TWO Americans will appear in court in Rio de Janeiro this week charged with
stealing a priceless meteorite from the city’s National Museum and trying to
smuggle it out of Brazil. Meteorite experts say the case highlights a growing
problem with illicit trade.

Ron Farrell and Frederick Marcelli were arrested as they tried to board a
flight to New York. Police claim that the missing meteorite was found in a shoe
in one of the men’s suitcases.

Maria Elisabeth Zucolotto, curator of meteorites at the National Museum, says
the meteorite, which weighs 446 grams, is unique. Called an angrite, it is
composed mainly of the blackish-green mineral augite, with some olivene and
spinel. It is believed to be around 4.5 billion years old, and fell into the bay
near Angra dos Reis, west of Rio, in 1869. An official ordered two slaves into
the water to retrieve it.

Zucolotto says that Marcelli wrote to her asking to see the museum’s
collection with a view to making some swaps, a fairly common practice among
collectors. However, she was not at the museum when the pair called and another
employee showed them the collection. Zucolotto alleges that a swap was made when
her colleague wasn’t looking.

Zucolotto says that other experts had alerted her to the activities of
unscrupulous dealers who sometimes try to cheat museums in developing countries
when offering “swaps” by overvaluing their own rocks. “These dealers are
everywhere now,” warns John Wasson at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“They are ready to bribe the curators of small museums and have largely depleted
some museums in Africa.”

BRAZILIANS sometimes call their country “Belinda”, meaning “Belgium and India
living side by side”. The nickname refers to Brazil’s geographic and
sociological Great Divide. While some parts of the south are almost as developed
and wealthy as Western Europe, conditions in the drought-stricken northeast are
little better than in the poorest regions of Asia and Africa. Many people there
live in desperate poverty and have to walk miles for water.

The same contrasts are found in agriculture. Brazil is one of the world’s
leading farming nations. This year’s crops are expected to reach a total of 73
million tonnes, worth around $160 billion, according to the government’s
statistics institute, the IBGE. The government claims that the country is
self-sufficient in most major food crops, and it is a leading exporter of many,
including coffee, oranges, sugar cane, bananas and soya beans. Yet vast numbers
of the rural population live on the brink of starvation, unable to find a patch
of land of their own to cultivate. Some estimates put the number of landless
Brazilians in the countryside at 15 million—nearly 10 per cent of the
total population.

In September, the government’s agricultural reform institute, INCRA, produced
a map of land ownership which shows that 2.3 per cent of the country’s rural
properties hold more than 50 per cent of its private land. The largest 75
properties occupy some 24 million hectares, while 140 000 of the smallest take
up little more than 200 000 hectares between them.

Several organisations, such as the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) and the
Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), have been fiercely—and sometimes
violently in the case of the MST— campaigning for land reform. Large
landowners argue that carving up their mammoth estates will destroy their
country’s proud agricultural record. But the reformers claim the only way to
drag millions of people out of misery is to radically change the face of
Brazilian agriculture. They say that far too heavy an emphasis is placed on the
cultivation of cash crops such as soya beans for export at the expense of crops
to feed local people. “The government just wants the problem to be seen as one
of social conflict,” says João Pedro Stedile, a director of the MST. “But
there is more to it than that. We have to reorganise agriculture in Brazil . . .
so that the enormous areas of land which are not productive could be
incorporated into the food production system.”

Stedile says the claim that Brazil is self-sufficient in food production “is
a joke. It appears that way at the moment because there is a repressed demand,
with two-thirds of the population unable to afford consumer goods. The
supermarket shelves are full only because nobody can afford to buy what is on
them.” He points out that in 1986, when one of Brazil’s many economic plans
temporarily raised the income of large segments of the population, there were
shortages of many basic items of food almost immediately. In 1994, another plan
had a similar effect. “We had to import butter from Belgium and five million
coconuts from the Philippines.”

The MST argues that reform would not mean large landowners would lose some of
their productive land. According to INCRA, only 28.3 per cent of the land
occupied by rural properties in Brazil is productive. This figure rises to 42.1
per cent in the south and drops to 13.6 per cent in the north, much of which is
Amazon rainforest. The Ministry of Agriculture claims there are 470 million
hectares of land awaiting cultivation. Many large estates were bought not to
produce food but simply as a hedge against inflation, which hovered at around
1000 per cent until mid-1994. “Brazil has plenty of space for large properties
and plenty of space for small ones,” says Marcio Santilli, a director of the
Social Environmental Institute, an independent organisation.

Small is bountiful

The MST wants to reduce the emphasis on huge plantations of grain, cotton and
soya beans and “organise production to supply the population of Brazil with the
food they need, giving incentives for small-scale production of poultry and
pigs, for example”, says Stedile. Its vision for the relief of poverty is backed
up by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, which in a report published in
August urged the government to encourage more family-run smallholdings that, it
said, were more efficient than vast ranches. And the World Bank reported
recently that when land in the northeastern Piaui district was redistributed to
small farmers, yields increased by up to 40 per cent on naturally irrigated
farms and up to 70 per cent on those that were artificially irrigated.
“Small-scale farming tends to be relatively more efficient than large
landholding enterprises . . . which continue to keep considerable amounts of
land idle,” it said.

Successive governments have talked about land reform, made lavish promises
and failed to do anything. Tens of thousands of people continue to live as
tenant farmers or sharecroppers in conditions little better than those once
found in medieval Europe. In 1985, for example, José Sarney became the
country’s first civilian president after 21 years of military rule and promised
to expropriate 14 million hectares of land and settle 1.4 million peasants. But
by the end of his presidency in 1990, only a few thousand of the poor had
benefited. In 1989 he simply scrapped the ministry to cut costs.

Since coming to power in 1994, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has
promised to make land reform one of the main concerns of his government. He has
resurrected the Ministry of Agrarian Reform and appointed Raul Jungman, formerly
in charge of the government environmental agency Ibama, as minister. In a speech
in August, Cardoso said the government had already settled 35 000 families this
year and would meet its first target of settling 60 000 families by December. He
claimed that 2 million hectares of land had been expropriated by his government.
Cardoso also announced that the 1996 budget for agrarian reform would
double—from $400 000 to $800 000—and that he intended
to create a fund to finance further reform by increasing taxes on unproductive
land. He has vowed to settle 280 000 families by the end of his term in
1998.

However, the government will face strong opposition from Brazil’s powerful
landowning lobby. The landowners have immense political clout and in the 1980s
formed a political party, the Rural Democratic Union (UDR), to defend their
rights. Its leader, Ronaldo Caiado, stood for president in 1990. The UDR has
since been disbanded but recently threatened to restart.

The landowners’ lobby has a more sinister side. Many take the law into their
own hands to combat invasions of unproductive land organised by the MST, and
over the past decade hundreds of peasants have been killed. Forty-seven have
died in clashes this year so far, according to the CPT. In the worst incident,
19 landless people were killed when police dispersed a protest near
Marabá in the northern state of Para, a region notorious for its ruthless
style of settling disputes. Church leaders and forensic experts claim that some
of the killings were in cold blood, but so far nobody has been arrested.

Settling down

The MST, formed 11 years ago, claims that it has settled 139 000 landless
families on 7.2 million hectares, largely by encouraging invasions of unoccupied
land. But both it and the CPT insist that despite the current initiative, the
government should be doing far more. Vilmar Schneider, secretary of the CPT,
adds that the government has set itself modest targets and even so is failing to
reach them. He also contests the number of people the government claims to have
settled, saying it is repeating former President Sarney’s practice of including
in national statistics families who found land earlier and have now merely had
their titles legalised.

Critics also say that newly resettled families find it hard to cope
financially. “There have been a lot of cases of families who have been given
land only to sell it again later because they have not been able to compete
economically,” says Santilli. The CPT points out that it is virtually impossible
for small producers to obtain credit from banks. “The system has always favoured
big businesses which produce for export,” says Schneider. “When small farmers
try and get credit, [the banks] place lots of bureaucratic obstacles in the way,
which in reality are deliberately designed to make the farmer give up.”

But some resettlement schemes have been remarkably successful. The MST runs
55 production cooperatives and helps families market their produce, a side of
the organisation which receives little publicity in the local media. Schneider
says that more cooperatives are needed to increase competition with the
large-scale producers and reduce their economic power—in the past, large
farms have been accused of deliberately reducing supply to increase prices.

“What gives us optimism is the fact that society is beginning to understand
the importance of what is going on,” he says. “I don’t believe that the state
would have taken any initiative on its own. Pressure from the CPT and other
movements has forced them to take the issue seriously. Otherwise the government
would not be worried.”

BRAZILIAN mothers who send their children to a crèche increase
their chances of developing pneumonia, according to a study carried out in the
city of Fortaleza. The study found that the risk of catching the disease, one of
the leading causes of child mortality in developing countries, increased more
than fivefold in children sent to crèches.

The authors say this is the first study to show a link between childcare and
pneumonia. “The finding is of significant public health importance for countries
such as Brazil with growing urban populations and an increasing need by mothers
to find work outside the home,” they say.

Acute respiratory infection accounts for around one in three of the 15
million deaths among the under-fives each year in developing countries. Of these
five million deaths, three-quarters are from pneumonia associated with
measles.

Although several studies have been carried out in developing countries to
examine the link between malnutrition and acute respiratory infections, little
attention has been devoted to the link with childcare.

The team, which included researchers from Ceará Federal University,
Pelotas Federal University, Santo Antonio Pediatric hospital and the London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, examined 650 children under the age of
two who were suffering from pneumonia. They were compared with 650 children from
the same neighbourhood who were not ill.

After adjusting for parents’ income and level of education, the team found
that children were 1.58 times as likely to contract pneumonia if their mothers
worked outside the home. Children from families with seven or more children were
2.36 times as likely to contract it. However, the most startling finding was
that attendance at a daycare centre increased the risk by 5.22 times.

“In theory, a well-managed setting should not increase the risk of severe
respiratory infection in a healthy child,” says the report. However, many of
these centres are not well-managed. The report adds: “Information on ways in
which daycare centres might be designed and managed to minimise the risk of
pneumonia is urgently needed.”

Walter Fonseca of the Ceará Federal University says that likely causes
of the high rate of pneumonia in crèches include “a lot of children
confined in a small space, poor hygienic conditions, staff not washing their
hands properly, and failure to recognise the symptoms”.

BRAZIL passed a wide-ranging patents law last month which it believes
will end the frequent allegations that it pirates other nations’ products.
However, scientists say that while the law will appeal to foreign companies, it
will do nothing to stop foreigners from plundering Brazilian know-how,
especially that of its rural populations.

Developed nations have often cast Latin America’s largest country as villain.
For example, it has been accused of large-scale copying of pharmaceuticals. But
local researchers point out that foreigners are equally guilty of exploiting the
country’s natural and intellectual resources, particularly in the Amazon,
without any benefits flowing back to Brazil. This is unlikely to stop.

“What happens when an ethnobotanist, for example, obtains information on how
Indians or rural populations use plants for medicinal purposes and takes it
abroad?” asks Nurit Bensusan of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Brasilia. “How
do you divide the ownership of knowledge? The law does not address this.”

The new law does nothing to stop foreign researchers smuggling genetic
resources out of the country to study abroad. Officially, foreign researchers
can take material out of the country only with a licence from the government’s
scientific research council, the CNPq, and any studies must be carried out in
collaboration with a Brazilian scientist.

According to Bensusan, these rules are rarely enforced and smuggling takes
place on a large scale. “It is almost impossible to control this. You do not
even have to take the whole plant out of the country, you just need an extract,”
she says. Bensusan says a bill has been drawn up by Maria Silva, a senator from
Acre, which tackles the issue but is only in the earliest stages of the long
road through Congress.

Sergio Ferreira, president of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of
Science (SBPC), says that the real problem is that Brazil still has no concrete
plan for making the most of its resources, especially in the Amazon. “There has
to be a strategy for developing the region, not just by the government but by
the universities.”

In other areas, he says, Brazilian industry will not benefit from the patent
law if it produces little in the way of new technology. Researchers at
universities and institutions have always patented their inventions abroad
anyway.

Ferreira believes that Brazil has given away more than it needs to with the
law, which was finalised when President Fernando Cardoso rubber-stamped it late
last month. The law includes a “pipeline clause”, so that products in
development will be included, and it recognises patents on microorganisms that
have been genetically engineered. Brazil has given itself a year to implement
the law. Ferreira says this is not enough.

He also doubts that the government has enough qualified personnel to
administer the law. “It is one thing to have a law, another is to make it work,”
he says.

BRAZILIANS don’t only play the British off the football pitch and drive
racing cars faster, they are also in a different league when it comes to getting
on and off buses.

A report by a transport specialist in Rio de Janeiro says that despite having
to negotiate a turnstile, pay the fare and receive change, Cariocas—the
inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro—get on and off buses faster than Londoners,
who often only have to flash a Travelcard or ticket at the driver.

Ronaldo Balassiano of COPPE, the engineering institute at Rio de Janeiro
Federal University, calculates that Cariocas take an average of 1.85 seconds to
board a bus, compared with 2.4 seconds for Londoners. Balassiano timed Brazilian
buses when they stopped, and divided the length of time they were stationary by
the number of passengers who got on. His London statistics come from the
Transport Research Laboratory and apply to buses without conductors.

The aim of his report was not to show up the British but to offer a detailed
study of Rio’s transport problems—and potential solutions—which, he
says, are applicable to other Latin American cities. Balassiano concluded that
Rio shares the developed world’s problem of spiralling car ownership. The only
way to stem the proliferation of cars on Rio’s streets, he concludes, is more
effective regulation of the companies which run the buses, rather than investing
in underground systems and road building programmes. These simply cause more
congestion and often do not get finished, he says.

Cariocas board buses quickly because the bus system is chaotic, says
Balassiano. To maximise profits, many companies—while officially denying
the practice—pay drivers a bonus according to the number of passengers
they carry. This means they are always in a hurry. “People know that if they
don’t get on quickly, the driver will leave without them,” he says. Buses often
pull away before the last passenger is fully on the bus, he says. Another
tactics to maximise the number of passengers is to speed past stops where there
are only one or two people waiting to get to a busier stop before a rival
driver, he says.

Meanwhile, the forty or so bus companies in Rio form an extremely powerful
lobby and deliberately run fewer buses than required by the city council in
order to maximise profits, says Balassiano.

As a result, anyone who can buy a car does so. Balassiano, who spent four
years studying traffic patterns to produce his report, says that there are now
21 cars to every 100 people in Rio. If economic growth continues at the present
rate the figure will reach 32 by 2005. Unless people can be coaxed onto the
buses, traffic will by then be crawling through the city at an average speed of
9 kilometres an hour. Other Latin American cities, such as Mexico City, Bogota,
Lima, Caracas and SĂŁo Paulo, face a similar prospect.

To make bus travel more attractive, says Balassiano, the companies need to be
closely watched and concessions to run routes, currently renewed automatically,
should be given only if the service is satisfactory. Bus lanes would increase
buses’ average speed from the current 15 kilometres per hour to 20 kilometres
per hour.

“It doesn’t really matter whether you have publicly or privately run
transport. The most important thing is to have coordination,” says Balassiano.
However, he is not confident that even these simple measures will be
implemented. “I’m very sceptical. For example, legislation exists that in 2000
the entire fleet should be on natural gas. But this is simply not going to
łó˛ą±č±č±đ˛Ô.”

BRAZIL has become one of the developing world’s great successes at
reducing population growth—but more by accident than design, says a
demographer at Harvard University. While countries such as India have made
concerted efforts to reduce birth rates, Brazil has had better results without
really trying, says George Martine, a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Center of
Population and Development Studies.

Brazil’s population growth rate has dropped from 2.99 per cent a year between
1951 and 1960 to 1.93 per cent a year between 1981 and 1990, and Brazilian women
now have only 2.7 children on average. Martine says this figure may have fallen
still further since 1990, an achievement that makes it the envy of many other
Third World countries. “Brazil has never had a family planning programme, yet
the decline in the fertility rate has been twice as fast as that of India,” says
Martine.

Martine puts it down to, among other things, soap operas and credit
programmes introduced in the 1970s. Both played an important, albeit indirect,
role in lowering the birth rate. Brazil is one of the world’s biggest producers
of soap operas, or novelas, which first became popular in the late
1960s. Globo, Brazil’s most popular television network, shows three hours of
soaps six nights a week, while three other companies all show at least one hour
a night. Most soaps are based on wealthy characters living the high life in big
cities.

“Although they have never really tried to work in a message towards the
problems of reproduction, they portray middle and upper class values . . . not
many children, different attitudes towards sex, women working,” says Martine.
“They sent this image to all parts of Brazil. It was an indirect effect. It made
people conscious of other patterns of behaviour and other values, which were put
into a very attractive package.”

The credit programmes, in which people could buy small items, such as shoes,
in regular instalments, were also introduced in the 1970s to try to encourage
poorer segments of the population to become consumers. “This led to an enormous
change in consumption patterns and consumption was incompatible with unlimited
procreation,” says Martine.

Martine, who has studied Brazilian population growth for 20 years, expects
the country’s population, currently around 150 million, to stabilise in the
first quarter of the next century at around 250 million.

In January, FIFA’s general secretary, Joseph Blatter, said that bigger
goals were being considered as a way of increasing the number of goals scored.
The idea was that raising the crossbar by 25 centimetres and adding 50
centimetres to the width might be enough to banish the boredom of nil-nil
draws and penalty shoot-outs. But at a meeting in Rio last week, the
federation’s rule-making body the International Board, refused even to
experiment with bigger goals.

Graham Kelly, chief executive of the English FA, who was one of the
delegates, said: “We didn’t give it much time. There was a lot of reaction
around the world to what was no more than a tentative suggestion. The reaction
was such that the board felt it was inappropriate to even consider the matter
in more detail.”

The size of goals has been set at “eight yards wide and eight feet high”
(7.32 metres by 2.44 metres) since 1865. But a report published in 1990 said
the average height of young adult males in Britain has increased since then
from 1.68 metres to 1.78 metres, a factor that has contributed to the decline
in goal-scoring.

However, FIFA prides itself on the fact that football is played in every
corner of the planet, and is a game democratic enough for height not to
matter. Its ruling will certainly be a relief to goalkeepers such as Jorge
Campos, the Mexican international famous for his outrageous fluorescent pink
and luminous green kits, who is only 1.72 metres tall.

Roderick Floud, provost of London Guildhall University and one of the
authors of the study on increasing height, was disappointed by the decision.
He says that FIFA and other sporting bodies will have to come to terms with
the growth of the human race one day. “World populations are all growing
taller, so it must affect sporting ability and sporting rules” he
says.

In 1991 Brazil passed a law aimed at protecting its Indians. It gave Funai, the government’s Indian affairs agency, sweeping powers to create reservations on what it determined was Indian land. The Yanomami reserve in the north of the country attracted international attention. After years trying to fend off miners on their traditional lands, the Yanomami were given a reserve of 1.4 million hectares.

Since then, Funai has proposed 554 Indian reserves of which 247 have been officially demarcated. The remaining 307 are at various stages in the demarcation process, which is only completed when white posts are placed at 200-metre intervals along the border of the reservation.

The new law gives anyone 90 days to voice their objections to reservations that are being created. So the 307 not yet officially demarcated can now be contested. Within days of announcing the measure, the government received its first appeal from a private company complaining about 9000 hectares granted to the Kaiowa tribe in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul two years ago. But the main objectors are likely to be the state governments. The Roraima state government has been strongly opposed to the creation of a reserve for the Macuxi and Tauarepang Indians, while the government of Pará has already voiced opposition to a number of reserves within its borders.

“Indigenous people took 500 years to have their lands demarcated and half of this can now be wiped out in one stroke of a pen,” warns the Catholic church’s council on Indian matters. Pedro Wilson, a deputy with the left-of-centre Workers’ Party, describes the decree as “a mighty weapon for those miners, loggers and armed bandits in general who want to retake the Indian reserves”.

A group of Indians, joined by opposition politicians, protested against the new measure in Brasilia while 400 Indians took four Funai employees hostage in the Alto Rio Guama reserve on the border of Pará and Maranhão states in protest at loggers invading their reserve.

Despite the 1991 decree, the Indians’ position has been anything but healthy. Funai, chronically short of funds, has been unable to stop outsiders invading the reserves, and there have been violent conflicts.

A report published in December by the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies in São Paulo said that a third of Brazil’s Indians suffer from malnutrition. Destruction of the environment had deprived them of their traditional sources of food, forcing them to work for low salaries.

After decades of hunting, Crocodylus intermedius is nearly extinct in the wild. The last count in the Colombian part of the Orinoco basin, in 1976, found only 280 adults in an area of 253 530 square kilometres. Researchers from the Roberto Franco Tropical Biology Research Station in Villavicencio believe that only half that number remain today.

The census will take about a year to complete, says Cristina Ardil, a biologist at the station. The Orinoco crocodile, which can grow to 7 metres, was abundant until the 1930s. But the riverbanks that once teemed with the reptiles are now deserted and local fishermen say they seldom spot one.

Captive breeding is the crocodile’s best hope. In 1991, the Roberto Franco station began a breeding programme with two pairs of crocodiles given to it in the 1970s. Between them the two pairs have produced more than 25 offspring, although the programme suffered a setback in 1993 when power cuts made it difficult to control the temperature in the incubators and more than half the hatchlings died.

However, it is not clear where the project will go next. According to Ardil, the Colombian government is considering allowing crocodiles to be farmed for their skins as Brazil has done with the Paraguayan cayman. But Ardil says this will do nothing to help the species. “This would only benefit a few people,” she says, adding that breeding techniques still need to be perfected. The researchers want to begin releasing animals into the wild, although they admit they do not have any way of protecting them from poachers.

European hunters were widely blamed for almost wiping out the crocodiles between 1920 and 1950. They only lost interest when adults became too difficult to find. However, local hunters carried on killing animals less than 1.5 metres long. Hunting was banned in 1976 but poaching continues. The one piece of good news for the crocodiles, say researchers, is the recent arrival of drug traffickers in the region. Hunters can earn more working for the traffickers than they can killing crocodiles.

For the past two months, Ibama offices around Brazil have been sifting through outstanding cases. They have unearthed 115 000 cases so far, but Ibama believes the total could reach 150 000. Of these, 42 172 offenders have been ordered to pay fines totalling £57 million – only a tenth of which has been collected.

Ibama’s financial director, Zila Soares Ribeiro, said the agency hopes to recoup the remainder by the end of the year. The biggest single fine was £1.78 million, which was slapped on the J. Ferreira timber company in Pará, northern Brazil. Ibama has taken on 150 independent lawyers to cope with offenders who take their cases to court.

The most common crimes are illegal forestry, use of charcoal as fuel by industries, dumping of toxic substances and illegal mining. The largest number of cases were in the states of Rondonia and Pará, both on the edge of the Amazon basin.

Environmentalists have often criticised Brazil for failing to enforce its legislation. “Until now, people have been fined, not paid and nothing has happened to them,” admits Ribeiro. “We want the public to know that when they damage the environment, they will be penalised.”

Ribeiro says that 60 per cent of the money raised by the campaign will pay for more inspectors and better equipment for Ibama. Most of the remainder will be spent on running the country’s beleaguered national parks.