Day 240 - 24 Apr 96 - Page 30
1 deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 1966 and 1975
2 to cattle ranching, 90 per cent of this under a state
3 programme of fiscal incentives (Caulfield above)."
4 A. Your Honour, I wonder if I could add a brief statement
5 to those two subsidiary paragraphs.
6
7 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It is very important to remember that a lot of
8 the development pressure to clear tropical forests of all
9 types for pastureland came about as a result of official
10 policy, both by domestic governments usually in the form of
11 fiscal and tax incentives, but also as a result in Central
12 America and in Brazil of very large amounts of aid money
13 being made available through institutions like the World
14 Bank, but also through bilateral aid agencies to build up a
15 beef export industry for economic reasons.
16
17 I think I am right in recalling that for the World Bank
18 alone, in the late 1960s and up to the mid 1970s, disperse
19 something like one billion US dollars for that purpose.
20
21 MR. MORRIS: You said that they aim to build up the beef export
22 industry for what? To benefit who?
23 A. As far as the aid agencies were concerned, the benefits
24 that they were trying to promote were for the countries
25 themselves, to build up their economic resources through
26 earning money through export and earning money through the
27 sale of beef in the export trade, and that was a very
28 significant driving force for tropical deforestation in
29 Central America and Brazil..
30
31 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Was this at a time when some of these
32 countries already owed phenomenal sums of money, or was it
33 as a result of this that they owed phenomenal sums or even
34 more?
35 A. There are sort of two ----
36
37 Q. I do not want you to go into any detail. All I want to
38 know, appropo of what you have said, is did they already
39 owe large sums of money so that, for instance, a healthy
40 beef export industry might help them make some repayments,
41 or some interest at least on them, if there was any
42 interest, or were loans from the World Bank part of the
43 increasing problem of large debt borne by these countries?
44 Without elaborating in any way, can you give me the simple
45 answer to that if you know it?
46 A. It was certainly a contributory factor in helping to
47 build up debt levels in these countries, although one has
48 to be careful to distinguish between countries because the
49 size of their ----
50
51 Q. Leave it there. If there is not a simple straightforward
52 answer ----
53 A. The countries did have significant debt and both for
54 the alleviation of that debt and to allow for greater
55 government and private sector investment in building up the
56 economies and therefore raising the standard of living for
57 people, the industry was encouraged and these loans were
58 made and then the debt increased substantially and
59 significantly again in these countries in the late 1970s
60 and early 1980s for other reasons related, in particular to
