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Demand for biofuels is driving the destruction of Brazil's cerrado
Demand for biofuels is driving the destruction of Brazil's cerrado,
one of the planet's most biodiverse savanna ecosystems.
The cerrado, wooded grassland in Brazil that once covered an area
half the size of Europe, is fast being transformed into croplands to
meet rising demand for soybeans, sugarcane, and cattle. The cerrado
is now disappearing more than twice as the rate as the neighboring
Amazon rainforest, according to a Brazilian expert on the savanna
ecosystem.
"The Cerrado was pretty much intact until the 60s, when most of the
relevant economic activity was the cattle ranching," Dr. Ricardo
Machado, author of a recent Conservation International (CI) study on
the cerrado, told mongabay.com. "During the 70s, when new
technologies and new varieties of plants (corn, soybean, rice,
wheat, eucalyptus, and grasses for livestock) where introduced the
Cerrado became an important region for the Brazilian agribusiness.
More and more native areas were cleared to be converted for planted
pastures (using African grasses) or croplands. The natural
vegetation removed was converted to charcoal to be used by the steel
industry."
Machado estimates that the area of cerrado of a percentage of its
original 204 million hectares in extent, has fallen from around 73
percent in 1985 to around 43 percent in 2004. He believes that the
area occupied by pastures and croplands has likely increased since
then, given the substantial rise in Brazil's agricultural production
and land prices, and pegs annual loss at 2.2 million hectares every
year, or about 1.1 percent of the remaining cerrado. By comparison,
Brazil's Amazon rainforest lost about 10.7 million hectares between
2002 and 2006, 2.1 million hectares or about 0.5 percent per year.
Scientists say conversion of the cerrado for large-scale soybean
farms, sugar plantations and cattle pasture is indirectly fueling
deforestation in the rainforest, by pushing small-scale farmers and
land speculators deeper into forest areas while spurring road and
infrastructure development.
"Soybean farms cause some forest clearing directly. But they have a
much greater impact on deforestation by consuming cleared land,
savanna, and transitional forests, thereby pushing ranchers and
slash-and-burn farmers ever deeper into the forest frontier," said
Philip Fearnside, a researcher at the National Institute for
Research in the Amazon in Manaus, Brazil. "Soybean farming also
provides a key economic and political impetus for new highways and
infrastructure projects, which accelerate deforestation by other
actors."
William F. Laurance, president of the Association for Tropical
Biology and Conservation (ATBC) and a senior staff scientist at the
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, agrees.
"Soy farming is having a huge impact in the Amazon right now, for
three reasons," Laurance told mongabay.com. "First, industrial soy
farmers are themselves clearing a lot of forest. Second, soy farmers
are buying up large expanses of cleared land from slash-and-burn
farmers and cattle ranchers, and the displaced farmers and ranchers
often just move further out into the forest, maintaining a lot of
pressure on frontier areas. Finally, the soy farmers are a very
powerful political lobby that is pushing for major expansion of
roads, highways, river-channelization projects, and other
transportation that will criss-cross large expanses of the Amazon.
This infrastructure is acting like Pandora's box—it is opening up
the frontier to spontaneous, unplanned colonization and exploitation
by ranchers, farmers, hunters, and illegal gold miners."
Dr. Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center says that the
growing demand for corn ethanol means that more corn and less soy is
being planted in the United States. Brazil, the world's largest
producer of soybeans, is more than making up for shortfall, by
clearing new land for soy and sugar cultivation.
"We see soy prices going up partly because less soy is being grown
in the U.S. as corn expands to meet the surging demand for the
emerging ethanol industry," Nepstad told mongabay.com. "Similarly as
sugar cane expands in southern Brazil, soy production is heading
northward, encroaching on the Amazon."
Nepstad expects land-clearing to accelerate as Western countries
continue to shift towards ethanol and soy-based biodiesel. For
example, despite a 51-cent-per-gallon subsidy for American corn
ethanol producers and a 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported
ethanol, the U.S. imported about 500 million gallons — 73 percent
of its total ethanol imports — from Brazil in 2006. A new accord
between the countries is expected to eventually reduce the tariff,
leading to higher U.S. imports.
"The future of Cerrado is not good if the current trends persist,"
added Machado.
Better the cerrado than the rainforest?
Soy expansion in the Brazilian Amazon, 1990-2005
Nevertheless, not everyone agrees that clearing of the cerrado is a
problem.
Dennis T. Avery, senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington,
DC and the Director for Global Food Issues, says that environmental
groups should be happy that growth of Brazilian agriculture in
concentrated in the cerrado rather than the Amazon rainforest.
"Greenpeace should be thankful that Brazilian scientists have
developed acid-tolerant soybean varieties that grow successfully on
millions of acres of acid, brushy "cerrado" on Brazil's central
plateau," Mr. Avery wrote in a 2006 editorial published in the
Canada Free Press. "Cerrado is not rain forest. It's scrub land.
Some of the cerrado is near the Amazon rain forest. Fortunately,
those former wastelands are now helping provide better diets for
millions of kids around the world because of high-tech plant
breeding—instead of clearing huge tracts of the actual rainforest."
Likewise, many Brazilians see the development of the cerrado for
agriculture as an important economic opportunity. In less than a
generation the cerrado has helped Brazil become an agricultural
superpower – the world's largest exporter of beef, cotton, and
sugar, among other products. Landowners in the region have seen
their land values double every 4-5 years in areas that just a decade
ago were wildlands. The market is driving deforestation and land
conversion.
Finding solutions
For this reason, some believe the market is the best way to slow
conversion of cerrado and neighboring ecosystems.
Aliança da Terra, an organization founded by a Texas rancher named
John Cain Carter and hid wife Kika, believes that by giving
producers incentives to reduce their impact on the environment, the
market can succeed where conservation efforts have failed.
While environmental degradation rates in the Amazon region have
accelerated since 2000, the problem is not a lack of laws, but
rather a legal system where enforcement is so slow and so corrupt
that it renders the laws effectively useless. On paper, farming and
cattle ranching in the Amazon may be the most restricted in the
world, with landowners required to keep 50-80 percent of their land
forested. Carter wants to see farmers in Brazil benefit in following
the law, by turning this restriction into a marketing advantage.
However in order to do so, Amazon producers have to ensure that
consumers ( i.e., buyers of commodities like McDonalds, Wal-Mart,
and Cargill) can confidently say that agricultural products are
produced legally and even more sustainably than stipulated by the
law. The incentive for producers is market access: Aliança da Terra
helps Brazilian farmers and ranchers get the best price for their
products, but only if they follow the rules. While producers get
higher prices for their goods, buyers like Burger King and Archer-
Daniels Midland can say they are using legally and responsibly
produced agricultural products. Meanwhile more forest is left
standing, ecosystem services are preserved, and biodiversity is
conserved.
"We're setting up an accrediting mechanism that will help
responsible landowners gain access to markets and get the best price
for their products," Cater explained. "We want market recognition
for shouldering this conservation burden. Where else in the world do
you have landowners who have to keep 50 percent of their land
forest? Nowhere. If the consumer is supposed to benefit people for
doing that then you tip the scales back in favor of the landowner
and its going to create more positive feedback for people to follow
the rules by maintaining the forest. As it is right now there's
nothing to keep forest standing because the law doesn't catch you in
time and you can always bribe your way out of it if you do get
caught."
"We're trying to turn this forest reserve law from a negative into a
positive, or make lemonade out of lemons, so to speak," Carter
continued. "People think farmers in the Amazon are bandits so we're
trying to show there are good people who are trying to make a
difference and reduce their impact."
Aliança da Terra is not the only group thinking along these lines.
Last year, after an investigation by Greenpeace linked Amazon soy to
chicken feed used to supply McDonald's and other fast-food
restaurants in Europe, a consortium of Brazil's largest soy crushers
announced a two-year moratorium on trading soybeans grown on newly
deforested lands in the Amazon basin. During that time the
agricultural sector will work with the Brazilian government to
prepare an effective mapping and monitoring system for the Amazon
biome, develop strategies to encourage soy producers to comply with
the Brazilian forestry laws, and work with other groups to layout
rules on how to conduct operations in the region.
It is possible that some of the recommendations will be extended to
production in the cerrado, where some firms are already
acknowledging the need for more responsible practices.
"We have an explicit policy of not clearing native vegetation, and
we don't subcontract to farmers who do," wrote Marcelo Vieira, Sugar
and Ethanol Manager at Adecoagro, a Brazilian firm owned by
prominent investor George Soros, in comments posted in response to a
Washington Post article. "We have an explicit policy of not clearing
native vegetation, and we don't subcontract to farmers who do.
Adecoagro restores land surrounding springs, streams, wetlands,
steep hills, hilltops and other sensitive areas. As part of this
program, we are restoring and setting aside reserves equal to 20
percent of our farmland, as Brazilian law requires. Finally, our
ethanol projects are in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, not in the
Cerrado."
Vieira says that higher land prices are driving more efficient use
of the cerrado.
"We see that as ranchers lease land for sugar cane and see property
values rise, they invest in efficiency, keeping the same herds on
less land," he continued. "Brazilian ranchers have historically been
very inefficient because of the low value of land. This is changing
fast with the expansion of agriculture."
The Brazilian government has said that part of the solution may come
from making better use of already cleared land. Last October at the
opening of an organic food products fair in Sao Paulo, agriculture
Minister Luis Carlos Guedes Pinto said that Brazil could cultivate
an extra 50 million hectares "without cutting down a single tree" by
using only degraded pasture. According to CI's Machado, the
Brazilian government plans to invest US$30 million through a GEF
project in conservation actions in the cerrado.
"We need to incorporate conservation issues on our development plan
for the region," Machado added. "Conservation of biodiversity on
private lands, respect for local indigenous cultures and traditional
communities, restoration of degraded areas, protection of
headwaters, creation of financial mechanisms for ecosystem services
payments, carbon credits for avoided deforestation and environmental
education are some initiatives that must be implemented
immediately."
Whatever happens in the cerrado, scientists say the biome — which
ranks as the world's most biologically rich savanna — is important.
Home to more than 10,000 species of plants (4400 of which are
endemic), 847 species of birds, and almost 300 mammals, recent
research indicates that the ecosystem provides important watershed
services and plays an integral role in carbon cycling.
"Many leaders and decision-makers wrongly justify this deforestation
because the Cerrado is not covered with dense tropical forests like
the Amazon or the Atlantic Forest," said Machado. "This reaction
ignores the fact that the biome harbors the richest savanna in the
world, with abundant biodiversity and watershed resources that are
of great importance for Brazil."
;)