Introduction

The 1990s will be decisive for Amazonia. Before the dawning of the third millenium, planners and policy-makers must decide whether the world’s largest remaining area of tropical rainforest will follow much of Africa and South-East Asia down the path of irreversible destruction, or whether the resources of this vast region will be harnessed for the benefit of Brazilian society and the world as a whole. The present volume is concerned primarily with the Brazilian portion of the Amazon Basin, which occupies two-thirds of the region’s 4.2 million square kilometres. It has been estimated that up to 12 per cent of Brazilian Amazonia had been deforested by the end of 1988, or some 350,000 square kilometres. Yet while this figure seems insignificant when compared with the 72 per cent and 63 per cent loss rates recorded for West Africa and Southern Asia respectively (WRI, 1986), there is certainly no justification for complacency. As several contributors to this volume point out, deforestation rates are proceeding exponentially in large parts of eastern Amazonia and Rondônia. On average about 20,000 square kilometres are destroyed every year; in 1988 alone, 12,000 square miles of rainforest disappeared, an area the size of Belgium. In 1989 a region the size of West Germany will experience a similar fate. If present trends continue, by the middle of the next century the Brazilian rainforest will have ceased to exist as a sustainable ecosystem.