Last of the Amazon - National Geographic Magazine - 0 views
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Brazil’s dilemma: Allow widespread—and profitable—destruction of the rain forest to continue, or intensify conservation efforts.
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The market forces of globalization are invading the Amazon, hastening the demise of the forest and thwarting its most committed stewards.
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n the past three decades, hundreds of people have died in land wars; countless others endure fear and uncertainty, their lives threatened by those who profit from the theft of timber and land. In this Wild West frontier of guns, chain saws, and bulldozers, government agents are often corrupt and ineffective—or ill-equipped and outmatched. Now, industrial-scale soybean producers are joining loggers and cattle ranchers in the land grab, speeding up destruction and further fragmenting the great Brazilian wilderness.
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All of it starts with a road. Except
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nearly every road in the Amazon is unauthorized. There are more than 105,000 miles of these roads, most made illegally by loggers to reach mahogany and other hardwoods for the lucrative export market.
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In Brazil, the events set in motion by logging are almost always more destructive than the logging itself.
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squatters, speculators, ranchers, farmers, and, invariably, hired gunmen.
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. Land thievery is committed through corruption, strong-arm tactics, and fraudulent titles and is so widespread that Brazilians have a name for it: grilagem,
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landless squatters moved in from adjacent lots, working plots whose ownership the government failed to resolve. That has fueled a bloody showdown pitting the powerful absentee elites who raze forest for agribusiness against family farmers who clear small patches for crops but still depend on intact forest around them for survival.
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The first model was implanted during the military dictatorship, based on timber extraction and cattle. It’s predatory because it causes death, it’s not renewable, and it devastates the forest.” The alternative model, preached by Stang, is what Pontes calls social environmentalism. The first concentrates wealth, the second calls for its dispersion in small-scale agroforestry collectives.
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Stang saw human rights and environmental conservation in the Amazon as inextricably intertwined
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To Maggi, deforestation is an overblown issue, a “phobia” that plagues people who can’t grasp the enormity of the Amazon. “All of Europe could fit inside the Amazon,” he says, “and we’d still have room for two Englands.”
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“Look around,” he said, “you won’t find a single scrap of plastic here.” Motioning to a barnlike structure that stored herbicides and pesticides, he said, “We keep all our agrotoxins properly ventilated until use.” In a steady rain, our vehicle fishtailing in the mud, we approached a denuded gully straddling a narrow stream; a closer look revealed hundreds of saplings. “When we bought this property,” Maggi said, “this riverbank was totally stripped. Now we’re regenerating the area.”
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The land here is very poor. If you don’t take the right corrective measures, you couldn’t produce anything. It’s not true that soy degrades the soil. On the contrary, it puts into the soil what naturally isn’t there. Afterward, you can grow anything you want.” R
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searchers agree that proper management of soy fields can increase soil productivity. But in reality, no one knows for sure how long the thin, highly acidic Amazon soils can be propped up, raising the possibility of an eventual two-headed catastrophe:
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shiny new silos belonging to ADM, Bunge, and Cargill—all American multinationals.
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azilians are not the only people profiting from soybeans. Along the 500-mile paved stretch of BR-16
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between Cuiabá and Guarantã do Norte, there are no fewer than five John Deere dealerships. And at harvest time, fleets of the trademark green-and-yellow combines rumble across the fields flanking the highway, pouring rivers of golden soy into open-bed trucks bound f
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The new district adds to an expanded mosaic of parks, reserves, and conservation units that, together with indigenous territories, forms the bulwark of defense against the expansion of the frontier in the central Amazon. These measures may be paying off. Deforestation rates fell more than 30 percent in 2005, and preliminary numbers for 2006 are also down. Indian lands in the Xingu watershed are proving an especially effective barrier. There, militant Kayapó and Panará warriors armed with clubs and shotguns patrol their borders using satellite images furnished by international NGOs to pinpoint illegal clearing. As Stephan Schwartzman puts it: “Where Indian land begins is where deforestation ends.” But Brazil’s measures to protect the Amazon must be weighed ag
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These include plans to build seven dams on the environmentally sensitive Xingu and Madeira Rivers,
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he dams will power aluminum smelters, and shipping channels will facilitate river transport of exports to Chinese markets.
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s well as roads, power lines, oil and gas pipelines, and large-scale mining and industrial projects.
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The dams will also flood millions of acres of forest, releasing methane and other greenhouse gases, destroying biodiversity, and forcing indigenous communities to flee ancestral lands.
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Water cycling
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carbon sequestering
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maintenance of an unmatched panoply of life.
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It’s far more profitable to cut it down for grazing and farming than to leave it standing. “Tropical deforestation is a classic example of market failure,”
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“It’s urgent to find mechanisms to compensate forest peoples, and their governments, for the ecosystem services their forests provide.”
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Last summer, Cargill and Brazil’s other big soy traders agreed to a two-year moratorium on buying soy grown on newly deforested land in the Amazon. The agreement is sending a signal to soy producers that the environmental impact of their operations is increasingly important in the world marketplace.