In the damp cathedral shadows of Suriname’s vast rain forest, little has changed in a thousand years.
Huge silver kankan trees, considered the sacred home of ancestral spirits, spread a cloud of leaves 150 feet into the sky. Twisted lianas, thick as a linebacker’s shoulders, climb in search of light above the rich, earthy decay of the forest floor.
Giant armadillos, the survivors of a lost era, lurk in burrows dug deep in the thin red soil. Scarlet macaws wheel overhead, squawking outrage. And above the dense canopy of olive and silver and a thousand greens that stretches in every direction for hundreds of miles, there rises the faint distant boom of roaring howler monkeys.
This is one of the most pristine rain forests on Earth-and it is scheduled for destruction.
In the next two months, Suriname is expected to grant three Asian timber companies the right to log seven million acres of virgin rain forest, or nearly a quarter of the national territory.
Proponents of the sale say it will bring desperately needed jobs, cash and development to this impoverished and largely forgotten forest country. The former Dutch colony is shared by the descendants of escaped African slaves, freed Asian indentured servants and some of South America’s most untouched indigenous tribes.
But international conservation groups, which are racing to block the sale and offer development alternatives, say Suriname is nothing less than a test case for rain forest preservation efforts worldwide.
If Suriname, with only 420,000 people and a tiny $1 billion economy, can’t find the international aid and economic alternatives it needs to avoid cutting its forests, they ask, what hope is there for the Brazilian Amazon or other threatened tropical forests worldwide?
“If you can’t make it happen here, how can you make it happen anywhere?” asks Russell Mittermeier, president of Washington-based Conservation International, one of the lead conservation groups battling logging plans in Suriname. “We have to come up with some real alternatives. If we can do it here, this will be a model.”
Suriname, a tiny nation tucked between Guyana and French Guiana on South America’s northern coast, is covered by a virtual blanket of greater Amazonian rain forest. Outside the decaying capital of Paramaribo and a narrow coastal strip of savannah, the country is 85 percent forest, cut only by meandering cocoa-colored rivers.
The complete absence of roads in Suriname’s interior has been the salvation of its forest. While miners, ranchers and loggers roar down newly built highways into the heart of the neighboring Brazilian Amazon, Suriname’s woods have remained largely untouched.
Today they are home to a cornucopia of biological diversity. More than 4,500 species of plants vie for space in the humid depths of the forest. Jaguars, tapirs and a plethora of monkeys, caimans and frogs make their homes there, along with 674 kinds of birds, including the exotic golden cock-of-the-rock, with its kazoo-like wolf whistle, and the unearthly screaming piha.
The woods are also full of people. Three hundred years ago, West African slaves, brought to work on Surinamese coastal plantations, escaped upriver into the country’s wild interior, where 41,000 of their descendants still live today, hunting, cultivating small forest plots and carrying on a largely untouched African culture.
About 6,000 Wayana and Trio Indians also still live in the forest, growing cassava, hunting peccaries and pulling giant predatory amuyulu fish out of the rivers.
But life hasn’t been as good for the largely Dutch, Asian and creole people living on Suriname’s coast. After a military coup in 1980, the Netherlands cut off foreign aid to its former colony, plunging the economy into chaos. An ensuing 12 years of civil unrest between coastal military leaders and rebels based among the former slaves-known as Maroons-scared away potential investment and devastated the country’s once-thriving tourism industry.
Today annual inflation tops 500 percent in Suriname. A good monthly wage is $30. Unemployment is high, and national legislators, meeting in a peeling white tenement that serves as the nation’s parliament building in Paramaribo, can’t find money to run the country, or even to finance their own campaigns for re-election next May.
To many of them, the Asian logging offers are an irresistible temptation.
“I don’t want to lose our rain forest. Not at all,” said Arnold Kruisland, a parliament member and chairman of Suriname’s Natural Resources Commission. “But our economy is not a good one, and we have to use all the natural resources in our country.
“If the international community wants to save the rain forest, they need to help us. But no one is offering as much as the loggers.”
Just how much Suriname might earn by selling its forests remains in doubt. The Berjaya Group, a Malaysian conglomerate and the most powerful and influential of the three Asian companies seeking logging concessions in Suriname, says it will pay Suriname at least $16 million to $20 million a year over the next 25 years in income taxes, royalties and other fees if allowed to log more than 2.5 million acres on the country’s eastern border.
Conservation groups call that income estimate high. According to an analysis by the New York-based World Resources Institute, Suriname would earn at most $8.8 million a year from Berjaya and as little as $2 million if “moderate” tax evasion occurs, as has widely happened with logging contracts in other parts of the world.
Logging opponents say that kind of money would hardly pay for the environmental damage that logging might cause, including erosion and river silting that could flood Paramaribo and the rice-producing coastal savannah. Equally risky, they say, is the threat of social unrest as loggers rush into areas claimed by both the government and the Maroon and Indian people of the interior.
Signs of such social unrest are already brewing. The so-called granmans, or chiefs, of the country’s Maroon and Indian tribes are planning a summit for next weekend in the central village of Asindoopo to discuss their options in the face of the threatened concessions.
“Nobody in the interior wants it. Everybody is against it,” said Granman Songo Aboikoni, chief of the largest tribe of Maroons and the meeting’s organizer. “We’ve spent hundreds of years living in the forest. It’s all we know.”
Logging opponents have struggled over the past year to persuade politicians in Paramaribo that the country has good alternatives to selling its rain forest. Costa Rica, with forests only a third the size of Suriname’s and much less rich, earns more than $515 million a year in tourism revenue, much of it from ecotourism.
Suriname, with some infrastructure improvements, could do as well or better, say environmentalists, who recently flew four Surinamese members of parliament to Costa Rica for a look.
Suriname also has embarked on bioprospecting ventures with foreign pharmaceutical companies interested in testing rain forest plants for new medicines. Suriname may also benefit from emerging international agreements that soon may require polluters in developed countries to offset their carbon dioxide output by paying to preserve pollution-eating tropical forests in other parts of the world.
The country also is being offered direct cash payments not to cut its trees. The Inter-American Development Bank has offered $15 million in loans over the next three years and assistance in setting up an international trust fund to pay Suriname’s bills for two to three years while it searches for development alternatives. And the Netherlands has offered $5 million for a forest-management institute designed to protect the country’s forest and ensure that any cutting is sustainably managed.
The problem, one Western diplomat in Paramaribo noted, is that “the offers are long-term and this is a short-term government,” eager to see quick money before the May elections.
“The concessions are not good for the country, no doubt about it,” the diplomat added. “But we can hardly expect Suriname to say that its forest resources are for the good of the world and not for us. There have to be real alternatives.”
Suriname’s politicians also are suspicious of what they see as 11th-hour offers from environmentalists whom they charge showed no particular interest in helping out until the logging concessions loomed. They also fear that these environmentalists might disappear just as quickly if the loggers are turned away.
“Where were they before we came around?” echoes Paul Yeong, the Berjaya company’s spokesman in Paramaribo. He says his company, which plans to invest $100 million in Suriname, is committed to sustainable cutting and will take only about five trees per acre of land. Berjaya will leave much of the forest intact while building roads, preserving buffers around indigenous villages and providing 6,000 local jobs both in felling trees and turning them into plywood, lumber and other products, Yeong said.
But minutes after describing his company’s commitment to protect the forest, Yeong dismisses plans for rain forest tourism in Suriname, calling the country “almost a Godforsaken hole” and urging that “if you want to see the Amazon, go to Brazil.” He also describes the extensive cultural retraining that he believes will be necessary to correct Suriname’s “very lazy” work force.
Conservationists say that is a hint of what is to come in Suriname from Asian logging companies that have been leveling tropical forests across Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and other countries for years with little regard for the indigenous residents.
Last year a Berjaya representative, who since has resigned, was expelled from the Solomon Islands after allegedly trying to bribe the commerce minister to win a logging contract there. In Suriname, Berjaya has hired the brother of the country’s minister for foreign affairs to run its operations, in an apparent bid for political clout.
“The Malaysians have a total lack of respect for their own indigenous people. They’re not going to care anything about these people,” Conservation International’s Mittermeier charged.
Kruisland admits that making sure the loggers live up to their promises of jobs, cash and restraint is the key to making the concessions work for Suriname. International aid to set up a forestry institute, as the Dutch have proposed, could help, the parliament member believes.
But existing small-scale logging on forest tracts in northern Suriname already is out of control. Suriname’s four forestry officers, with their two jeeps and two motorized canoes, are powerless to even keep track of, much less stop, widespread illegal cutting.
That does little to create confidence that the vastly larger proposed concessions in the remote, roadless wilderness of southern Suriname could be controlled.
But the concessions are likely to be granted anyway, diplomats say. The loggers’ quick cash, they believe, will prove too strong a temptation for Suriname’s politicians-unless the international community can provide enough short-term aid to allow the country the luxury of a long-term view.
“This country could become another Costa Rica if they cleverly develop their assets. Or they could sell everything and start on the way to becoming another Haiti,” Mittermeier said. “The choice is theirs.”
