Days after the high-profile murder last month of Sister Dorothy Stang, an American-born nun who promoted sustainable use of the rainforest in the eastern-Amazon state of Pará, the Brazilian government unveiled a pair of initiatives of which Stang would likely have approved.

First, it earmarked 12.8 million acres (5.2 million has) of rainforest land for conservation, the bulk of it in Pará. Then it reserved an additional 19.7 million acres (8 million has) of Pará rainforest for sustainable development.

The set-asides, the result of a two-year planning effort by the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, cover an area that, taken together, is bigger than the U.S. state of New York.

Coming just five days after Stang’s Feb. 12 murder, the government moves received wide media attention. But they also have raised a question that too often overshadows such initiatives: will Brasília provide the enforcement money and manpower needed to ensure the forestland is truly protected?

Green advocates have their doubts.

“The government hasn’t backed up these paper plans to protect the Amazon with special, guaranteed money that is immune to budget cuts,” says Fernando Gabeira, a Green Party member who is a leading environmental advocate in the Brazilian Congress. “So whether these protected areas will have the funding they need to safeguard them is something that’s decided on a year-to-year basis, based on revenues.”

More than 90%of the land that was set aside is in Pará state, where the government is struggling to curb land grabs and illegal logging on both sides of a soon-to-be-paved, 704-mile (1,174-km) section of the Cuiabá-Santarém Highway (BR-163). This unpaved stretch of BR-163 is slated to be asphalted next year so farmers, most of them soy producers, can get their crops from western Brazil to the Pará state port of Santarém for shipment to foreign markets. Currently, seasonal rains from December to May often leave that part of the road impassible.

Soon after the paving of BR-163 was agreed on in 2002, land grabs—often involving forged or otherwise illegal land titles—surged in the region. To address the problem, the government last year unveiled plans for conservation areas on both sides of the highway as part of a three-year, US$136 million project to establish land-use controls, promote sustainable development and bolster Amazon forest monitoring and enforcement. (See “Brazil launches Amazon forest-protection steps,” EcoAméricas, April ’04.)

The cornerstone of the government’s new Pará policy is the forest-protection initiative announced last month. The 12.8 million acres (5.2 million has) in new conservation lands are located in Pará, Amazonas, Acre and Roraima states, with 75% of them contained in two contiguous reserves in Pará state on the eastern side of BR-163.

The bigger of the two Pará reserves, an 8.4-million-acre (3.4-million- ha) swath called Middle Land, is the largest Amazon reserve land ever created in Brazil. It is to be used exclusively for biological research. The other reserve is designated as a national park named Serra do Pardo. The 19.7-million-acre (8-million-ha) expanse earmarked for sustainable uses, meanwhile, is subject to a six-month ban on development while plans for it are finalized.

Tasso Azevedo, the Environment Ministry’s director of forests, expects 70% of this land will be opened to sustainable logging once legislation creating a new system of private logging concessions clears Congress. Most of the remaining 30% of the acreage, he says, is local-community land that likely will be designated as extractive reserves—areas in which residents are supposed to engage only in environmentally sustainable economic activities.

Officials plan to pay for start-up of the new initiatives by tapping some of the US$73.4 million that the German and Brazilian governments, the World Bank’s Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) pooled for such efforts in 2003 in so-called Amazon Region Protected Areas (Arpa) funding. Initial monitoring and enforcement, they add, will be funded with some of the US$136 million earmarked for Amazon forest-conservation last year. However, critics such as Gabeira of the Green Party say failure to identify recurring revenue sources could doom the new protected areas.

Environmental groups, while welcoming the government initiatives, also need convincing. “[J]ust how well it will be implemented depends on the same old question, how much money and manpower Ibama [Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency] will have not just this year and next, but permanently,” says Adriana Ramos, public policy coordinator with the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA), a leading green group here. “Ibama is traditionally too understaffed and underfunded to protect even the most critical areas of the Amazon. And this [initiative] just adds to Ibama’s protection responsibilities.”

Says Paulo Adário, Amazon coordinator for Greenpeace in Brazil: “Given that land speculators already have invaded both sides of BR-163, especially the eastern side, does Ibama have the funds and field agents to dislodge them and keep them from coming back? The protected areas on both sides of the highway need constant monitoring, and that is costly.”

Flávio Montiel, head of environmental protection at Ibama, defends his agency’s ability to police protected lands. He says some of the $136 million in already-appropriated forest-protection funds will be used this year to build 19 bases for Ibama agents in the so-called Deforestation Arc, a swath of 60 municipalities in the Amazon states of Pará, Mato Grosso and Rondônia, where rainforest destruction is severe. Says Montiel: “These bases bring Ibama agents closer to the scene of illegal logging and other such crimes more quickly.”

José Maria da Cunha, the Transport Ministry’s project director, agrees. “To protect the forest on either side BR-163 from illegal land grabs and logging doesn’t require a huge monitoring effort,” he says. “It just requires a permanent one that’s closer to the area where such activities occur.”

Montiel adds that the 360 Ibama field agents now patrolling the Amazon would this year be reinforced by 90 agents reassigned from less environmentally sensitive areas. Ibama agents also will be accompanied on occasion by federal police and are scheduled to receive logistical support from the army.

Meanwhile, Ibama expects to benefit from improved satellite and radar monitoring of Amazon forestland. While the agency used to rely solely on purchased images from a U.S. Landsat satellite, for instance, it now receives images free-of-charge from a joint Brazilian- and Chinese-owned CBERS-2 remote-sensing satellite launched last October.

“Because we no longer have to pay for satellite images or go through the red tape of buying them, we’re using four times more CBERS images than Landsat images to detect anomalies in the Amazon forest cover,” says Edward Elias Junior, head of Ibama’s remote-sensing department. “This will help protect the entire rainforest, and especially the critical areas like the one around BR-163.”