Updates:

- Wednesday 26th September:

- each team member will act as a liasion to at least one other team;
we will review and revise all of the other teams' plans to verify
social and economic feasibility.
our team decided on who the liasons to other teams were:
                                          
Nick: Water and Air
Solomon: Alternative Development Programmes
Nina: Land
Julie: Flora and Fauna
Christina: Systems interaction
Angel: PR, legal and political

PLAN:
-we have to collaborate with other teams at least once every two weeks to help
maintain strategies that are economically and socially feasible

-develop strategies to maintain or improve local economic and social
stability and counteract possible adjustments inherent to the Mission
plan.

-analyze the present economic status as well as possible ramifications
of the projects on the region, both on a local scale, and in a global
context.

-analyze the present social conditions as well as possible
ramifications of the projects on Amazonian society.


-we also decided that we were going to split are team into smaller sections dealing with certain aspects of socio-economic problems regarding the Amazon project.
My section is Financing and Budgeting, the main purpose is to search for potential sources of funding for the project, and also to decide on how to allocate financial resources to individual teams.

-Wednesday 3rd October:

-we decided to do research on specific regions of the Amazon:
         -find out about the social patterns of the different people related to the Amazon Basin.
we require this information to help us decide whether plans in a region would be socially acceptable, or maybe even desirable.

-we decided that a plan in a tree diagram would help structure our project, we would have a guideline to follow and we could see clearly what areas were related to each other.

-learn about the economy mainly of Brazil and perhaps expand that to other countries containing areas of the Amazon, and maybe expand that even further to investigate other economies that may be able to support the project.

-Wednesday 23rd October:

Possible sources of funding:

The World Bank :

The World Bank has funded many preservation and conservation projects in the past including many regarding the Amazon Basin. A recent project involves the Brazilian government and the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) which is supposed to be the first phase of a 10 year long project. The project consists of creating 62 million acres of new parks and reservesin the Amazon. The funding for this project was 30 million dollars.

Figures such as these can give us rough estimates of the amount of funds we can raise, much of the budget may have to come from borrowing in which we will need to plan long term projects that will give us a steady inflow of money to pay back the loans and also feed money back into our project. The problem with using figures are that the funding of the projects vary widely, obviously dependent on the size of the project. As our project is on a large scale involving much of the Amazon, the funding required would be much more than a project like the one I mentioned. Our project includes many smaller projects that may require a lot of money and not have much impact on preserving the Amazon and some that may be simple yet effective, so as the socio-economic group we have to see if proposed plans are economically and socially acceptable. One of our main focuses now are on tourism.

WWF :
WWF have been working on preserving the Amazon for 30 years, mainly working with preserving animals but supports various different projects including protecting birds, prevention of illegal logging, etc.

UN :
The United Nations establishes relations between countries and may therefore be a strong medium for communication with other countries, UN can give aid to our project and help promote our cause.

MEDC's:
Developed countries such as the US may offer support to preserving the Amazon.

Multi-national corporations:
Multi-million dollar corporations may take up projects in the Amazon where they may benefit and the forest benefits from some of the profits made, examples could include pharmaceutical companies, the problem with this is that researching and developing medicine requires a lot of time.

Tourism:
Tourism is one of our main focuses at the moment, obviously focusing on eco-tourism where we try to minimise the damage done to the forest. For this we would need some enforcement to make sure there aren't too many tourists in the same area and that they don't ruin nature. If we can establish sites nearer the outside of the Amazon, perhaps near a city which would attract more tourists, we could effectively help the forest as well indirectly. Locals living near by would get benefits from selling souvenirs and providing services to the tourists which would motivate them to preserve the forest because they have to keep the area in pristine condition in order to attract more tourists and therefore increase their personal income. However, it would be hard to guarantee that this happens, so I think we need to research into current eco-tourism sites to compare with our strategy.

Monday 28th October:
Christina and I are working on finding funds for the project, we decided to split up looking into large organisations that may be able to sponsor our project. My job is to look at WWF, Green Peace, Kfw of Germany (bank that has previously funded conservation projects) and the Brazilian Central Bank while Christina looks at the World Bank, including GEF and IMF and large pharmaceutical firms that may be able to make use of the rich resources in the Amazon and therefore return some profits back into the preservation project. With Nina's help, we also managed to find links to many useful and informative sites of organisations focussed on conservation of forests that may be able to provide funds for us:

Greenpeace : Greenpeace is a non-profit organisation, with a presence in 40 countries across Europe, America, Asia and the Pacific. To maintain its independence, Greenpeace does not accept donations from governments or corporations but relies on contributions from individual supporters and foundation grants. As a global organisation, Greenpeace focuses on the the most crucial worldwide threats to our planet's biodiversity and environment including the Amazon. I have contacted Greenpeace asking them hypothetically whether they would fund a project like our own. Here's the copy of the email I sent out:

To whom it may concern:
I am a freshman at MIT, I am currently taking a class that focuses on designing a project to preserve the Amazon, we split into ten different teams focussing on different aspects of the project. I am in the economic and social team, which includes finding funds for the project and allocating the funds to each project other groups come up with. I am writing to ask whether Greenpeace would support a project such as ours (hypothetically speaking)? And if so, in what way? And how much do you sponsor large-scale projects like ours that include many smaller sub-projects such as teaching natives how to farm in a more effective and preservative manner? Do you work in conjunction with other organisations such as WWF?
Our home webpage is:

http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2006/kvh/index.html

From the homepage, there are links to team websites and personal websites which include a lot more detail on our project. Thank you for your time and I look forward to your reply.

Yours sincerely,
Nick Chan

I have also contacted the World Bank and WWF and I will post up replies on my website as soon as I can.

"WWF-Brazil has been working very hard to preserve Brazil's natural wealth, while searching for an adequate and balanced growth model for the country. However, since it has no precise revenue source, the organization still depends on donations and contributions from companies or individuals to guarantee the implementation of actions and projects."
Quoting from WWF-Brazil, this shows that it may not be possible for WWF to provide aid directly to our project.

From the sources I've read, I can conclude that a lot of the funds for our project would have to come from the private sector because conservational organisations require funds themselves to fund their own projects. However, these organisations can act as contacts to the private sector, for example: Bank of America, Motorola and Alcan are partners with WWF, so it would be easier to establish close contacts with these multi-national firms if we go through WWF. The government would not be able to offer much aid financially as they were $251 billion in debt at the end of 2001 meaning that the debt would be larger now.

To find out about how much money we could get, we have to look at past projects that have about the same scale as our project, an example could be the pilot program set up in 1992. The budget for this program was $340 million, which is significantly more than the $30 million Amazon Region Protected Areas Project which commenced only earlier this year. The scale of our project is more similar to the pilot program which includes many sub-projects that could cost as much as the Amazon Region Protected Areas Project. Another large scale project is the Protected Areas in the Amazon project (ARPA)
This project had an initial stage that costed $68.5 million and is still in progress at the moment, it began in 1998 and is predicted to end in 2012.


Wednesday 6th November
I received replies this week from Nike, Kodak and Duracell but none were promising. They all said that they receive too many e-mails similar to the one I sent them so they cannot sponsor or help our project in anyway. Here is one of the replies:

Dear Mr. Chan:

We regularly receive interesting and attractive opportunities for
giving.  Although we wish it were otherwise, we simply cannot support
all of them due to limited and fixed budgets, and we must decline your
request.  Please understand that our decision does not in any way
reflect on the merits of your proposal, but rather on the number of
requests we receive.

Please visit the Kodak home page and click on the "About Kodak" link to
visit a web page about Kodak Community Relations and Contributions.
More information is provided there, as well as a review of what Kodak is
doing currently.  You will also find an address if you want to contact
us for more specific information.

We appreciate your interest and the chance to comment.

Sincerely,

Michele R.
Kodak Environmental Services
Eastman Kodak Company

From replies similar to these, I think it would be very difficult to find a company that will be willing to sponsor as we haven't established firm plans yet. I think we have to consider planning our budget by comparing our projects to past projects. Or maybe if we become a sub-branch of a larger project and focus more on certain aspects of preserving the Amazon, our budget would be determined and funded by the larger project's sponsors. This has been considered in our meeting last friday but nothing has been decided yet. A project sponsored by Raytheon is a very large scale project which could theoretically use our team (whole of M2006) for their project, we could work on and try to improve what they've been working on or add something new to the project.

Our team job this week is to investigate and summarise the following elements of Brazil:

national economic health - sol
exports from brazil -sol
major corporations involved in extraction - nick
production - angel
consumption - nick
imports -christina
workforce - angel
(how all this affects amazon)

social situation in amazon as opposed to rest of country:
tribes - nina
landless farmers -julie
plantations -julie
anybody else in the amazon - nina

include recent events (for each category)
The names next to each category is the person assigned to invesitgate it.

Wednesday 13th November

Consumption:
In R$, the final consumption in 2000 was 868 061 million which is over 10% increase from 783 277 million in 1999. But considering that the population of Brazil is 160 million, an annual consumption of  under R$5000 per capita p.a. which is about R$13.50 per day (around US$4.00): not a lot compared to American expenditure. Brazilians mostly consume everyday products, such as basic food and drink like bread. Consumption of tribes within the Amazon are not accounted for in the statistics because they grow and eat their own food and trade between tribes are not accounted for either. "Most Brazilians are used to two large meals - lunch and dinner. Breakfast is quick and light. A typical diet includes meat, vegetables, fruit, rice, beans and deserts. Brazilians enjoy eating and are very proud of their food." "Important aspects of Brazilian social life include dancing, drinking in a cafe or eating out." ( http://afsweb.afs.org/HongKong.nsf/pages/1bra ) It is difficult to find statistics for consumption so these quotes act as examples for what Brazilians consume.


Major corporations involved in extraction:
Any company incorporated under Brazilian law can be authorised for exploration and a mining concession. So it is not difficult for corporations to get mining rights in Brazil which ruins the forest. There are major corporations involved in mining iron ore (Ivai), gold (Golden Palm Resources) and the largest of all: copper. Corporations involved with mining copper are Anglo American plc, Caraiba Metais SA, Cia Braileira do Cobre, CVRD, Mineracao Santa Elina, Rio Tinto in five locations: Camaqua, Chapada, Fortaleza, Jaguarari and Salobo.