Senators Vow to Fight Japanese-Funded Amazon Road

Calling attention to an urgent new threat to the Amazon rain forest, a team of U.S. senators pledged Friday to try to block construction of a highway that they say could enable Japan to plunder lumber and other natural resources crucial to the global environment.

The road, scheduled to be built this spring with Japanese funding, would link remote regions of the jungle in Peru and Brazil to bustling Pacific Ocean ports on the other side of the Andes, permitting raw materials to be shipped abroad with ease.

Such a development, the senators contend, would gravely compound the threat to the rain forest that is currently posed by massive man-made fires set in an attempt to clear the jungle for cropland.

The enormous Amazon rain forest is regarded as vital to the global environment. Scientists have warned that deforestation there could deprive the world of an important oxygen source and alter its weather patterns. Plants release oxygen during photosynthesis.

“These forests are the world’s lungs,” Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.) said after briefing environmentalists in Washington on the situation. “And in the state of the highway lies the state of the tropical rain forests’ future.”

The senators angrily vowed to pressure the Japanese, who they said had been frustrated by Southeast Asian governments’ recent conservation efforts and are seeking new sources of raw materials.

Charging that Japan has been the “principal despoiler of tropical rain forests in Asia,” Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.) charged that it is now seeking to “slurp the Amazon dry.”

“They don’t touch the trees in their homeland,” Gore said, “but in the tropics and subtropics, it’s ‘Katie, bar the door!’ ”

The senators, who saw evidence of the planned road while touring the Amazon basin last month, said the project is being funded by Japanese banks and is to be built by a Brazilian construction firm.

Wirth, Gore and Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.) said they will seek to meet next week with the Japanese and Peruvian ambassadors to the United States to voice their opposition and to try to block the project.

Noting that construction is expected to begin when the rainy season ends in the Amazon about April 1 and that road-building equipment is already in place, the senators and environmentalists in attendance described the matter as extremely urgent.

The road across the Andes would link modern highway systems in western Peru with rudimentary roads in the jungle region of Acre province in western Brazil.

A map given senators by officials there shows ambitious dreams for new markets to be created as a result of the road. A bold line extending from the South American interior splits into swaths labeled “wood,” “rubber” and “other products”--headed across the Pacific to Japan, with another line pointing toward California.

The senators said they recognize the new road’s attraction for residents of the remote jungle region. However, they expressed concern that Brazil and Peru would not enforce environmental safeguards to protect the forest, particularly with new economic incentives for foresting.

“The construction of this highway would kindle new threats of destruction to the rain forests,” Wirth said.