestation in Indonesia for biofuel crops, an increasingly lucrative business. "In Europe three years ago biofuel was heaven, but now it's hell," he said.