A Day In The Life Of Mother Earth : Brazil’s Amazon : ‘The end of April used to be pretty rainy. Now it rains very little.’ Ronaldo Oliveira, <i> ecologist </i>

* The Problem--Dwindling Rain Forests

* The U.N. View--”Reconciling the need to preserve the Earth’s remaining forests with the needs of countries to exploit their forests as economic resources is one of the most challenging tasks on the agenda of the Earth Summit.”

* The Case Study: The Amazon--The world’s largest tropical rain forest covers about one-third of South America.

In the Amazon afternoon, extraterrestrial death rays are zapping a naked patch of earth without mercy. Such solar bombardment, and a season of punishing rains, has left the soil leached, bleached and petered out.

Ronaldo Oliveira squats to sift spent dirt through his fingers. Then he moves to nearby ground where Jose dos Santos Reis has planted a legume called feijao de porco, or pig beans. Oliveira lifts some leaves and shows Reis the dark, moist soil underneath.

“It’s plain to see that this earth here is going to be well-protected,” Oliveira says, and Reis agrees.

Not only do the pig bean plants protect the fragile soil from sun and rain, they also will enrich it with nitrogen and organic matter. Planted between coffee and other perennial crops, pig beans form part of a vegetation “consortium” designed for intensive and sustained agricultural production in the Amazon.

Oliveira, 41, is an architect-turned-ecologist who hopes to help preserve the Amazon by working with people like Reis, 34, a farmer whose main goal is to make his homestead productive.

The two men are finding that their goals can be compatible. Consortium systems of tree, shrub and ground crops are proving to be a productive and ecologically sound way to farm the weak soils.

If the hundreds of thousands of small farmers in Brazil’s Amazon region can cultivate consortiums to make a living on the same land year after year without depleting the soil, they are less likely to continue cutting down more natural forest, many ecologists hope.

A day with Oliveira and Reis reveals both reason for hope and appreciation of the long road ahead.

At scattered spots around the Brazilian Amazon, groups of small farmers like Reis are learning consortium technology, some by trial and error, some with outside aid. But progress is slow in the huge, underdeveloped hinterland.

The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rain forest with 2.1 million square miles, an area 13 times the size of California. It is shared by nine countries, but most of it is in Brazil. According to calculations based on satellite surveys, at least 8% of the Brazilian Amazon has been destroyed this century.

In the state of Rondonia, Oliveira says, rainfall patterns have changed with deforestation. “The end of April used to be pretty rainy,” he says. “Now it rains very little. One of the causes certainly is the high index of deforestation.”

How continued destruction of trees in the Amazon may affect the rest of the world is still a matter of some debate. Many varieties of plants and animals undoubtedly would be lost, eroding the planet’s biodiversity.

Until the late 1980s, it was mostly large landholders who destroyed the rain forest. They were inspired by government tax breaks and other incentives to turn forest into cattle pasture. International pressure, and the fact that cattle-ranching in the Amazon is not very profitable, has helped bring such large-scale clearing under better control.

In 1988, a disastrous year for the Amazon forest, destruction totaled about 6 million acres. In 1990 and 1991, it was down to about 3.5 million acres a year.

Now ecologists are focusing their attention on small farmers who slash and burn away forest to cultivate traditional crops such as corn, beans and rice.

Since the 1960s, the government has built roads into the region and settled poor farmers on millions of acres of forested land. But government agencies, by and large, have not provided the settlers with the means for preserving trees and soil. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working with farmers are few and far between.

One of the NGOs that does field work is the Institute for Pre-History, Anthropology and Ecology, founded in 1988 by a diverse group of researchers at the Federal University of Rondonia in Porto Velho. One of the founders was Willem Groeneveld, a visiting Dutch professor of soil science.

Groeneveld, 34, is now executive director of the institute, known as IPHAE. Under his leadership, the institute has set aside pre-history and anthropology to concentrate on ecology.

It operates two experimental farms and nurseries east of Porto Velho, and it works with more than 100 small farmers.

Like many ecologists who know the Amazon, Groeneveld does not oppose farming in the region. The farmers are here to stay, and they must eat. But he says that crops like corn, rice and beans are ecologically harmful when cultivated by traditional methods.

Bankrupt state governments are hard-pressed to finance effective extension services. In Rondonia, a state agronomist earns less than $100 a month.

“Good people leave,” Groeneveld says. “The whole thing is falling apart.”

IPHAE is trying to pick up some of the pieces. Oliveira is the institute’s president, but he spends much of his time in the field.

This day he is at IPHAE’S experimental farm 50 miles east of Porto Velho, a former frontier outpost that now has a population of 200,000. Shirtless and sweating in the midmorning heat, clipboard in hand, he is checking row after row of young plants.

There are mahogany saplings and other hardwoods alternating with two kinds of fruit palms--acai and pupunha. There are bananas and pupunha next to cupuacu, a plant that produces a sweet and aromatic pulp used for juices and ice cream.

Oliveira takes notes on how plants in each row are progressing. From the notes, he will give instructions for the experimental farm’s foreman, and he will draw conclusions to discuss with settlers being helped by IPHAE.

It isn’t easy to persuade the farmers to use these methods. “There is a certain resistance,” Oliveira says. “They never had this technology. They have doubts about the results.”

He stoops to clear a vine that is winding around a pupunha, which he says will be producing a nutritive fruit and palmito, or heart of palm, within three years. “You can cut out the heart of palm annually without affecting the plant,” he says.

Moving on, he shows where a banana plant’s big leaves are giving needed shade to a small cupuacu plant. He points out dead weeds that have been pulled and spread over the ground to give it shelter and humus. The project uses no chemical fertilizers. “The farmers can’t afford it,” Oliveira says.

The experimental farm occupies land that was deforested years ago. Traditional farming exhausted the soil, and poor-quality, second-growth forest took over. One of the experimental farm’s purposes is to find the best ways to reclaim such degraded land.

If degraded land can be returned to agriculture, there will be less pressure for cutting down virgin forest, Oliveira reasons.

He stops work for a lunch of rice, beans and beef stew on the porch of the farm’s rustic bunkhouse. The temperature climbs past 100 degrees.

After lunch, Oliveira heads out to talk to farmers like Reis.

Reis, a compact man with a curly brown beard, lives with his wife and three children in a dirt-floor house he built with planks and hand-hewn shingles. Irregular rows of coffee bushes and other crops surround the house, and the fields are flanked by high, green walls of forest.

Since homesteading the land three years ago, Reis has cleared the forest from about 18 of his 130 acres. Brazil’s “ecological reserve” law will permit him to deforest half his acreage if he wishes. Oliveira doesn’t think Reis will need near that much cleared land, but the farmer isn’t so sure.

With IPHAE planting material and technical advice, Reis put in 160 acai palms, 2,000 pupunha palms and a scattering of mahogany saplings in January. In April of last year, he planted 1,000 cupuacu.

Showing Oliveira around, he stops to gaze proudly at a thriving cupuacu. “That’s right, Ronaldo, the way my cupuacu is coming up looks good to me,” he says.

All the new plantings are in consortium with Reis’ 12,000 coffee bushes. Oliveira praises the progress of the mahogany saplings, remarking that the trees will provide shade for the coffee bushes and someday will produce a windfall of valuable wood.

“That’s my retirement, those trees I’m planting there,” Reis says. “And my savings account is the coffee.”

It’s late afternoon, and the sun is still blasting away like a space laser at the areas of bare earth remaining between rows of coffee. Reis obviously is more interested in coffee than in ground-covering legumes, more concerned about making a living than saving trees and soil.

At least he has advanced beyond the slash-and-burn mentality. “That’s a first step,” Oliveira says, driving back over the rough dirt road from Reis’ farm.

Oliveira says he will show Reis how he can maintain four head of cattle on a reduced pasture of about 2 1/2 acres, rather than the normal 20 to 25 acres, by efficiently managing the pasture and growing supplemental feeds.

And he predicts than Reis will learn by stages how to further diversify his consortium to the point that it will give him as much production as he needs, without more land.

Most of Reis’ income will come from coffee this year, but Oliveira is trying to convince him that the more he diversifies, the better off he will be. IPHAE knows that to sell the consortium system, it must offer farmers a variety of money-making crops that will reduce dependence on more traditional ones. Heart of palm, for example, brings top prices.

IPHAE receives requests for help from more farmers than it is equipped to attend. But rather than making major expansions of its program to meet demand, the institute hopes to rely on the success of farmers like Reis to spread the consortium technology.

“Neighbors will absorb it from them,” Oliveira says. “The multiplier effect can be significant, and it is much faster.”

Even with a strong multiplier effect, it probably will take years for consortiums to become dominant. But Oliveira believes that the seeds planted today could eventually help save the Amazon forest from devastation.