By Andrei Khalip RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Brazil's Catholic bishops have called on the government to stop stoking "predatory" development in the Amazon region, which they say causes destruction of the world's largest rain forest. "Our main concern is that the government is absent and not acting where it should," Dom Orani Joao Tempesta, Archbishop of Belem and commission head of the influential Brazilian National Bishops' Council, or CNBB, told Reuters on Thursday. "The church is not against development, but it opposes development that deprives populations of their future. We have to nurture respect for nature," he said. The CNBB annual Fraternity Campaign began debates on Thursday near Belem in the Amazon on how better protect the region. A CNBB statement said the Fraternity Campaign for the Amazon was "a call for state and society to stop financing and tolerating a predatory model of development". The bishops said the government, via its recently restored Sudam Amazon development agency, was giving tax and other incentives for farming, including soybean cultivation, in the region, without monitoring its expansion. "The soy planting is causing the same devastating effect as did the spread of big commercial ranching in the 1960s and 1980s," the Council's head, Dom Odilo Scherer, was quoted as saying in O Globo newspaper. He called on the government to strictly control the expansion of farmland "so that measures are no longer taken after the problem is already there, after the forest is felled and burned." Land-clearing in the Amazon had surged after Lula took office in 2003 largely because booming world demand for Brazilian commodities led ranchers to graze more cattle, farmers to plant more soy and loggers to fell more trees. Environmentalists have also blasted the government for funding a paved highway aimed at boosting soy shipments from the region. They fear the road will hasten the destruction of the forest by loggers, ranchers, soy farmers and squatters. The government says Amazon deforestation dropped by about a third between August 2005 and July 2006 from a year earlier. In 2005, forests in an area the size of Israel or Wales were felled. Separately on Thursday, a bishop from Bahia state, Dom Luiz Flavio Cappio, who staged an 11-day hunger strike in 2005 over government's controversial plans to change the course of the Sao Francisco river, handed a letter to presidency calling for a public debate on the subject. He called the government's stance "authoritarian," saying it had not consulted the locals. The irrigation project, designed to bring water to arid lands in Brazil's northeast and reduce poverty there, has been stalled after several court injunctions, but remains on the government's agenda.
