The development of SISPROF by IBAMA derived from the need to establish a more reliable and effective modern management tool in order to improve the enforcement of legislation and better use of the country’s forestry resources, particularly in Amazonia. Until then, the instruments of monitoring and control available to IBAMA were archaic and obsolete. Suffice it to say that, in the state units and offices of the Institute in the Amazon region, it was practically impossible to consolidate an “accounting balance” of inputs and outputs of forest resources and products for any timber processing unit that could, in fact, be compatible with the raw material exploitation authorizations that had been conceded by IBAMA.
Individual controls, in different stages of the productive chain, were not only conceived as isolated or tight instruments that would not allow their adequate consolidation or aggregation with controls of other stages, but were also highly vulnerable to their recorded information being easily altered (or adulterated). Most information in these controls was simply written down and recorded by pencil, not even by pen, without any safeguards or security guarantees for avoiding or making adulterations more difficult. In fact, one may say that the previous IBAMA controls on the access and use of forest resources in the country would hardly conform to established principles of legislation and commandments of regulatory norms. Given the weakness of controls one could not guarantee a high standard of responsiveness to precepts and requirements of laws and norms. In this respect, it should be noted that new legal instruments, such as the law of environmental crimes, had started to demand a more blunt and effective enforcement of its principles and determinations by the institutions of the public power that had the competence to act in the environmental area.
In the face of such a challenge, the Directorate of Forests of IBAMA started a series of studies, some four to five years ago, to develop alternative and new models of proceedings, field inspections and organization and processing of data and information in order to implement an integrated system for monitoring and controlling forest-based activities through the use of information technology, geo-processing and remote sensoring techniques, as well as the employment of a broad, central, computerized data bank.
The accumulated past experience of IBAMA in the public control of activities that exploit, use and process forest resources in the country, and in particular in Amazonia, a region subject to a wide and complex process of forest-cover losses associated with the expansion of the agriculture frontier, indicated clearly that there were strong deficiencies that needed to be defeated and that would have to be taken into account in the conception and design of any modern instrument or system of control and monitoring that intended to be effective. Among these deficiencies that conditioned the scope and comprehensiveness of the new system of control, the following should be underscored:
• the need to generate, in real time, with transparency and reliability, additional, more systematic and site-specific information on the progress of deforestation in a vast region like the Amazon: all the information capacity generated by the National Space Resarch Institute (INPE), based on a modern remote satellite source for monitoring forest cover in Amazonia, which allows the immediate development of deforestation maps in big areas still needed to be reinforced by an “on-the-spot” verification of the use of rural properties, on how the use of the different areas of landholdings evolve, and the end-uses to which these areas are dedicated. A new system of control should consider this necessity to strengthen, from information gathered in the field, the analytical and interpretation capacities of mechanisms such as those of INPE;
• the need to generate information, at the level of rural property units, on permanent preservation areas, legal forest reserve areas and other areas of environmental interest, as well as on the extension of deforested or converted areas, that could support/help or complement the action and effectiveness of other public policy instruments, such as the Rural Land Property Tax (ITR). Reformulated in 1996, and administered by the SRF, the new ITR, now a “declaratory tax” to be paid by rural landholders, would require stronger capacity on the part of the public sector to verify the information declared by tax-payers, forcing IBAMA to become better prepared for such tasks (more particularly to help confirm to SRF the “Declaratory Environmental Acts” associated with ITR declarations and which refer to the specification of areas of “environmental interest” in rural land properties, since these areas may be exempt from a levying of the tax);
• the need to integrate this information on rural property areas destined for forestry use or environmental conservation with the registries/rosters of rural properties that must be maintained and implemented by INCRA, which is also linked to the implementation and collection of ITR;
• the need for these controls and information generated by a new system to be adequately integrated with other systems of IBAMA itself, as for example the Federal Technical Registry of Potentially Pollutant and Natural Resource User Activities, among others;
• the need for dialogue with other systems of monitoring and control of forest resource use, already developed or in process of development, by State Environmental Agencies (OEMAs) which required sufficient comprehensiveness and scope for SISPROF to propitiate better integration and partnership between the federal institution and state agencies. In this respect, in particular, one should note the need for inter-state relations (flows of transportation and commercialization of products that cross state frontiers) involving forest resources and products to be adequately controlled and monitored, which would require a wider system (preferably federal) that would allow dialogue and consolidation of information from specific state systems;
• not only because of legislation impositions, but also due to the complexity of economic relations involved in the process of deforestation and forest resource exploitation in the Amazon. Any system of monitoring and control of the access and use of these resources would need to embrace the entire “chain of custody”, from the extraction in the forest to the final processing of the raw material in manufacturing units in order to increase the risks and costs of illegal operations that tend to persist in the immense Amazonian region. Such risks exist because of the existence of forces and incentives that induce resource users to look for ways of escaping or infringing norms, rules and controls, and “not to economize” on the use of the resource;
• the need to establish a sufficiently wide system capable of submitting the productive chain to a more effective control, clearly distinguishing the three, legally foreseen, basic and different sources of obtaining timber (deforestation, forest management and reforestation/forest replacement), a distinction considered indispensable to propitiate adequate conditions for a privileged or differentiated treatment to permanent productive forestry in the region, i.e. to sustainable forest management (SFM) (or, also, reforestation), since it is deforestation – and the raw material thereby derived – that undermines the incentives to move towards SFM in the Amazon region;
• linked to this differentiation and “preference” for forest management the need that the activity be submitted to a certain degree of scrutiny and verification of its performance and quality – something that nowadays is commonly required in international, regional, or national processes of “criteria and indicators” of SFM – not only insists on more transparency and accountability in the exercise of the activity but also that countries respond and report to public demands on progress towards SFM. This would call for a greater effort in building a specific part of the new system for the control of forest management plans (PMFS). The Directorate of Forests of IBAMA would assign as a priority the establishment of the “data validation module” of SISPROF and its component for the monitoring and follow-up of forest management activity in the Amazon, further providing a complementary apparatus constituted of training courses, nucleus of support to forest management, technical packages and manuals for the elaboration of management plans, and follow-up of their implementation, etc., aiming to promote and give some support to the activity.
In spite of some drawbacks in these last years such as the discontinuity in the administrative application of policies, diverse interferences and insufficient technical capacity of IBAMA, the establishment of SISPROF was initiated in 1999.
Since July 2001 the first base of the system has been installed, that of São Luis in Maranhão state, as a test-pilot for the establishment of the SISPROF data bank, and since August 2002 the bases of Cuiabá-Mato Grosso, Manaus-Amazonas, Belém-Pará, Palmas-Tocantins, Sinop-Mato Grosso and Santarém-Pará were inaugurated. This initial phase of the system’s operation in Amazonia had already the ability to test the data bank module, to transfer knowledge to technicians of the management units of IBAMA, and to train personnel hired to carry out the registration of data and information in the new system.
From July 1999 to August 2002, SISPROF has counted on the support of Project UNDP/BRA/97-044 - “Sustainable Forest Development”, which provided the initial development and implementation of the system in Amazonia. During this period the geo-processing component was incorporated into the system, but it has not yet been implemented in the operation bases, since a standard geo-referenced base for IBAMA has to be established for the whole Amazon region, with the specified software and applications to be used. This work is currently under development by the Remote Sensoring Center (CSR) of IBAMA and is expected to be ready and fully operational in July 2003.
In mid-2002, IBAMA signed a contract with the Federal University of Lavras-Minas Gerais State in order to speed up the establishment and operation of SISPROF in the whole of Amazonia. After the contract was signed, and from September 2002, eight more operational bases were inaugurated in the region: Porto Velho-Rondônia, Ji-Paraná-Rondônia, Vilhena-Rondônia, Juina-Mato Grosso, Marabá-Pará, Macapá-Amapá, Boa Vista-Roraima and Rio Branco-Acré. There still are eight bases to be established: Tefé-Amazonas, Barra do Garças-Mato Grosso, Alta Floresta-Mato Grosso, Paragominas-Pará, Redenção-Pará, Altamira-Pará, Imperatriz-Maranhão and Ariquemes-Rondônia, totalling 23 bases that have been proposed for operation in Amazonia. With these 23 bases IBAMA will cover the capital cities of almost 550 municipalities, distributed across nine states of Legal Amazonia within a maximum radius of 200 km.
SISPROF was officially launched in November 2002 by the Minister of the Environment, through Normative Instruction no. 11 of 27/11/2002. At the same time the stamp of forest origin for timber products was also instituted, and a period of 120 days was given to IBAMA to regulate its use.
In the following section of this report, and in order to single out the factors that mostly constrain the model or pattern of use of its forest resources, an attempt is made to give the reader a comprehensive view of the complexity of the Brazilian Amazon and of the occupation process of its territory and development of its economy. Although the description may be a bit long, it is believed it was necessary to highlight better the degree of difficulties to be confronted by an apparatus of control and monitoring of all activities involved with the use and disuse of forest resources in the region.
It should be noted here that the year 1996/1997 is taken as the base-year for the majority of statistical data and information, as well as for most comparisons, inferences or analytical-descriptive interpretations, because this is the year to which the published available information of the agricultural census of IBGE (1996) refers. So, even using other secondary sources of information, we have tried to extract from them the data that were closer to that year.
In section 4, a more detailed description of SISPROF is presented, including its three basic pillars (geo-processing, data bank and data validation) of the instruments, computerized equipment and software needed to run the system, as well as the proceedings for planning and processing information and data concerning the control and monitoring of deforestation, forest management, forest replacement and of the flows of transportation and commercialization of forest resources and products (together with respective licences and authorizations), until the final issuance of the stamps of forest origin.
In section 5, we describe how the system is being used to monitor PMFS and to report on their implementation, the necessary instruments for the control of the activity, the mechanisms of support to forest management that have been instituted by IBAMA, as well as the advantages that the system presents for those who carry out the activity in the field.
Section 6 presents estimates of the costs of SISPROF and of the “transaction costs” incurred by forest management activity because of the control mechanisms imposed on it, and especially the impacts or increases in costs that derive from SISPROF.
The last section presents the conclusions and recommendations of the entire work.
