SPECIAL REPORT-Amazon projects undercut Brazil's new green path

POLITICAL PRESSURE

Such challenges are likely to be multiplied with the planned construction of the much larger Belo Monte dam on the upper Xingu river. The region is home to numerous Indian tribes and the dam would directly impact 120,000 people.

The environmental agency Ibama is again under pressure, this time to speed up the Belo Monte approval process. Again, two officials resigned and conservationists cried foul.

"They want them to turn a blind eye to technical and legal procedures, and sometimes even to ethics," said Marina Silva, former environment minister and renowned Amazon defender.

Perhaps the biggest worry for environmentalists is the planned pavement of the BR 319 motorway between Porto Velho and Manaus, which leads through one of the most pristine areas of the Amazon with a high biodiversity and many endemic species.

Satellite images showing fish-bone shaped patterns of deforestation show how roads attract settlers to set up farms and cattle ranches.(See:here &ie= UTF8&ll=-3.899878,-54.165344&spn=1.254997,1.7276&t=h&z=9)

Deforestation of the Amazon has fallen to the lowest rate in over two decades, due in part to stepped up controls on illegal ranching and logging but also to weaker global demand for farm products from the region, such as beef, soy and timber. Still, nearly 20 percent of the Amazon has already disappeared and large chunks of the forest are still destroyed every year. In the year through July 2009 an area the size of the U.S. state of Delaware was chopped down.

Supporters of the road say it would reduce the cost of merchandise in Manaus but studies show transportation costs to and from Manaus are cheaper by river than road.

Jorge Viana, former governor of the Amazon state Acre and a leading voice in Lula's Workers' Party last month sent a letter to Lula along with a group of prominent scholars saying there was "no economic justification that can compensate for the environmental cost" of the road.

The government pledges to create new national parks to buffer the environmental impact of the road but experts point to numerous parks in the region that have been invaded by ranchers and loggers.

"The road makes no sense. We are not against development and infrastructure but it needs to be intelligent," said Paulo Moutinho, coordinator at the independent Amazon research Institute, Ipam.

He said projects like the road could fuel deforestation, which makes up 75 percent of Brazil's carbon emissions.

"If the (infrastructure) plan is not changed, it will put at risk Brazil's deforestation and emissions targets." (Editing by Claudia Parsons)