https://archive.md/gwXpT
"This past December, I was driving down the Trans-Amazonian Highway, near the
city of Santarém, in northern Brazil, when the road disappeared into what I
thought was fog. When I got out of the car, though, I realized that the haze
was smoke, wafting thick and acrid from the burning forest. The week before,
Santarém had registered at 581 on the air-quality index—among the worst ratings
in the world.
Fire is not a natural phenomenon in the Amazon, but now the flames arrive with
alarming frequency and scale. Each dry season, farmers carve up and burn
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of acres in one of the world’s largest
terrestrial carbon sinks to make way for cattle pastures and soy plantations,
the leading engines of deforestation across Brazil. According to a January
report, in recent years, deforestation due to soy production has increased.
Now global-trade tensions threaten to further accelerate the ecological
destruction. President Donald Trump’s 145 percent tariff on imports from China
and China’s 125 percent reciprocal tariffs on U.S. goods could reroute a
significant share of China’s demand for American commodities. Soybeans are
among the United States’ top exports to China, supplying about 30 percent of
the country’s demand. If tariffs on U.S. soybeans remain, China will almost
certainly purchase more from Brazil, the only country that produces more
soybeans than the U.S.—just as it did during a trade war with Trump in 2018.
Experts fear that such a boost in demand for Brazilian soy, coupled with moves
to cut environmental policies in soy-producing Brazilian states, could drive
further deforestation.
Some of that deforestation will likely happen in the Cerrado, the savanna biome
next to the Amazon that serves as Brazil’s second-largest source of carbon
storage. The Cerrado is governed by much laxer environmental laws than the
Amazon, and has become a major hub for soybean production. There, deforestation
is rampant.
In the Amazon, far more land is legally protected, and rules dictating how much
farmers can clear their own land are much stricter. “Our published research
shows that there is very little land that’s suitable for soy and that can be
legally cleared in the Brazilian Amazon,” Lisa Rausch, who studies Brazilian
deforestation at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. Just because
clearing land for soy is illegal, though, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen.
Brazil has a solid system of regulations and institutions to prevent illegal
deforestation, but enforcement is weak, especially in the Amazon, which has a
long history of illegal slash-and-burning. One study found that almost 91
percent of all deforestation in the Amazon from August 2023 to July 2024
happened without authorization.
Rising soybean prices will boost demand for the cleared land that farmers
generally need to grow the beans. Soy production in the Amazon tends to follow
an established pattern: First, loggers cut down the most precious trees,
opening up roads through the forest. Then cattle farmers cut and burn the
remaining forest and lay claim (legally or not) to the land. Eventually, they
sell the cattle-cleared land to soy farmers. The cattle farmers seek out new
pastures, pushing the agricultural frontier ever deeper into the rainforest.
“The Amazon offers far more land than anywhere else. There are over 50 million
hectares of open pastures, many of them degraded,” Mairon G. Bastos Lima, a
senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told me."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
