Overexploitation or Sustainable Management? Action Patterns of the Tropical Timber Industry by Imme Scholz

Author:Imme Scholz [Scholz, Imme]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, General, Social Science, Human Geography, Developing & Emerging Countries
ISBN: 9781317845089
Google: lHt0DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-24T05:08:22+00:00

The plan presented by SUDAM makes it plain how sharply it diverges, at least on paper, from traditional strategies: durable growth is to be achieved by rationally managing natural resources, strengthening regional R&D capacities, and enabling small and medium-scale enterprises (so-called SMEs) to absorb techno-organizational innovations. Even though the plan welcomes the location here of foreign corporations as a means of promoting the transfer of technology, we cannot fail to note that it, realistically, takes the strengths and weaknesses of the existing productive structure as its point of departure in conceiving a growth scenario. In view of the limited public funds available the investment program is left with the development of waterways and pavement of existing highways - this, too, an assessment of the options open to the public sector that is more realistic than that of previous decades.

The criticism of the traditional institutional model of regional promotion is also clear:

"The administrative model of centralist planning conceived in the second half of the 1960s, installing SUDAM as the central organ of the federal government's planning system in the Amazon region, was never really put into practice and has today completely lost -whatever functionality it may have had." (SUDAM 1995, p. 6)

SUDAM's lack of power to achieve its interests vis-à-vis other federal agencies, the fact that, for reasons of party politics, alliances and cooperative relationships have been inaugurated without inclusion of SUDAM, and the growing criticism of its clientelist obligingness toward local elites in the past 10 years have forced the institution, in its own interest, to open lip and operate in a more transparent fashion.

In practice not much of SUDAM's regional-policy strategy has been implemented; the firms that enjoy favorable loans and tax exemptions are still as a rule big industrial corporations, mining projects, and cattle ranches, though the latter are promoted only if they are located outside the primary-forest areas of the Amazon region.11 Owing to traditional action patterns and a generally lower technological level, SMEs in Para do not include the dynamic firms that could place SUDAM under pressure, in this way obtaining subsidies. One example of this lack of lobbying power is Pará's timber industry.

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