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The Amazon Needs More Local Scientists |
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By Mario Osava*
Foreign experts conduct most of the scientific studies of this vast and biologically rich region. Brazil is trying to triple the number of local graduate students in related fields by 2010.
RIO DE JANEIRO - The Amazon, which concentrates the world's greatest biodiversity and comprises 60 percent of Brazil's territory, receives just over two percent of the country's already scarce investment in scientific research.
So it should come as no surprise that only 36.9 percent of the scientific articles about the vast, green region are written by Brazilians, while the rest come from foreign scientists, according to a statistical study by Adalberto Val, a biologist with INPA, the national Amazon research institute.
Val studied the 1,026 texts in the periodicals Internet portal of CAPES, the coordinating agency for post-graduate studies in Brazil.
His research found that the United States leads the way in production of scientific knowledge about the Amazon, with 41.6 percent of all articles, of which only a few were based on collaborative studies with Brazilian scientists.
The South American giant does not even have the human resources necessary for "comprehending, processing and taking ownership" of the knowledge produced by foreign research and readily available, laments Val, who urges training and establishing Brazilian scientists in and around the Amazon region.
Local scientific knowledge is key for making decisions about an area so rich in natural resources that are much desired on the international market, he said.
"Today sovereignty is exercised more with information than with weapons. Our control over the Amazon is diminished if we aren't well informed of what exists there, the relationships of its plants and animals with their surroundings," stressed Val.
Putting down roots of highly qualified Brazilian human resources in the Amazon requires a turn-around in attitudes. The region is home to only three percent of the 1,820 post-graduate programs registered by CAPES.
In addition to training scientists and technicians, it is essential for them to live in the Amazon area to "interact with local society" and promote sustainable development, because it is not enough to spend a few months or years there collecting data for a thesis, according to Val. Of the 379 Brazilian articles on the Amazon registered, fewer than half were produced by Amazonian institutions.
Brazil has some 50,000 people with PhDs, but only about a thousand do work in the Amazon, according to CAPES.
A new program, "Accelerate Amazonia", aims to tackle this deficit, tripling the number of post-graduate students in the region by 2010, with resources earmarked for expanding the number of laboratories and scholarships.
In addition to local post-graduate courses, the program will encourage researchers to move to the Amazon and will foment scientific cooperation with other parts of Brazil and other countries. The number of people with doctorates who live in the Amazon area must increase at a rate much higher than the rest of the country, contrary to what has been occurring, José Fernandes Lima, CAPES program director, told Tierramérica.
The shortage of Amazon research is even more serious in the other Amazonian countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Surinam and Venezuela.
Brazil is responsible for 44 percent of Latin America's scientific production, according to Lima. In the articles that Val studied, he estimates that less than 10 percent were authored by scientists from the seven countries that share the Amazon with Brazil.
But according to Dennis del Castillo, president of the Peruvian government's Amazon research institute, IIAP, these statistics are not an exact reflections of the accumulated scientific knowledge in the region.
The low number of such publications by Amazonian countries is a function of "the custom of our researches to produce and store great quantities of grey information," which they don't release as scientific articles, "or they take too much time" in doing so, said the expert.
Furthermore, he added, there are few scientific journals in Spanish or Portuguese, and investments in science are scant.
In the United States, in addition to greater investment, "the researcher who does not publish is simply pushed out of the system," while in the Amazonian and Andean countries, publication of scientific articles is not seen as a measure of productivity, said Del Castillo by way of comparison.
In his opinion, it is important to attract scientists, offering them good working conditions and an interesting life, but also facilitating quality studies for "local youths with a scientific vocation, who know their biophysical surroundings and the customs of their peoples."
Another expert, Adalberto Verissimo, agrees that the lack of zeal to publish is a cultural trait, but that there is also a lack of stimulus to overcome the shortage of Brazilians and other Latin Americans in the field.
"There is a lot of specialized knowledge" that will only become useful and "exist as science" after it is published, which underscores the need for selection and systematization of information, said Verissimo, an agronomist with the non-governmental Institute of Man and the Environment in the Amazon, and author of more than 80 articles on the region.
* Mario Osava is an IPS correspondent.
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