Brazilian Police Seize 500 Truckloads of Hardwood

Sao Paulo, Brazil, February 25, 2008-- Brazilian federal police seized more than 500 truckloads of illegally cut hardwood that were abandoned last week when rioting residents and loggers drove out environmental authorities.

About 450 officers retook the town of Tailandia on Saturday, patrolling on horseback and in pick-up trucks and standing guard outside sawmills.

At least 2,000 residents burned tyres, blocked roads and forced Environmental Protection Agency workers to flee the area last Tuesday. The force sent in at the weekend allowed the seizure of the wood to resume while preventing any new violence, federal police officer Fernando Alberto Silva said.

Huge trunks of precious hardwood were loaded on to flatbed trucks to be taken away and auctioned off by the government, which plans to spend the proceeds on rain-forest protection. So much wood was seized that it will take authorities nearly three weeks to cart it all away.

The seizure is part of a larger government push to prevent an apparent rise in illegal logging and burning that threatens to reverse three successive years of declines in deforestation in the Amazon.

Many of the rioters work in the area's sawmills, which could suffer as a result of state efforts to audit companies and mills suspected of illegal logging, the Environmental Protection Agency said.

A January report indicated as much as 2,700 square miles of rain forest were cleared between August and December 2007. At that pace, Brazil would lose 5,790 square miles of forest during the year ending in August 2008, a 34 per cent increase over the previous 12-month period.