A voice in the wilderness: Acre Gov. Jorge Viana has big plans for the rainforest--and enemies to spare. (Trade Talk).

Jorge Viana, governor of Brazil's impoverished Acre state, would like you to think of the Amazon rainforest as a garden--a resource that can serve human needs as long as humans are willing to restore it.

In Acre state, a densely forested area, has put his ideas into sweeping practice in an effort to curb deforestation and show the world the financial benefits of going "sustainable." Viana has created a model for doing business in one of the poorest and most remote areas in South America.

As governor, he created a ministry for extractive industries, encouraging peasants to cultivate rubber, Brazil nuts, natural oils and medicines from local plants and entrepreneurs to build ecologically friendly hotels.

Viana shelved plans from a previous administration to pave some 1,200 miles of state roads. (Researchers say about 75% of the Amazon's deforestation occurs within 30 miles of a paved road.) What logging is done occurs under the auspices of the Forest Stewardship Council, a private environmental monitoring group based in Oaxaca, Mexico. This year; he even cajoled a government agency--Brazil's federal development bank, BNDES--to sign a historic, US$17 million agreement to finance sustainable development projects.

Viana hopes to offer Acre's peasants an alternative to slash-and-burn farming to ensure state forests will be around for future generations. "We want to bring local populations into the policy of forest management," says Viana. "We have to show them how to exploit without destroying."

Logging, dams, power projects, roads, miners, farmers, a government push to be the world's greatest soybean producer--all this and clear-cutting land for crops and cattle--are the culprits. Now, a $43 billion, eight-year government infrastructure program, called "Brazil Advances:' is likely to cause further destruction. The project, which aims to improve living conditions for the Amazon's 17 million residents, includes paving a 1,770-kilometer highway through the heart of the forest.

Viana, the son of a congressman, is the first major Brazilian politician to hold a degree in forest engineering. He is inspired, he says, by the late Chico Mendes, the charismatic organizer of Acre rubber tappers who, with his followers, physically blocked bulldozers from clearing the forest for pasture. Mendes was killed in 1988 by cattle ranchers, becoming a martyr for the environmental movement.

"Chico taught me that sustainable development is the answer to our problems," Viana told me soon after he won the governorship in 1998.

Despite this valiant effort, trees in the Amazon Basin, home to the world's largest tropical rainforest, continue to be cut down at an alarming rate. Since the 1970s, some 15% of the Brazilian Amazon has been destroyed, disappearing at a rate of about 15,540 square kilometers annually, according to Friends of the Earth, a London-based environmental group. Almost 4% of the Amazon's 3.9 million square kilometers is flattened each year for development.

Killing the messenger. Viana needs help from Brasilia, which should finance sustainable programs nationwide, as well as clamp down on entrenched political forces that continue to raze forests in the name of unfettered development. Two years ago, police discovered a plot to assassinate Viana, later linked to a powerful state politician. Just this year; Viana's political opponents reportedly bribed election officials to keep him off the ballot. After an uproar, his candidacy was reinstated.

The federal government also should use its recently inaugurated $1.4 billion state-of-the-art Amazon radar system to track illegal logging, rather than focusing mainly on border areas, where little deforestation is occurring.

In 1987, a global commission headed by Norway's Gro Harlem Brundtland, then prime minister and now director general of the World Health Organization, talked of the urgency of turning to sustainable economic development. An ensuing landmark report defined that as development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Gov. Viana has heeded those words. Latin America's leaders should follow his example.

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