The Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) has been implementing in the last four years a broad integrated computerized system for the control and monitoring of deforestation and forest-based activities, such as forest management, obligatory forest replacement and corresponding flows of forest resources and products from extraction to forest-based industries.
Based on its past experience, IBAMA has conceived and developed the whole system and its parts, using computer software and programmes available worldwide, thus reducing costs considerably. This system, known as SISPROF, is integrated with other corporative systems of IBAMA, and is comprehensive enough to allow its dialogue and integration with (i) other federal systems of control, such as the registry of rural land properties of the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) and its linkages with the support system of the Rural Land Property Tax of the Secretariat of Federal Income (SRF), as well as (ii) other systems of control that have already been operated by some state environmental or forestry agencies of Brazilian states, in particular in the Amazon region.
The system, as described in this report, provides IBAMA and the federal government with a modern tool that is capable of giving more effectiveness to the enforcement of forestry and environmental legislation concerning rural land use sustainability as a whole and, in particular, more transparency and reliability in the control, monitoring and follow-up of permanent forest management activities, especially in the Amazon region, where the latter are still quite incipient and represent a tiny portion of the overall regional land use pattern.
As we try to show, from our description of the main features of the occupation and deforestation processes under way in the Brazilian Amazon, control and law enforcement for the protection of the forests are extremely difficult, due to the vastness of the area, the economic and social conditions of the expanding agricultural frontier, the poor infrastructure of the region, the large number of actors involved with deforestation and the consequent and associated practices and behaviour of those that exploit, manufacture, process and trade with forest resources and products in that region.
Although SISPROF, as we attempt to emphasize, is certainly not sufficient to more fully restrain or revert the incentives that move people towards deforestation and logging; and therefore away from a permanent productive land use activity such as forest management, the system and its controls are indispensable to (i) reduce ways and possibilities of circumventing or violating norms and rules, (ii) increase the costs associated with such actions, without at the same time imposing too heavy a burden on those that act legally and strive to engage in more sustainable (though so-far not so economically competitive) activities, and (iii) serve as a complement, or support, to other, still to come, more specific and efficient policy measures or instruments capable of really undermining or reverting the existing incentives that favour so much deforestation and discourage so much forest management.
That is why such a system as SISPROF must be agile, modern, wide and comprehensive enough, encompassing all the stages of the productive chain of custody of forest resources and products, so that it may respond more adequately to public demands for better and more sustainable timber production activities, either at national or regional levels as well as at the level of rural or forest management units.
