The government vows it will not allow a repeat in the Amazon of the kind of destruction wreaked elsewhere. But environmentalists say Brazil, despite recently introducing new, tighter controls on logging, has yet to prove it can force the notoriously negligent Amazon timber trade to observe the law. The arrival of the multinationals, with more financial and technical muscle than their Brazilian counterparts, is a decisive test of Brazil's forestry policy. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, of which logging is a major contributing factor, actually sped up after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, reaching 14,896 square km in 1994, compared with 11,130 square km in 1991. The problem is lack of enforcement.
Officials say a small amount of timber has already been felled.
WTK and Samling established themselves as forces in the world timber trade through massive logging concessions in the Sarawak region of Malaysia, where indiscriminate forestry techniques have decimated what used to be virgin jungle. Like other Far Eastern timber giants, they looked abroad to expand their businesses. Both have concessions in Cambodia, where King Norodom Sihanouk has led a chorus of criticism of the destruction of the environment and the ways of life of indigenous groups by the logging industry there. Changes in government policy in the Far East, along with the dwindling of the region's forests, has focused the attention of Asian loggers further afield, to Africa, Central America and inevitably, to the Amazon, the world's largest rainforest and home to a third of the planet's tropical timber. Firms from Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea have already negotiated generous logging concessions from the governments of Guyana and Suriname on Brazil's northern border.