The Brazilian government is trying to better manage farmers, loggers, and other economic development in the Amazon rain forest using advanced satellite technology – but those wanting to exploit this fragile land base are staying at least a few steps ahead of the environmental cops. Development in the Amazon is clearing about 1.3 million hectares a year as of this writing, with no end in sight.

The government plan is to take approximately 20 million hectares of land in the central Amazon and establish conservation zones, where some development is permitted (for example, loggers can clear 1/5 of the area of a particular plot) and the land is given to former gold miners, indigenous resource developers, and other settlers for use in developing farms and small communities. The rules will be enforced by using satellite imagery to determine if the owners or managers of a particular plot are exceeding their approved use.

Unfortunately, there are already signs that resource extraction interests, mainly loggers, have found ways to get around the rules. One simple technique is to promise land to settler groups, register the group with the government, then log all the land and disappear, leaving the settlers with no infrastructure and no means of earning a living, far from cities and public services. Another problem is that the development plan is threatening to wipe out a long-term research study being done on the rainforest’s ability to handle human use.

The irony of settlement attempts in the Amazon, as any farmer familiar with the soil and climate of Brazil knows, is that the rainforest soil is exceptionally poor. Burnoffs produce cleared land that can be planted once or perhaps twice, but which is then nutritionally unable to sustain any further crop cycles without the addition of modern fertilizers. Land clearance plans done on the cheap are essentially doomed to be temporary; it just isn’t possible to farm the rainforest land in a sustainable way, because the soil will not support anything but primitive slash and burn agriculture, without access to high levels of capital and agronomic training that most of the people being settled here at the present time do not have. The Amazon climate offers huge solar input (although with a lot of clouds) and plenty of water – too much, in fact – but those things are only helpful with a decent soil base to work from, which most of the Amazon basis just doesn’t provide. It would be a real shame to destroy all that beautiful wilderness for a short-term gain that can’t be developed in any significant way.

The Brazilian government agrees with that, of course, which is why they are trying to create sustainable forest-harvesting sites, where locals can do things like pick nuts, gather medicinal plants, host tourism, and other non-destructive economic exploitation of the forest area. Unfortunately the lure of quick money from logging and one-crop soya farming is such an appeal to poor people in Brazil that it is going to prove extremely difficult for the government to keep development under the constraints that the environmentalists want.