With a focus on the timber industry in the Brazilian Amazon region and based on a comparison of results of a study of the forestry sector carried out in the early 1990s and studies carried out about ten years later, this article explores various recent tendencies which have the potential to change tropical forest management in the Amazon region. These changes are related to a) changes in the supply of roundwood, b) globalisation and the opening of external markets for timber and other products like soy, c) increasing scarcity of timber, d) new markets and incentives for sustainable forest management and community-based forest management, and e) changes in forest land ownership, including the decentralisation of forest governance and devolution of forest land. We conclude that the changes are generating different effects. Whereas the expansion of external markets is leading to increased deforestation, the decentralisation and democratisation of forest governance and a global preoccupation with the loss of environmental services and livelihood opportunities for local people is creating new incentives for sustainable forest management. The greatest challenge is to find ways to make family-based logging and sawmill operations in settlement areas more sustainable, for instance through innovative company-community partnerships.
Amazon region; Timber industry; Sustainable forest management; Soy cultivation; Forest governance
