Server revolutionizes inspection of timber in the Amazon – 04/29/2023 – Environment

Botanist Felipe Guimarães cried like a child when he entered a logging company for the first time and saw the forest “piled on the ground”, in Ji-Paraná (RO). He noticed the fragility in the inspection of trucks that transported wood in the Amazon region in the first days as a servant of Ibama (Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Resources), in 2003.

The route on the first day of work for action on a stretch between Porto Velho and Ji-Paraná, “was just livestock, livestock, livestock and timber, timber, timber”, says Guimarães. He thought: “Where is the forest? There isn’t one.”

“It was very shocking. I remember that day perfectly, I cried a lot. (SC).

The inspector says that those first few weeks shook him. “I wanted to leave the job, because it was all disgrace, destruction, burning and deforestation. I questioned whether that was what I wanted for my life”, he says, who previously worked as a biology teacher “on a paradise island”, he says, in reference to to the capital of Santa Catarina.

One of Guimarães’s first activities at Ibama was to fill in spreadsheets with the types of wood that were inspected. The firewood needs to be registered in a control system that determines which species the loggers are authorized to exploit. It is up to the inspector to check whether the material in the document is the same as the truck.

But most agents, says Guimarães, did not know how to identify them and had to rely on the logger’s word. “Since I was young, they had me write it down on the spreadsheet and take pictures. Then there was a discussion about which wood it was: ‘is it ipe, cumaru or igarapé’. I said, ‘guys, which one is it? I need to write it down here’. Nobody knew . I had to write down what the logger said.”

Guimarães says that many loggers put the name of some kind of wood on the document, while camouflaging the illegal, noble and forbidden cuts among the authorized ones.

“We inspected the document trying to find any bureaucratic error, because nobody knew how to identify the wood. But aren’t we the ones who are Ibama inspectors? Since when is the logger the one who says what kind of wood it is?”, he says.

Dissatisfied with the situation, Guimarães took action. To understand how to inspect wood, the environmental analyst took a course in Brasília. He came back full of doubts, “but with a lot of desire to make it happen”.

To learn in practice, he went to the sheds where the logs were stored and asked for two samples of each species. One of them he would send to the laboratory and the other would stay with him to compare after the result came out.

And so, kind of on the fly, he acquired knowledge that led him to create a course that revolutionized inspection in the Amazon region and allowed illegal companies and loggers to be punished.

At that time he was head of inspection in Ji-Paraná, when he received the news that he would return to Florianópolis, where he is until today. Since he couldn’t let that knowledge go with him, he called 18 inspectors from the interior of Rondônia, from cities like Ariquemes and Pimenta Bueno, and gave a one-week didactic course, in which he delivered kits with samples of wood in plastic bags. .

The result of the classes, according to Guimarães, was that for a year these students took turns on a barrier in Vilhena, one of the last municipalities in Rondônia, where there is a post for the Secretariat of Finance and Ibama.

“The inspectors of that first group did ‘damage’ to that barrier, because they seized a lot of material and trucks. At that time I was already in Floripa, but I was providing assistance from a distance. A beautiful piece of work by this group.”

When Ibama found out about the informal course, they invited Guimarães to be an instructor and, thus, he taught intensively throughout Brazil between 2009 and 2010 in places like Manaus, Salvador, Belém and Cuiabá.

Now, the kit with the wood samples is delivered inside a wooden box. According to Guimarães, more than 300 identifiers have been formed since then.

For this work, Guimarães was the winner of the Espírito Público award, in November last year, in the Environment category.

One of these students, from the Manaus class, is forestry engineer Natália Castro, 37, who today works as an environmental technician at Ibama. For her, the course provided more subsidies to act more effectively in inspection in the state of Amazonas.

“We did the inspection the wrong way, because we didn’t know how to distinguish the species in the document and in the truck. We accepted something we weren’t sure about. It bothered me, it was a vulnerability of the public agent”, says Natália.

“Ibama is no longer hostage to a logging company. [os fiscais] we are free to say with confidence: ‘Your document is wrong, I can prove it’. Today we have the technical competence to attest that the logger is committing fraud”, says Guimarães.