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Germany’s Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, has pledged $150 million to a programme
to save the Brazilian rainforest. But environmentalists say that the programme
could do more harm than good.

Kohl made his pledge on a visit to Brazil last month, a few days after
the country’s President, Fernando Collor de Mello, accused the world’s seven
richest nations of showing a ‘lack of urgency’ in finding funds for a $1.5-billion
programme to save the rainforest. The Pilot Programme for the Protection
of Tropical Forests, proposed by Germany and accepted by the G7 last year
in Houston, is the most ambitious plan yet for rich countries to help poor
countries to preserve their environment.

But until last week, the only money pledged to the project was $15 million
from the European Community. European officials attribute the delay in funding
to a lack of detailed proposals from Brazil for spending the money. The
proposals are now taking shape. A draft programme drawn up by the World
Bank, the European Commission and the Brazilian government was approved
by the G7 in London last July.

At an international forestry meeting in Paris in September, Jacques
Delors, the President of the European Commission, called the programme ‘a
realistic alternative to the destruction of primary forests’ because it
compromised ‘between an exclusively conservationist view and development
²Ô±ð±ð»å²õ’.

Chris Elliott, of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, says
the plans so far amount to little more than a publicity exer cise for the
donors. If work gets under way by December, as now planned, it could be
‘premature, and quite damaging’, he says.

FOE says the plan does nothing to change the basic economic conditions
that led to destruction of the forest. In the impoverished northeast of
Brazil, for example, drought and landlessness have driven poor people to
Amazonia. Migration from the southern states has been aided by local governments
with foreign bank loans. FOE wants the project to limit, and eventually
to block, new settlement of the rainforest.

FOE also complains that the indigenous people of the Amazon and Brazilian
environment groups have been poorly consulted about the pilot programme.
The two bodies that will run the programme are a council of foreign donors
and the Brazilian government, and a coordinating committee of Brazilian
ministries and agencies. Allowing foreigners to help to run the project
is a major concession from Brazil.

But attempts to limit damage in the rainforest still face tough opposition.
Governors in the Amazon region formed an alliance this year to block efforts
to limit economic development in Amazonia. Last month one of the governors
publicly called Jose Lutzenberger, Brazil’s environment minister, a ‘stupid
idiot’. ‘So I called them stupid idiots,’ Lutzenberger told New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ.
‘Even so, they all know we can’t go on as we are now.’