Brazil developing grand radar system to monitor Amazon forests

MANAUS, Brazil (Reuters) -- Brazil's government hopes a radar surveillance system for the Amazon will dramatically help combat drug trafficking, logging and other threats to the world's largest jungle.

"This is Brazil's most illuminating project," President Fernando Henrique Cardoso said on Wednesday while visiting the nerve center for the system, which is under construction in Brazil's Amazon capital, Manaus.

"This is for the defense of Brazil, not just the defense of (the Amazon) territory, but of ecology, its people and burning."

The $1.4 billion project, which is partly operational but will only fully function in 2002, will stretch a network of high-tech radars across the Amazon capable of tracking any movement in an area roughly seven times the size of France.

The system was originally thought of as a way to halt devastating destruction of the Amazon. But it has received much more attention in recent months as Brazil fears drug runners will increasingly move over the border due to Colombia's $7.5 billion U.S.-backed plan to combat the drug trade.

The impenetrable Amazon is home to 50 percent of the globe's animal and plant species and extends to Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. The Amazon forest in Brazil represents 85 percent of the total.

U.S. aerospace and defense firm Raytheon Co. is providing the 25 radars being installed.

Ever since Brazil hosted an "Earth Summit" on fighting environmental destruction in the early 1990s, environmentalists have urged that the country do more to protect the Amazon. An area roughly Belgium's size was illegally logged every year in the mid-1990s.

"In the 1980s, the Amazon was considered the lungs of the world and we, Brazilians, the burners of the planet's oxygen," the project's Web site, http:/www.sivam.gov.br, said in a brief introduction.

Sivam, a Portuguese acronym for System for Monitoring the Amazon, will help collect information and quickly send it to Brazil's government.

Brazil's environmental agency, Ibama, will get updates on where there is logging or burning, and the army will receive information to intercept unidentified planes that often fly from neighboring countries carrying drugs to clandestine air strips. It also includes weather monitoring stations.

"Sivam is basically a huge data bank," said Ricardo Vilarinho, regional head of Atech, the Brazilian company providing the software for the project.

Vilarinho explained that of the 25 radars, six can be moved around by plane, which can fly under the heavy cloud that constantly hangs over the Amazon.

The Amazon represents 60 percent of Brazilian territory, but only 12 percent of its 165 million people live there.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

See related sites about Americas

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.