COLUMN ONE : Problems Flow Into Amazon : While world concern focuses on Brazil, the headwater areas of the Andes face even more threatening devastation.

ATAHUALPA, Ecuador —  Like the waters cascading from the Andes Mountains, problems and hopes are pouring downstream into the Amazon jungle basin from the highlands that give life to the world’s mightiest river.

All along an immense crescent from Venezuela through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, covering a distance of more than 3,000 miles, the Amazon finds its strength. Nearly one-third of the Amazon Basin lies in the rim of Latin American countries surrounding Brazil.

While world concern homes in on Brazil’s struggles over the development and conservation of its rain forests, the countries whose waters feed the river are attempting, more quietly, to cope with equally daunting dilemmas.

Indeed, in several ways the array of problems facing the headwaters of the Amazon is more complex, and more threatening, than in Brazil itself.

While the Brazilian settler’s trek westward from the Atlantic can mean a 2,000-mile journey, the reverse migration from the Pacific side of the continent rarely is longer than a few hundred miles. With limited open space and exploding populations, these poor, indebted nations see their Amazon interior as an escape valve and a potential economic salvation.

But the Andes plunge down into jungle so suddenly--with elevation changes of 12,000 feet or more within a few dozen miles--that problems like erosion and river-silting from deforestation take on frightening proportions.

Conversations with dozens of officials, scientists and residents in the region underscore a web of crises at the headwaters: The rush to develop oil reserves has opened up hundreds of miles of roads, bringing a crush of settlers and land speculation; illegal coca fields on steep hillside jungles in Peru and Bolivia feed erosion, and cocaine processing pollutes rivers with tons of illegal chemicals; restive native Indians are chafing over relentless encroachment, and deforestation is proceeding at a dizzying pace.

The conflicts result in part from the delicate landscape in the countries where the Amazon is born. Tiny highland brooks form the river’s most tender veins. The headwaters then plummet down jagged canyons through fragile cloud forests that are among the world’s wettest climates and richest ecosystems.

The waters already have swelled into powerful rivers by the time they descend from the eastern Andes slopes into tropical rain forest--as much as 1,000 miles before joining the Amazon’s main artery in the relatively flat jungle across the border in Brazil.

The mountains feed the rivers a rich diet of minerals, which leach into the soils downstream on the lowland river banks during flooding. That makes the land relatively attractive for farmer-settlers, in contrast to the often poorer jungle soils in Brazil. The geography also has left deposits of oil, gold and other riches in the jungles at the foot of the mountains--all magnets for development.

With a hodgepodge of sometimes conflicting and often ill-enforced policies in hand, governments surrounding Brazil are attempting to control the rapid colonization and exploitation of their Amazon regions. At the same time, their awareness of ecological hazards is haltingly taking hold.

Environmentalists, a growing force in these countries, are waving danger flags. They are also moderating their anti-development stance into a more realistic approach of sensible, controlled development.

“The crises in the economy and the environment are closely linked here, and people are beginning to realize it,” said Antonio Brack Egg, a leading Peruvian ecologist. “We have abused, looted our resources to a terrible degree. We have cleared 8.5 million hectares (21 million acres) of the Amazon in Peru, and 6 million hectares are abandoned. We must make that land productive instead of clearing more. What we desperately lack is planning.”

Peru and Ecuador face the gravest threats. Peru has 16% of the basin, the largest outside Brazil, and the basin makes up 60% of Peru’s territory. Roughly 10% of the 300,000 square miles of the Peruvian basin has been cleared of forest.

Ecuador, though far smaller than Peru and containing just 2% of the basin, confronts a comparatively greater array of pressures, in part because its population density and growth rate are the highest in the region. In search of space and a future, its people eye the vast expanse of green below the mountains. Only about half of the Ecuadorean basin remains forested.

Road Was Lacking

Five years ago, there was no road along the south bank of the Napo River, one of Ecuador’s major Amazon tributaries. Jungle native families of the Huarani and the Quijos Quichua tribes hunted and farmed a few acres, and colonists--usually poor Indians themselves from the Andes highlands--pushed downriver from Puerto Napo, their progress slowed by the lack of transport other than outboard-powered dugout canoes.

When the 25-mile dirt road was opened from Puerto Napo to Ahuano, hundreds more settlers followed. They were ceded 125-acre tracts by the colonization program. The Huarani fled to the interior, and the Quijos Quichua quickly sought to legalize their traditional holdings, with mixed success.

The result is a sudden patchwork of bare-bone farms, reached by lumbering buses that come three times a day. Loggers are felling 2-foot-diameter hardwood trees. Thousands of acres of virgin rain forest have disappeared.

Francisco Tapuy, a native who runs the 50-pupil primary school in the newly constituted village of Atahualpa, said, “The colonists have brought more advanced agricultural techniques, which is positive, but they also teach us crime, social conflict. They exploit, they take the land by force, they don’t pay. The natives know how to exist on the land without destroying it.”

He said the 300 families, mostly natives, carefully chose the name for their town: Atahualpa was the 17th-Century Inca leader who resisted capture by the Spanish colonists in Peru.

“There is no room here for more colonists,” Tapuy said. “We are already seeing some erosion.”

He pointed to a bare patch on a cleared hillside where a landslide had occurred. “Civilization is arriving,” he said.

Many Got Land Titles

Between 1964 and 1982, 12,838 settlers and 4,343 natives received land titles in the Ecuadorean Amazon. Many more applications, which usually take years to process, are in the works.

A major source of anger for the natives, and for conservationists and planners in Quito, the capital, is the principle that underlies the development program. The law once required settlers to clear 80% of their land in two years to win ownership. The rule has been eased, but the concept still prevails in practice. Thus, the natives who use the forest without cutting it down are penalized, while settlers who arrive and clear land for farming are awarded title more easily.

Further encouraging deforestation is the timber-harvesting policy, which determines royalties on the amount of wood actually cut, rather than the harvestable volume on a given tract.

Both the land title and timber policies “have had a devastating impact on tropical forests in the provinces of northwest and Amazonian Ecuador,” said a study conducted for the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). Although environmental laws are numerous, “the problem in Ecuador is an inconsistent and uncoordinated application. . . . The result is a myriad of legal conflicts brought on by conflicting jurisdictions, ill-defined policies, unclear objectives and the failure to systematically apply even the best of environmental laws.”

Flavio Coello of the forestry protection program in the Agriculture Ministry said land speculators buy up tracts, sell the logging rights and report figures far below what they actually cut.

“For lack of a clear political policy, we haven’t been able to stop it,” he said. “The ownership of land in this country is in chaos.”

Coello has just four park guards to protect the entire Yasuni National Park, which covers 2.5 million acres in the Amazon basin. “To try to enforce control there would be like trying to empty the sea,” he said.

Coello said colonization has already begun along the edges of Yasuni, but he added: “We can’t blame the colonists with their 50 hectares. The fault lies with the government and its failure to impose order. It’s as if they are in a trance.”

Ecuador’s Amazon boom coincided with the discovery and exploitation of major oil reserves in the early 1970s, and few people suggest that an impoverished country can or should ignore such a vital source of income, even in national parks.

Coello, however, expressed anger at the government oil company and several foreign firms, including Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum, whose exploration block includes a corner of Yasuni Park. He said the firms have refused requests to provide minimal assistance to pay for guards and research that would prevent oil exploration from leading to deforestation.

In contrast, he said, Conoco has agreed to provide substantial aid after suffering international criticism for its planned road into Yasuni for oil production.

David Neill of the Missouri Botanical Garden, who has worked in Ecuador’s jungles for four years, said that Conoco, Union Oil of California and Petro Canada all are supporting scientific research during their oil exploration, but others have not come forward to help.

Fernando Ortiz, an ecologist who advises AID, estimated that about 300 miles of roads have been built since the early 1970s, mostly for jungle oil production, “without consideration of Indian interests, the environment, anything.”

Roads are far easier to build in jungle areas nearer the Andes than Brazil because the rivers bring down gravel deposits needed to keep the roads from becoming impassable. Farther downstream, gravel is unavailable, and it must be hauled in for road-building at high cost. So road development and colonization have been easier near the headwaters of the Amazon.

Deforestation is occurring in Ecuador at a rate of 2.3% a year, costing up to 850,000 acres a year, including 187,500 acres of virgin forest, according to the study done for AID.

For those charged with development in the region, however, roads are the solution. Asked to name the No. 1 priority for the Napo River area, land title office secretary Juan Leonardo Mera said: “Highways. This is the fundamental basis of growth. With roads, the people work harder, plant more yuca, coffee, and the costs drop because they can take out their products.”

The land title office, one of six in the Amazon, approves about 200 new titles a year. Of the total 1.43 million acres in its area, the office has carved up 834,000 for development, while 307,000 acres are set aside as protected zones.

Ivan Romo, an Agriculture Ministry land analyst, said the timber industry, not the small colonist, is the real villain in deforestation.

“They can clear 50 acres in two months, and they have no programs of forestation. Then the destruction starts, the soil weakens and erosion sets in.”

Romo’s department recently began a program to provide residents with seedlings to reforest fields.

Army Takes Role

Hugo Ramiro Landazuri, governor of Napo province, said the government is using the army at checkpoints to control colonization, stop land speculation and reduce frictions between natives and settlers. The Napo region, with a total population approaching 300,000, has grown so fast that it was split into two provinces this year: Napo itself, with the capital at Tena, and Sucumbios to the north, with the capital in the oil town of Lago Agrio.

The governor said he opposes further colonization, preferring to focus on better use of the land already cleared. “We also have hydroelectric potential (and) we have marble and gold. These can be developed carefully.

“The natives believe that the whites and mestizos (mixed-race people) are invading and taking their land,” he said. “But it is also necessary that the poor Ecuadoreans from the highlands have a chance to thrive. We are a small country, and we need to grow.”

For the natives, such talk merely suggests further encroachment. Ruben Calapucha, a 28-year-old leader of the provincial Indian federation representing about 25,000 natives in the Napo area, reminded a visitor: “The land is our culture, our essence, our history, our survival.”

The native group is less concerned about colonists than the land agency and large companies. “We say that if a foreign company comes in and takes away our riches, then we at least want those companies to meet the many needs of these communities--putting up schools, community centers, health clinics. We want the government to make these things part of the contract, Calapucha said.”

Even the save-the-Amazon movement has indirectly hurt the natives, Calapucha said. “They say this is the lung of the world, so they have created reserves where they won’t give us titles. But we have been here for generations!”

The population in the Amazon areas of Peru and Ecuador has surged at nearly double the national rate in the last 15 years, with the greatest growth right at the foot of the Andes and on the slopes of the mountains. That growth, and the discovery of oil in the late 1960s in both countries, nourished the off-and-on dream of conquering the jungle.

One of the primary architects of the dream was former Peruvian President Fernando Belaunde Terry, who envisioned a highway, never built, through the western Amazon from Colombia to Paraguay. The concept reflected the importance of the Amazon to the countries whose mountains create it.

Much of Belaunde’s road would have passed through highland jungle and cloud forest on the slopes of the Andes. One portion of the road was built, through Peru’s Upper Huallaga Valley, with disastrous consequences.

During a recent flight over the valley in a police helicopter, a visitor saw hundreds of plumes of smoke rising from the floor and precipices as farmers cleared new fields. If the past pattern holds, much of the space will be devoted to coca fields.

The Upper Huallaga is the largest single source of the leaf used to make cocaine. Estimates of coca plantations there range as high as 450,000 acres, by far the largest crop in the Peruvian Amazon. Because it is illegal, although largely unmolested, coca is grown on the least suitable terrain, according to Marc J. Dourojeanni, a professor at the National Agrarian University in Lima.

Bolivia, which contains about 12% of the Amazon basin, is the No. 2 coca producer after Peru, with much of its uplands jungle similarly affected. Colombia is a far smaller coca grower and under less jungle settlement pressure, but it has major cocaine-refining operations.

Dourojeanni said in a report that coca fields alone may have caused 10% of Peru’s deforestation in the Amazon in this century.

“Ecologically, coca is located in some of the most fragile life zones of the country, some of which are the least apt for agriculture,” he wrote. Coca is grown between 2,000 and 6,500 feet on unterraced hills, extremely susceptible to erosion. Some erosion is gradual, with up to 300 metric tons of soil washed away each year per 2.5 acres. Some is catastrophic.

Fatal Landslides

Deadly landslides kill dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of people each year in Peru’s valleys, often blocking roads for days.

Coca growers use herbicides that wash into rivers, but far worse is the discharge of chemicals used in the refining process--as much as 57 million liters of kerosene and 32 million liters of sulfuric acid per year in Peru.

Two national forests and several parks have been partially invaded by coca.

Dourojeanni noted that coca is being adapted to grow at lower altitudes, and new road construction could “disperse the coca growers through the entire Amazon region,” just as the construction of the Jungle Highway in the Upper Huallaga by Belaunde brought coca to that area.

As in Ecuador, Peruvian environmentalists blame conflicting policies and lack of government control. And many insist that the consequences of problems at the origins of the Amazon threaten its entire course to the Atlantic.

“People are always harping about the lowland jungle and Brazil, but the cloud forests are twice as important,” said Tony Luscombe, an American ecologist who has lived in Peru for years. “When you take off the trees, you start the erosion, which causes flash floods and clogs the rivers. Things are happening here with a vengeance, and nobody’s raising a voice.”

Luscombe said oil companies are already having trouble moving materials by barge in some areas because silting from erosion had reduced river depths.

“The government is giving incentives to get people roaring off into the jungle to avoid having to solve the problems in the sierra (mountains), where they originate,” he said.

Jorge Caillaux Zazzali, president of the Peruvian Society of Environmental Law, complained that the Amazon Treaty signed by countries in the region has merely become a device to fight off industrialized countries who oppose Amazon destruction. He said the treaty needs teeth imposing obligations on each member and “forming the basis for planned and balanced development.”

If Peru pollutes upstream and thus hurts Brazil, the Brazilian government should be empowered under the treaty to force a response, he said.

Gustavo Suarez, technical director of Peru’s Foundation for the Conservation of Nature, said that while Peru has taken steps to protect its forests through a national plan for sustained use, a contradictory law was passed in January pushing colonization and industrial development of the lowland jungle.

Once again, Suarez said, the government has ignored the repeatedly demonstrated fact that the paltry soils are unsuitable for cattle ranching and monoculture, or single-crop farming. With the new policy, “it is very probable that new areas will be opened for the cultivation of coca and drug-trafficking, especially after the colonists encounter impoverished soils and cannot sustain themselves any other way.”

More recently, to the relief of the environmental lobby, the government has set up a commission, including non-government and native groups, to draft a broader strategy for Amazon development.

In the far southeastern corner of Peru, the Madre de Dios River region contains some of the richest and most diverse virgin rain forests of the Amazon. In the first expanse of flat jungle after the mountains and hills have subsided, immense trees form a canopy so thick that no photographs can be taken in the constant dusk below.

Tree roots branch out like flukes 30 feet from the trunks of the largest trees. Native people know how to drink water from tree fruit and use wood chips as insect repellent. On the grounds of the riverside Cuzco Amazonico Lodge, an estimated 120 mammals roam, and one visiting scientist counted eight species of bats.

Jose Dominguez, the lodge manager for the last 10 years, said growing eco-tourism has helped encourage protection of the Amazon by generating badly needed foreign income. But he worries about settlers who are pushing up against his borders. And he worries about the gold dredgers now appearing on the river.

“Maybe I won’t be alive, but someday. . . . “

Dominguez trailed off, leaving unspoken his fears for the future.