By Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden | 16 September 2025 (IDN) — Belem is the Brazilian city at the mouth of the Amazon. Unlike its slummy counterpart, Kinshasa, at the mouth of the Congo, it is full of resplendent streets with beautiful nineteenth-century houses. It has squares and marketplaces filled with cafes, fountains, and life.
In November, it hosts the UN’s Conference of the Parties (COP) on Climate Change. Unfortunately, according to The New York Times last week, the number of hotel beds is insufficient for the mass of delegates and their entourage—a foretaste of the world to come.
The large city grew up shipping rubber from the Amazon forest, which begins on its doorstep. This made it wealthy. One can see the beautiful Baroque Theatre of Peace, a fluffy pink building where Anna Pavlova danced.
On the main square, ornate with pavements of black and white quartz, is the Hotel Grao Para, where Xavier Cugat and his orchestra would play and Zsa Zsa Gabor would stop over on her way, by propeller plane, on the slow flight to Rio. Then there is the magnificent opera house, which once attracted the best singers from Europe and North America. Now beautifully restored, it is attempting to do the same again.
The Forest’s Decline Under Bolsonaro
By now, we all know the forest has been milked of much of its wealth and, as wildfires sweep across its mammoth area, cattle farming and illegal logging had a field day under the very right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, who tore apart the legacy of the great conservationist, ex-president, but now president again, Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva.
Less well known is that it is now 60 years since Pierre Gourou, in his seminal book, “Le Monde Tropique”, warned that the tropical forest is not, as it appears, a farmers’ and ranchers’ paradise. It’s a fragile environment and only the Indians, with their shifting cultivation, have fully come to terms with it- farming in a way that protects and preserves the forest.
Cutting down such a forest is the same in the Congo, Indonesia, India, Madagascar, and China. Introducing modern methods of intensive agriculture or cattle rearing leads to its ruin. Without the protective cover of the umbrella canopy, the soil will soon turn into rock, laterite or sand.
Yet still the lesson is unlearned. Within a few hours’ drive from Belem along forest back-roads, but well within reach of the local administration, one can see new attempts at large-scale forest clearing, as settlers from Brazil’s central, north-eastern and southern states attempt to develop pasture for cattle. Every minute of the day, three football pitches of forest are cleared away.
John Boorman’s great piece of cinema, “The Emerald Forest”, portrayed the magnificence of the Amazon. Made 40 years ago, it warned us that the forest was rapidly disappearing. Boorman was the David Attenborough of his time. He wasn’t listened to by enough people.
Global Deforestation: A Shared Mistake
Still enormous, still overpowering, dense, and in parts nearly impenetrable, the jungle is being eaten away or burned too fast, both for Brazil’s good and for humankind’s. It’s the planet’s largest lung, producing 30% of our planet’s oxygen supply and is one of the great repositories of plants that can produce some of our most essential medicines.
The Amazon contains around one million forms of plant and animal life, 10% of the Earth’s stock of species. A single hectare of the rain forest can contain up to 230 species of tree compared with 10 to 15 commonly found in temperate forests.
Tropical forests produce essential oils, gums, latexes, resins, tannins, steroids, waxes, edible oils and, above all, the raw material for medicines. More than 50% of modern medicines come from the natural world. For example, two critical anti-cancer compounds are derived from the periwinkle plant found in the forests of Madagascar.
The synthesis of many naturally derived drugs is often not commercially feasible, and even for those drugs that can be synthesised, the chemical blueprints provided by wild plants are frequently needed.
The centres of origin of many food plants lie in the tropical forest. The world’s food supply depends on maintaining plant resistance to pests and diseases. Resistance is often maintained by crossbreeding with wild populations of the same species. Already, too many wild plant varieties have become extinct.
Breakthroughs also depend on the untouched stock of genes. The gene for the semi-dwarf variety of rice, which over the last four decades has transformed Asian agriculture, originated from a primitive Taiwanese plant, and its resistance to virus came from another wild species that probably evolved in the Silent Valley of India.
In the last few years, some countries have led the way in reforesting vast areas. In Kenya, the late Wangari Maathai led a nationwide movement of women to plant over 50 million trees. For this, she won the Nobel Peace Prize. Ethiopia mobilised its people to plant 350 million trees in one day.
A little late, but it is not too late; the world is beginning to wake up to the importance of this heritage. The emerald forests need not die, our planet need not overheat, but humankind must use its wit and will to stop that happening.
*Jonathan Power has been an international foreign affairs columnist for over 40 years and a columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune (now the New York Times) for 17 years. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Copyright © Jonathan Power
Visit www.jonathanpowerjournalist.com
Image: Aerial view of a boat navigating a river in an area of the Amazon rainforest, in the state of Pará, northern Brazil, on 6 August 2023. Credit: Antonio Lacerda (EFE).