Documents Show Ibama Facilitated Illegally Harvested Timber Export | Nature

This Tuesday morning, during a meeting of the BRICS (a group of countries that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), President Jair Bolsonaro said that he will release a list of countries that buy illegally extracted wood from the Brazilian forests. But they criticize the country for deforestation.

Greenpeace Brazil, the Socio-Environmental Institute and the Brazilian Association of Members of the Public Ministry of the Environment filed a lawsuit in June against a decision taken by the president of the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), Eduardo Bim, who relaxed the rules for the Brazilian export of wood. The decision was made after a request from the loggers.

The actions of the environmental organizations were published by the newspaper “O Estado de S. Paulo”. Jornal Nacional also had access.

In February, loggers in Pará asked Ibama to change a rule that had been in place for nine years.

The companies wanted to sell wood abroad by presenting only the document of forest origin (DOF), prepared by the companies themselves and which originally only served to allow the transport of the merchandise to the port.

According to environmentalists, in March, Eduardo Bin contradicted the technical reports of Ibama’s Directorate for Sustainable Use of Biodiversity and Forests and did exactly what the loggers asked of him: he suspended, through a dispatch, the effects of a normative instruction, arguing that the device no longer applies due to the Forest Code.

To convince the president of Ibama to relax export rules, Pará loggers claimed that they were not making sales because international buyers demanded the export authorization issued by the institute, a guarantee that the wood was not illegally extracted from the forests. Brazilians. .

In the action, the three entities state that Ibama allowed the extinction of the environmental control mechanism that existed until then, related to the control of the export of loads of wood extracted from the country’s forests so that a new dynamic of inspection, to be carried out when the wood would no longer be on Brazilian soil.

In practice, the entities maintain that Ibama gave the loggers a blank check.

This Tuesday (17), the president of Ibama reinforced the decision to suspend the normative instruction and defended that the control prevents the illegal export of wood.

“The inspection of samples was a previous rule and it is still a rule now. Nothing has changed. There is no reduction in the inspection effort. On the contrary, as I say today, once or twice a week, Ibama’s Biodiversity Directorate here at headquarters sends the account reports to allow an intelligent inspection ”, he declared.

The Greenpeace spokesperson said that the Bolsonaro government facilitated illegal timber exports.

“The government is once again trying to point the finger and blame other people, other organizations or even other countries. If we did our homework, stopping illegal logging, we had a unified, transparent and effective system of licensing and control of the forestry sector, we would not even have the export of illegal wood, we would not even have the means to export illegal wood, ”said Rômulo Batista, spokesperson of Greenpeace’s Amazon campaign.