According to the bank, Brazil has become the world’s largest exporter of soybeans (56% globally), corn (31%), coffee (27%), sugar (44%), orange juice (76%), beef (24%), and chicken meat (33%). Additionally, it is the second-largest seller of two other commodities: ethanol and cotton.

With over 200 million inhabitants, the ‘breadbasket of the world” currently produces enough food to meet the needs of approximately 900 million people, which accounts for 11% of the global population.

The report highlights a series of figures that illustrate Brazil’s “tropical agriculture miracle.” For instance, grain production has surged from 47 million tons in 1977 to the current 312 million tons.

Agricultural productivity has increased by 58% since the year 2000 — during the same period, the growth rate was 37% in emerging countries and 32% in advanced economies.

BTG Pactual notes that agricultural financing has shifted over time from a profile based on official subsidies to a market-based approach. For the 2023/24 harvest, 67% of financing resources are private, with only 33% originating from the government.

According to the bank’s analysis, only 8% of Brazil’s territory is occupied by crops — a contrast to 14% in Argentina, 18% in the United States and China, 58% in France, and 61% in India.

“Brazilian pastures are still poor in terms of quality and productivity,” the report states, estimating that 40% of the 73 million hectares used for cattle ranching are “moderately or severely degraded.” Therefore, they could be converted into plantations, further expanding the cultivated area.

Mercopress

That “bioeconomy”, with its legions of small producers, including Indigenous communities, receives just a fraction of the flood of investment pouring into expanding soy and cattle.

As Brazil tries to protect its fast-vanishing rainforest, reduce inequality and build a more sustainable economy, finding ways to shift investment toward expanding the bioeconomy may be the best chance to protect the Amazon and its people, experts say.

“We have a model that looks at our natural resources from an exploitation point of view,” said Carina Pimenta, a founder of Conexsus, a Brazilian non-profit that helps traditional producers get the business expertise and investment they need to grow.

By instead proactively developing and strengthening the bioeconomy, Brazil can not only protect its forests and meet its climate change and biodiversity commitments but boost its economy and channel cash to communities with a stake in keeping nature intact, she said.

“The economic benefits are larger in this sustainable system” – not least because continuing Amazon destruction will disrupt the rainfall Brazil’s cattle and soy economy depends on, said Pimenta, who was recently named National Secretary for the Bioeconomy in President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s environment ministry.

“The problem is we have not promoted it as a development path. People are used to another means of production – and this is a cultural change that needs to be induced by public policy.”

Chocolate to açaí

Conexsus, which won a US$ 2.25 million prize for social innovation this month from the U.S.-based anti-poverty Skoll Foundation, works on the ground with small producers of products such as açaí and chocolate, improving practices, adding skills, and helping line up finance.

The aim is to turn small cooperatives and subsistence-level production into thriving, sustainable businesses.

In the Amazonian state of Pará, for instance, Conexsus has helped Coopatrans – a cooperative of cocoa farmers that produces their own brand of chocolate, Cacauway – with technical assistance on how to produce better quality cocoa beans.

Cooperative members also have access to mentoring on how to more effectively run their growing business, and have received a line of low-interest credit which has helped them pay farmers on time, improving relationships.

“Before, it took us 30 to 60 days to pay them, or sometimes even longer than that,” said Hélia Félix, a member of the collective. “Now our associates know that if they deliver their produce, they’ll be paid upon delivery.”

With help from Conexsus, “we now see (Coopatrans) as a business” rather than just a collective, she said.

In Marajó, a region of Pará, Conexsus has similarly helped açaí producers cut waste, get access to credit, process açaí into higher value products and sign supply contracts, including with schools.

“They are on this path. The potential is to accelerate this path and offer the tools, the solutions and investments for this to happen faster,” Pimenta said.

Rising deforestation

Conexsus got its start in 2018, as Pimenta and other sustainable development experts, many of them Amazon specialists, watched in dismay as the country’s Amazon deforestation rate rose, largely as soy and cattle ranching expanded.

They formed a collective, aiming to use their experience to try to reverse the trend and drive investment to more sustainable economic activity, said Marco van der Ree, interim executive director of Conexsus and a member of the original 40-member expert group.

Intact Amazon forest has an economic value four times higher than the same land turned into cattle pasture, if benefits such as the forest’s contribution to producing rainfall, clean air and a stable climate are considered, according to work by Carlos Nobre, a leading Brazilian scientist and climate change expert.

But “the financial system doesn’t look at things in that way,” van der Ree noted – which is one reason most finance continues to go to cattle and soy expansion.

Today just 22% of subsidized rural credit channeled through Brazil’s public banks goes to support bioeconomy businesses, Pimenta said – something she hopes to change.

Even more important is persuading Brazil’s private banks that the bioeconomy is a good investment – a change that can be encouraged with new government incentives and policy, and through philanthropic investments that prove the case, van der Ree said.

“It’s hard work, to get change done,” he said. But as private banks begin to see returns, the hope is that funding for the bioeconomy could become self-sustaining.

Broader aims

While about half of Conexsus’ work focuses on the Amazon, the organization – with its team of on-the-ground advisors – also targets other key Brazilian ecosystems, from the Cerrado, a highly endangered tropical savanna, to the coastal Mata Atlântica rainforest.

“There are amazing biodiversity products in all those biomes,” van der Ree noted.

Efforts to build a Brazilian bioeconomy could also happen on about 50 million hectares of degraded land in the country that has the potential for restoration, Pimenta said.

But whether selling carbon offset credits from protected forest will become a big part of a more sustainable Brazilian forest economy remains unclear, she said.

Carbon credits could play an important role in paying for land restoration – but issuing credits for protecting existing forest is more complicated, with carbon markets unregulated, land ownership often unclear and “carbon cowboys” moving in to profit, she said.

“This is spreading across Brazil. Communities are not well prepared and equipped. That’s why regulation is important to protect their rights,” Pimenta said.

Building sustainable nature-based businesses in the Amazon is a surer bet, she said, particularly because “they generate wealth that stays in the region,” unlike large-scale soy and cattle production and many carbon credits.

The shift to a new economy “is not going to happen very quickly because the complexity of this is high,” Pimenta noted. But “we have the right path for it to happen. We are in the right moment, with the right people to do this.”

Laurie Goering is Climate Change Editor for the Thomson Reuters Foundation based in London. Previously she was a Chicago Tribune correspondent based in New Delhi, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Havana, Rio de Janeiro and London.

Fabio Teixeira is a Climate Correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation based in Brazil, covering climate change and labor issues. Fabio has worked for national newspaper O Globo and has a post-graduate degree in Investigative Journalism from the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism.

This article was produced by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Visit them at https://www.context.news/

The visit was postponed when the Brazilian leader was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. He is now set to visit from April 11 to 14.

The state visit comes at a time when China is trying to present itself as an important global power that can rival the US.

China’s trade relationship with Brazil was set to take center stage in the initial visit, with Lula set to bring a delegation of 240 business representatives with him to Beijing.

Trade flow between China and Brazil currently amounts to US$ 150 billion annually, and Brazilian exports to China reached US$ 89 billion in 2022.

China now invests in a wide range of sectors in Brazil, and experts say Beijing wants to tap into the South American country’s rich resources and market size.

“Brazil has a lot of resources that are of interest to China, and soy from Brazil is a major component of China’s overall thinking on food security,” said Margaret Myers, director of the Asia and Latin America Program at the Inter-American Dialogue.

Myers added that, given the size of the Brazilian market, it was a natural choice for Chinese companies to make it one of their first destinations in Latin America.

“The welcoming of China, Chinese engagement and Chinese investment to Brazil by the Lula administration in 2010 helped grow the bilateral dynamic,” she remarked.

Other analysts pointed out that Lula’s trip aims to further expand Chinese investment in Brazil, particularly in the manufacturing sector.

Evandro Menezes de Carvalho, a professor of international law at Brazil’s FGV University, said Brazil hopes to attract Chinese companies that can help foster growth in areas like automobiles and green energy.

Agriculture

Among them, the meat industry is particularly eager to gain more access to the Chinese market. The world’s largest meat company, JBS SA, was set to send 10 representatives as part of the Brazilian delegation on the March trip, according to Reuters news agency.

Leland Lazarus, the associate director for national security at Florida International University in the US, pointed out that China views Brazil as an important pillar in its engagement with Latin America. But Lula will likely try to strike a balance between prioritizing courting Chinese trade and investment and taking a tough stance on China when it came to environmental issues.

“Lula won’t be so keen to simply play second fiddle,” he said. “He will likely continue to find ways to boost exports of frozen bovine meat, soybeans, iron ore and crude petroleum to China’s massive market. At the same time, [he is likely to demand] China do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and [hold] Chinese state-owned enterprises operating in Brazil accountable for damaging Brazil’s precious environment.”

Chinese Dominance

Although Brazil hopes to maintain its deep economic engagement with China, the dominance of Chinese companies across many sectors in Brazil has sparked unease among Brazilian businesses and industry leaders.

In a recent piece published by the US-based think tank Global Americans, Evan Ellis, an expert on Latin American Studies at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, pointed out that Chinese businesses have invested an estimated US$ 70 billion in Brazil over the last two decades.

Additionally, Chinese businesses have projects in 23 of Brazil’s 26 states, which span sectors like mining, agriculture, industry, telecommunications, finance and medicine.

Myers from the Inter-American Dialogue said industries and interest groups have expressed growing concerns about China’s engagement in certain sectors.

She said the manufacturing sector has been resisting open trade with China, as they worry it would negatively impact Brazilian industry and competitiveness. “There are many concerns about Chinese dominance across different sectors,” she said.

While Brazil is not a signatory to China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Myers said the topic will likely be brought up when Xi and Lula eventually meet.

“Signing onto the BRI will result in some economic benefits for Brazil,” she said, adding that it was critically important for China to garner support not just for the BRI, but also for other wide-ranging China-backed initiatives.

Future of BRICS

While bilateral trade issues are expected to dominate talk between the two leaders, there are also important geopolitical implications.

The two countries signed a 10-year cooperation plan in 2012, after Beijing upgraded the bilateral relationship to a “comprehensive strategic partnership.”

China also sent its then vice president, Wang Qishan, to attend Lula’s inauguration earlier this year, highlighting the importance of Beijing’s relationship with Brasília.

As both countries are members of the BRICS group of emerging nations, some experts expect Xi and Lula to discuss the current status and future prospects of the alliance.

Myers said that she expects the two leaders’ future discussions to also include the ongoing war in Ukraine. “The Ukraine war will come up in a much more pragmatic sense, including the aspects related to BRICS and the implications of the conflict for the platform,” she said.

Lazarus from Florida International University added that Xi and Lula would likely present BRICS as “a successful framework for Global South cooperation.”

“While Xi may seek to claim economic leadership of BRICS, Lula will likely claim moral leadership on climate protection,” he said.

Additionally, Brazil’s role as a major player in South America can also offer a balancing effect amid the rising tensions between China and the US, said Dawisson Lopes, a professor of international and comparative politics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.

“It’s crucial for both China and the US to maintain good relationships with the largest country in South America,” he said.

DW

A blue-and-russet ringed kingfisher (Megaceryle torquata) dove for a meal Capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), those bulldog-sized rodents, munched greenery. Innumerable birds perched or soared: eagles, candy-colored spoonbills, squawking parrots and stilt-legged waterfowl. Jabiru storks (Jabiru mycteria) glided above on 2.7-meter (9-foot) wingspans. A family of giant river otters (Pteronura brasiliensis) fished their way downstream.

Then we glimpsed what had brought us here to Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands: rosette-spotted fur.

There lay a jaguar (Panthera onca), well-camouflaged, nearly imperceptible, calmly eyeing us from bushes bathed in dappled sunlight. As we silenced the engine and dropped anchor, a small cub ambled from the shadows and snuggled beside its mother. She groomed her baby tenderly, meticulously, ignoring us. Then the pair rose and disappeared into the thicket.

Photographer Steve Winter and I spotted an extraordinary number of jaguars during our September expedition through the northern Pantanal. This is an ecosystem we know well: I’ve long reported from here, and Winter began documenting the Pantanal’s jaguars in 1998, returning many times.

But changes that have occurred in the five years since our last assignment now place jaguars and this entire ecosystem in danger.

‘A savanna shaped by fire, cattle and water’

The Pantanal, which means “great swamp” in Portuguese, is the world’s largest tropical wetland, even bigger than the state of Florida. Most of it lies in Brazil (78%), but the region also spills into Bolivia (18%) and Paraguay (4%). It’s a 185,000-square-kilometer (71,000-square-mile) mosaic of grassland swamp fed by rivers, streams and seasonal floods; and dense, low-forested savanna. Large cattle ranches dot the landscape, but ranchers and wildlife have coexisted relatively well here for more than two centuries.

On this trip, we arrived at the end of the dry season. Soon, months of rain would swell the Paraguay River and its tributaries by up to 4.5 meters (15 feet), inundating 80% of this vast South American floodplain. The Pantanal acts like a giant sponge, holding floodwaters from November/December to April/May. After this, the water slowly drains away during the dry season. Water is why this biological wonder teems with life.

“It’s a savanna shaped by fire, cattle and water,” says Fernando Tortato, a conservation scientist with Panthera, the wild cat conservation NGO. Seasonal floods sculpt a landscape also swept by yearly dry season fires and grazed by at least 4 million cows.

Discussions with local people and researchers revealed why we saw so many jaguars this year, and some of it was good news. Jaguar numbers here have been rising, largely because they’re the area’s ecotourism superstars. People flock here from all over the world to see them, pumping nearly $7 million a year into the economy in this remote region. That’s made some local ranchers more jaguar-friendly, even if the cats sometimes prey on their cattle.

But our many sightings also had a shadow side. A dark confluence of human activities in Brazil and around the world are now drying up and sizzling the ecosystem, says Alan Eduardo de Barros, who focuses on jaguar ecology at Brazil’s University of São Paulo.

The list of what he calls “a perverse combination of threats” is daunting, and includes industrial-scale agriculture, dams, and extreme climate-driven heat and drought. Unprecedented, catastrophic fires have charred forested areas. All this has forced jaguars in the northern Pantanal to congregate in unnatural proximity within remaining tracts of green along waterways — where we saw so many of them.

But another potentially devastating risk to the “kingdom of the waters” now looms. There have been small-step moves toward “developing” the Pantanal’s lifeblood, the Paraguay River, into an industrial shipping channel for big barges, says Tortato. The Paraguay-Paraná Hidrovía project would dredge and straighten the river to ship soybeans and other commodities southward to Argentina for export, mainly to China. This year, officials in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state issued preliminary approval for two large ports on the river.

“It’s madness that has been protested by lots of researchers,” says Rafael Hoogesteijn, who directs Panthera’s jaguar conflict program.

This is happening despite sweeping protections. The entire wetland is a designated national heritage site under the Brazilian Constitution: Use must be ecologically sustainable. President Jair Bolsonaro, in office since the start of 2019, has largely disregarded that designation, but president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who takes office January 1st next year, has promised to turn back the environmental degradation and halt the deforestation conducted under his predecessor.

This wetland savanna lies in the heart of South America and boasts one of the continent’s highest concentrations of plants and animals. Some are endangered. Despite 3,000 ranches in the Brazilian Pantanal, and 93% of the land being in private hands, this immense wetland has remained a model of sustainable use. Four-fifths of the native vegetation remains.

Pantaneiros, cattle ranchers, have coexisted here with giant anteaters, marsh deer, tapirs and other rare animals since the 17th century. Tolerance of jaguars has been growing, nurtured by ecotourism and cattle-protection initiatives by Panthera. A long-established cowboy culture of “shoot and shovel” — killing and burying jaguars — has faded somewhat.

The Pantanal remains home to the largest cats in all jaguardom and is the big cat’s second-largest stronghold, after the Amazon. But in the last few years, normally occurring wildfires have escalated drastically, threatening jaguars and the 47,000-plus animal and plant species that inhabit this rich UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In 2019, searing heat and drought, worsened by climate change, sparked massive blazes in the southern Pantanal. The next year, rainfall was the lowest in four decades, and catastrophic fires raged in the northern Pantanal, the worst in recorded history. Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research detected 22,099 blazes that incinerated nearly one-third of the Pantanal, about 40,000 km2 (more than 15,000 mi2) — an area about the size of Switzerland.

“The intensity of these fires was something we’d never seen,” says Fernando. “They spread so fast there was nothing we could do to stop them.” Many animals were unable to flee. More than 17 million died instantly, a rough estimate that researchers called “astonishing.”

But “we don’t know how many individuals were really affected,” says Ronaldo Gonçalves Morato, a coordinator at the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation and co-author of the study. Researchers couldn’t account for animals that perished underground, or survivors that later died from lack of shelter, their injuries, or those that starved in a burned-out land.

Jaguars were heavily impacted. They lost more than 2,700 km2 (more than 1,000 mi2) of home range habitat, according to a recent study. “In some areas, you see only black trees,” says Fabricio Dorileo, a naturalist whose ancestors settled in the Pantanal some 200 years ago.

The cats require some cover. With much of the woodlands burned, they had to seek new territory to find shade, protect their cubs and ambush prey. “So the jaguars came to the rivers,” Dorileo says. Since much of their prey is aquatic, there’s plenty to eat there: capybaras, caimans and anacondas.

But jaguars are solitary except when mating or rearing cubs. Each cat needs its own territory, about 90 km2 (35 mi2), and will fight over it, so displacement is a problem. Repeated fires may create competition, and deadly conflict, says de Barros from the University of São Paulo.

Colliding threats and the ‘tragedy of the commons’

Scientists recently sounded an alarm with a letter published in Bioscience, citing an ongoing “tragedy of the commons” occurring in the Pantanal. That oft-quoted phrase was coined 20 years ago in a paper warning that “apparently trivial [cumulative] decisions can lead to profound geographical, ecological and social consequences.”

That prediction was prescient for the Pantanal. “Those who benefit from development dismiss larger ramifications,” says Tortato, an author on the letter. “It’s just another dam, it’s just another law.” Development and the legal rulings that permit it, coupled with deforestation and escalating fires driven by climate change are creating “a convergence of threats that may lead to the disappearance of the Pantanal as we know it today.”

Tortato’s co-author, Brazilian sustainability expert Rafael Morais Chiaravalloti, called it “the termitization” of the Pantanal, likening the devastation to a massed termite attack on a single piece of wood.

Because ecosystems are inextricably linked, some of those attacks come from activities in other parts of Brazil, disrupting the Pantanal’s watery, life-sustaining pulse. The headwaters of the Paraguay River lie high on the Cerrado plateau, a savanna biome that cradles the wetlands below on three sides. During the yearly October-to-April rainy season, floodwaters from the Paraguay and its tributaries submerge huge tracts of the Pantanal wetlands for four to eight months.

But unchecked industrial agriculture has devoured more than half the Cerrado, converting native grassland to cattle pasture and mega plantations of soy, cotton, corn, oil palm and other commodity export crops. The plantations, with their high water use, are desiccating the savanna, threatening the biome with desertification. That means less water courses from the Paraguay River into the Pantanal. Some 47 hydroelectric dams on its tributaries also limit flow, with another 138 proposed, planned or under construction.

Deforestation, which soared exponentially during the Bolsonaro administration, is also drying the Amazon Rainforest. Researchers discovered back in 1984 that Amazon trees absorb moisture and release it back to the atmosphere — creating a sky river of clouds that moves over the Andes and then swirls back to fall over Brazil. But an increasingly denuded Amazon now makes less rain, bringing greater drought to the neighboring Cerrado and Pantanal.

Global climate change is also altering weather patterns. According to U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models, rainfall in the Paraguay River Basin could dip by one-third by 2100, with temperatures rising by 5-7° Celsius (9-12.6° Fahrenheit). Extreme fluctuations in flood and drought are expected, caused by short, intense rainy seasons and long, searing dry seasons. Another consequence may be more frequent, intense fire, says Panthera’s Tortato.

In the past, yearly fires sputtered out, blocked by water channels acting as natural firebreaks. In 2020, temperatures soared, there was little rain, and the dried-out landscape became a tinderbox.

People add to the problem. About 80% of fires began within 10 km (6 mi) of human settlements or roads, de Barros notes, with many likely started by cattlemen wanting to expand ranches. A government policy that blocked small, preventive controlled burns also did harm. In 2020, the infernos even raged underground, charring roots. Trees, shrubs and grasses died.

Cascading effects, says naturalist Dorileo, include “fewer fruit trees, less insects, and less food for fish and small animals. It’s an imbalance that starts from the bottom up.”

With these combined assaults, no one knows how long this wetland will remain a keystone habitat for jaguars and other wildlife which link to animal populations in the Cerrado, Amazon, Chaco and other biomes, says Tortato.

A possible death knell

Next could come a massive industrial waterway: a hidrovía. In January, environmental officials in Mato Grosso state issued a preliminary license to build the large Barranco Vermelho port on the Upper Paraguay River. In June, they sanctioned a second, the port of Paratudal. A third is planned.

The proposed Paraguay-Paraná Hidrovía requires dredging and straightening of a sinuous stretch of river to accommodate convoys of barges and ocean-going ships. It would transform one of the wildest spots on the river. The Paraguay runs through the Taiamà Ecological Reserve (protected under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands treaty) and the Pantanal Mato-Grossense National Park.

The hidrovía, heavily supported by the ruralistsas — agribusiness tycoons with strong lobbying ties to the Brazilian Congress — would speed up exports of soy, fertilizer and other commodities overseas, and lower costs.

Researchers call the piecemeal approvals of these “small” port projects an end-round maneuver to commercialize the Paraguay. This year’s port approvals have been likened to building bus stations so that lawmakers can then justify construction of a superhighway running to them.

Paraguay River

The Pantanal is fed by opaque brown waterways, chiefly the Paraguay River and its tributaries. Image by Sharon Guynup/Big Cat Voices.
Gustavo Figueroa, a biologist for the NGO SOS Pantanal, offered an example of potential impacts on wildlife. A population of jaguars in the Taiamà reserve specialize in fishing, he says, relying on bays formed by yearly floods that would disappear if the project moves forward.

Strong opposition from experts and local people is fighting a government process they say is rife with inadequate studies and unaddressed environmental damage. Technicians from the Mato Gross state environmental authority (SEMA) noted 111 issues in the environmental impact report.

“The preliminary approval ignores cumulative impacts,” de Barros argues. “The need for an integrated approach” — examining the combined consequences of river dredging and straightening, of building ports, and releasing an onslaught of barge/ship traffic — “has been demanded by scientists and conservationists for decades.”

The hidrovía isn’t a new idea. For more than a century, politicians and businesspeople have dreamed of a commercial waterway through South America’s heart. Then, in the late 1980s, the Paraguay-Paraná River Basin countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) initiated the process by creating the Intergovernmental Committee on the Hidrovía (CIH). Their goal: to cheaply transport minerals and agricultural products, primarily soy, to the Atlantic coast.

A 1997 CIH report on the proposed waterway failed to seek public input and overlooked environmental consequences and the needs of Indigenous residents. An independent study by Victor Miguel Ponce, a researcher at San Diego State University’s College of Engineering, enumerated dire impacts. Blasting, deepening and straightening would alter the river’s flood dynamics, draining the river faster. It would increase floods and quickly empty temporary lakes and sodden grasslands, harming the ecosystem.

Isidoro Salomão, a resident and coordinator of the Popular Committee of the Paraguay River, an NGO, fears irreparable damage. “I usually say that water is the blood of the Pantanal,” but this project will bleed the Pantanal to death, he commented in an interview with ((o))eco, an online Brazilian environmental news service.

Altering this large river would worsen local climatic changes, making the region more arid with less rainfall, Ponce noted. Savanna will spread at the expense of lusher greenery. Deer and other herbivores would become rarer. Animals and vegetation adapted to dry conditions might fare better, but such shifts would affect the entire food chain.

Glimmers of hope amid great challenges

Deregulation and the dismantling of environmental agencies has been rampant under the Bolsonaro administration. But Lula’s victory in the election in October “brings us some hope that the federal government will give more attention to the environmental agenda,” a source said, speaking confidentially out of fear of reprisal.

President-elect Lula had a good environmental record during his first two terms in office, from 2003-2010. This time around, he campaigned on a pro-environment platform, promising to address deforestation in the Amazon and other biomes. “He knows that [his government] needs to act strongly to protect the Amazon and the Cerrado in order to recover Brazil’s image abroad,” one expert told me. To that end, Lula sent representatives to the COP27 U.N. climate summit in Egypt and attended himself, even though he hasn’t yet taken office.

Approval of the hidrovía is a federal responsibility, unlike the ports which only require state approval. The scientific community and local people hope that their arguments will convince Lula to reevaluate and cancel the planned waterway. “While the demand for international commodities is high, we need to regulate it, or control it in a way that you still have enough wild areas to maintain ecological cycles,” says Panthera’s Hoogesteijn.

There’s also hope that Brazilian laws and international agreements will be honored, including wetland protection under the Ramsar treaty. The Pantanal’s designation as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve requires that sustainable use be balanced with biodiversity conservation. Brazil ratified the U.N. Convention on Biological Biodiversity in 1998, promising to protect 10% of the Pantanal by 2010, with the 2011-2020 Aichi Goals advocating for 17%. That has not happened: just 5% is currently preserved in protected areas, says Tortato, noting that the conserved area needs to at least double.

Environmental protection is also embedded within the 1988 Brazilian Constitution. It guarantees the right to an ecologically balanced environment; grants the right to “defend and preserve it for present and future generations”; and requires the government to “preserve and restore ecosystems, ecological processes and protect species.”

In contrast, Mato Grosso state passed a bill in August that permitted ranching and tourism within Pantanal protected areas. Governor Mauro Mendes also vetoed a law that prohibited small hydroelectric plants along the Cuiabá River, an important Paraguay River tributary. But there was opposition, as many local people now value biodiversity because of tourism dollars.

The disastrous 2019-20 fires also forged conservation collaborations. The blazes were “a historical event that no one wants to see repeated,” says Tortato. “Cattle rancher unions, nonprofits and universities are now working together to manage fire.” Some cattlemen are returning to the centuries-old practice of burning underbrush early in the wet season, when fires don’t easily spread, which means less tinder in the dry season.

More than 25 new fire brigades have formed. Newly installed cameras in remote areas alert officials to fire before they spread. “It’s crucial to fight fires within the first hours,” Tortato explains. “Even one or two days [lost] may be too late.” In 2020, some initially undetected fires burned for two months. In contrast, quick response by firefighters and airplanes had a blaze in a state park under control within two days.

“Only an ecosystem-wide strategy will shield this mega diverse wetland from destruction over the long term. We need a specific law protecting the Pantanal — now,” Tortato says.

In September on our last day in the Pantanal, we watched a nearly grown female jaguar cub dozing in the bushes, her mother sprawled above on a tree branch. That young female holds promise for the future: she may bear a dozen cubs in her lifetime. We hoped that human actions will give her and her offspring the opportunity to thrive.

Citations:

Tortato, F. R., Izzo, T. J., Hoogesteijn, R., & Peres, C. A. (2017). The numbers of the beast: Valuation of jaguar (Panthera onca) tourism and cattle depredation in the Brazilian Pantanal. Global Ecology and Conservation, 11, 106-114. doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2017.05.003

De Magalhães Neto, N., & Evangelista, H. (2022). Human activity behind the unprecedented 2020 wildfire in Brazilian wetlands (Pantanal). Frontiers in Environmental Science, 10. doi:10.3389/fenvs.2022.888578

de Barros, A. E., Morato, R. G., Fleming, C. H., Pardini, R., Oliveira-Santos, L. G., Tomas, W. M., … Prado, P. I. (2022). Wildfires disproportionately affected jaguars in the Pantanal. Communications Biology, 5(1). doi:10.1038/s42003-022-03937-1

Tortato, F., Tomas, W. M., Chiaravalloti, R. M., & Morato, R. (2022). Tragedy of the commons: How subtle, “legal” decisions are threatening one of the largest wetlands in the world. BioScience, 72(7), 609. doi:10.1093/biosci/biac025

Gottgens, J. F., Perry, J. E., Fortney, R. H., Meyer, J. E., Benedict, M., & Rood, B. E. (2001). The Paraguay-Paraná Hidrovía: Protecting the Pantanal with Lessons from the Past: Large-scale channelization of the northern Paraguay-Paraná seems to be on hold, but an ongoing multitude of smaller-scale activities may turn the Pantanal into the next example of the “tyranny of small decisions”. BioScience, 51(4), 301-308. doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0301:TPPHAP]2.0.CO;2

Figueiredo, J. S., Fantin-Cruz, I., Silva, G. M., Beregula, R. L., Girard, P., Zeilhofer, P., … Hamilton, S. K. (2021). Hydropeaking by small hydropower facilities affects flow regimes on tributaries to the Pantanal wetland of Brazil. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 9. doi:10.3389/fenvs.2021.577286

Salati, E., & Vose, P. B. (1984). Amazon basin: a system in equilibrium. Science, 225(4658), 129-138. doi:10.1126/science.225.4658.129

Tomas, W. M., de Oliveira Roque, F., Morato, R. G., Medici, P. E., Chiaravalloti, R. M., Tortato, F. R., … Junk, W. J. (2019). Sustainability agenda for the Pantanal wetland: Perspectives on a collaborative interface for science, policy, and decision-making. Tropical Conservation Science, 12. doi:10.1177/1940082919872634

Sharon Guynup writes on wildlife and environmental issues for US and international publications. She is co-author of “Tigers Forever: Saving the World’s Most Endangered Big Cat.”

This article appeared originally in Mongabay. Read the original article here:
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/12/brazils-pantanal-is-at-risk-of-collapse-scientists-say/

But amid praise for this declaration, there is also serious doubt whether major signatories can deliver on its ambitious promises. In particular, all eyes are on Brazil.

Not only does Brazil contains large portions of the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado ecosystem (the largest area of savannah in South America), but government policy on environmental issues has become particularly destructive under the presidency of the country’s current leader, Jair Bolsonaro – who was notably absent from COP26.

Seeing how Brazil’s government – and Bolsonaro in particular – has reversed progress on deforestation in the past leaves us less than optimistic about its sincerity this time.

Deforestation in Brazil

Brazil has previously seen different sectors of its economy set their names to ambitious deforestation goals. In July 2006, the six biggest multinational commodities traders signed the Soy Moratorium, pledging to stop buying soy from traders implicated in illegal Amazon deforestation. Three years later, Brazilian slaughterhouses signed the Zero Deforestation Commitment, making similar promises.

Consequently, between 2009 to 2014, Brazil experienced its lowest ever Amazon deforestation rates. This small period of limited progress was only possible due to collaboration between companies in Brazil, the Brazilian government, and several major players within the global commodity supply chain.

Our research showed that this short-lived progress was in part the result of a campaign by Greenpeace Brazil, as well as the actions of the Brazil Federal Prosecutor’s office. A combination of “name and shame” campaigns, police involvement and legal agreements with the federal prosecutor’s office increased pressure on slaughterhouses, threatening the sector’s profits, and resulting in the partial engagement of companies to tackle deforestation.

Unfortunately, the political alignment between these sectors has eroded since the political and economic crises that hit Brazil in 2014. Since Bolsonaro took office in 2019, deforestation rates have started to increase at a fast pace again, reaching a 12-year high. Fighting deforestation through multilateral declarations like this one has therefore fallen short before.

In 2014, the New York Declaration on Forests attempted to establish a similar objective: ending deforestation by 2030 after halving it by 2020. As many as 40 countries signed it, but Brazil was not one of them.

Even though the New York Declaration was also celebrated, its actual impact was limited. In 2019, a five-year follow-up report concluded that “there is little evidence that these goals are on track”, stating that less than 20% of overall forest restoration goals were met.

It’s important to note that the mix of signatories to this new COP26 declaration is unprecedented. Countries with significant forest coverage, such as Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, have signed – some for the first time.

The list of signatories also includes countries like the UK, Japan and Germany – some of the biggest consumers of commodities like palm oil, cattle, soy, cocoa, timber and rubber – the production of which is intrinsically linked to deforestation.

The financial sector is also sending signals in favor of reducing deforestation. More than 30 leading financial institutions, which together control over US$ 8.6 trillion in assets, have committed to eliminating commodity-driven agricultural deforestation from their investment portfolio by 2025. Yet, similar to the pledges made by nation states, only time will tell whether these promises manifest in substantive action.

Bolsonaro’s Track Record

Elsewhere in the climate negotiations, Brazil’s new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – non-binding national climate plans – include cutting 50% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. This increase, from the 43% cut previously pledged in 2015, sounds progressive.

But it is actually nothing more than creative accounting. Bolsonaro’s government is trying to change the historical baseline on this commitment. This change would mean that, in the best case scenario, Brazil keeps its original NDC. In the worst case scenario, it would actually allow for more emissions. This makes it harder to trust Bolsonaro’s environmental promises elsewhere.

Bolsonaro is well known for his disregard for environmental governance. He has tried to increase access to the Amazon for the commodities sector, claiming that relaxing environmental regulation is key to achieving economic growth. He also has a track record of attempting to dismantle environmental agencies and limit their budgets.

Maybe this new declaration will give world leaders an upper hand, by allowing them to impose economic sanctions on Bolsonaro’s government if he breaks the agreement. Nevertheless, as negotiations at COP26 continue, it is vital that Bolsonaro and his anti-environmental, anti-globalist ideology does not undermine the talks.

Marcus Gomes is a lecturer in Organisation Studies and Sustainability at Cardiff University

George Ferns is a lecturer in Organization Studies and Sustainability at Cardiff University

This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/brazil-signs-agreement-to-halt-deforestation-but-bolsonaro-cannot-be-trusted-171091

The EF-170 railroad, known as the Ferrogrão, or Grainway, is a priority project of the federal government and will run 933 kilometers (580 miles) from the municipality of Sinop, in Mato Grosso state, to Miritituba in Pará state.

The call for a tender is expected to be released within the first quarter of 2021, and the project is expected to be granted its environmental license in April.

All the freight traffic between the two cities currently flows through the BR-163 highway, bringing produce from Mato Grosso north to the river terminal in Pará. At present, though, more than 70% of Mato Grosso’s harvest is trucked southeast to the Atlantic ports of Santos and Paranaguá for export.

With the railroad, the government aims to avoid this arduous step of the journey, instead sending commodities like soybean and corn to the transshipment terminal in Miritituba and onto ships sailing out to the Atlantic via the Tapajós, Tocantins and Amazon rivers. Aside from grains, the government also plans to transport soybean oil, fertilizers, sugar, ethanol, and petroleum products.

While the railroad is considered vital for grain shipping, the way the federal government is pushing ahead with the project has raised concerns. In particular, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) in Pará has challenged the government’s failure to seek the free, prior and informed consent of the Indigenous peoples through whose lands the railway would pass.

In October, the MPF and five civil society organizations filed a request with the Federal Court of Accounts, the government accountability office, for the precautionary suspension of the privatization process and for the call for tender to be stopped.

Public prosecutor Felipe Moura Palha said the fact that the federal government has violated the Indigenous communities’ right to participate in discussions about the project risks imposing significant economic losses in the future.

“This is the first time that the MPF has called on the Court of Accounts to analyze a large project in the Amazon with an eye on economics,” he said.

The MPF says the lack of data on the real environmental impacts of the project means the cost of compensation could be greater than imagined and possibly lead to losses from the public coffers.

“We maintain that prior consultation, analysis and the effect on Indigenous communities in the economic viability analysis for the project is essential,” Palha said.

In response to the request filed by the MPF, the court notified the National Land Transportation Agency (ANTT), the federal regulator for railway and highway infrastructure, and Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, to carry out consultations with Indigenous peoples along the route of the planned rail line.

But even then, the federal government has played foul, according to the MPF: prosecutors allege that the government’s Special Secretariat of the Partnerships and Investments Program (SE-PPI) tried to improperly entice an Indigenous Munduruku leader to act on behalf of the tribe.

The Munduruku people, with a population of about 13,700 occupying territories along the Tapajós River, have their own political organizations. According to the MPF, the government sought out a single person to be “the speaker granted representation to articulate the interests of his people.”

On December 14, the MPF recommended that the prior consultation process also include the project’s impacts on the Indigenous peoples in the state of Mato Grosso who would be directly or indirectly affected by the Grainway. The recommendation was aimed at Funai and IBAMA, the federal environmental protection agency.

Indigenous People Ignored

Melillo Dinis is a lawyer with the Instituto Kabu, representing 12 communities of the Mêbêngôkre-Kayapó people, including some 12,000 Kayapós. He said the Indigenous people have yet to form an opinion about the Grainway because the project has not yet even been presented to them.

Dinis said there are currently three issues under debate: the right to prior consultation and fulfillment of Indigenous protocol, neither of which were acknowledged by the government of President Jair Bolsonaro; the need for thorough social and environmental evaluation of the degradation, deforestation and growing tensions over territory in the region; and the fact that representatives of governmental agencies affirmed that Indigenous rights would be respected but did not carry out their promises.

“The context that has been presented to us until now is completely disrespectful of Indigenous peoples,” he said. “They have been living here for around 10,000 years. We will fight until the end.”

Dinis noted that the project has been dragged out over previous administrations; the Grainway was proposed in 2016, under the watch of then-president Dilma Rousseff, who was later that year impeached and replaced by Michel Temer. Temer was succeeded by Bolsonaro.

“Before, they would listen to us but wouldn’t pay any attention,” Dinis said of the Rousseff and Temer administrations. “This administration won’t even listen to us. So the outcome is the same.”

Prosecutor Palha said there’s no way to stipulate a ceiling on spending on the project without knowing how much to allocate for environmental compensation. “We are not opposed to development projects,” he said. “Our request is: carry out the prior consultation before claiming that the project is viable so it can be discussed.”

He cited the case of the Belo Monte dam in the state of Pará as an example. A significant decline in the flow rate of the Xingu River now threatens the viability of the dam, raising the prospect of new power plants, likely fired by fossil fuels, needing to be built.

“We want to avoid this situation with the Grainway, having a project already installed that hasn’t been properly planned,” Palha said. “This is why the Court of Accounts is carrying out an unprecedented economics analysis.”

Controversy over the Grainway began in 2016 when it was announced that studies would be carried out to make the project viable. In 2018, it was reported that the Kayapó people had expressed their concern over the potential threats posed by the railway and had written a letter to the ANTT.

In it, tribal chief Anhe Kayapó said: “The Grainway cannot be built without reinforcing controls, protection and vigilance in the Conservation Units and Indigenous Lands [along its route].”

Jennifer Ann Thomas is a Brazilian journalist with experience in environmental affairs, sustainability and human rights. She has traveled all the regions in Brazil and reported from the different biomes. From the Amazon rainforest, she has covered crimes against wildlife, illegal mining and contemporary slave work.

In 2016, she traveled the Doce river after the Samarco dam break and covered the impacts from the worst socioenvironmental disaster in the country’s history. On a regular basis, she reports on government transparency, deforestation rates and public policies. In 2018, she was shortlisted as one of the top 10 sustainability journalists in Brazil.

This article appeared originally in Mongabay. Read the original article here: https://news.mongabay.com/2021/03/freight-train-project-that-railroads-indigenous-rights-still-on-track/

Instead of expanding destructive farming and logging, Brazil should “develop” the Amazon region by producing high-value products from its indigenous biodiversity, from nuts and fruits to medicinal plants, a top forest researcher said.

Sequencing the genomes of its many unique species, for example, could result in earnings as firms look for new medicines, or as agencies try to monitor pathogens that could spur new pandemics, he said.

Growing açaí – a native palm fruit increasingly popular internationally as a super food – similarly could net producers 10 times as much income as growing soybeans, according to Carlos Nobre, an earth systems scientist at the University of São Paulo.

The region might even be able to come up a new kind of chocolate, created from cupuaçu, an Amazon fruit, said Nobre, an Amazon expert and president of the Brazilian Panel on Climate Change.

Such shifts could potentially create millions of dollars in annual revenue for the region, and help curb forest losses that are contributing to runaway climate change and nature decline, he said.

Right now, “everything the Amazon provides goes abroad as primary products”, Nobre said. But “it is possible to have value-added products”.

Since taking office, right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro has pushed development of the Amazon region through expanded soybean farming, cattle ranching and mining.

But human rights activists say that has led to an increase in violations of indigenous rights as miners, ranchers, farmers and loggers invade indigenous land and destroy forests.

Shifting instead to more profitable use of Amazonian native species could help curb deforestation, protect indigenous communities and shore up declining rainfall in southern Brazil, experts say.

The risks of not rethinking the current Amazon development model are substantial, researchers say.

Last year, an area the size of Israel was deforested in the Amazon – which spans nine countries in South America – as destruction surged 21% in the region, according to the Amazon Conservation organization.

Amazon forest losses are changing rainfall patterns across swathes of South America, driving worsening droughts that threaten agriculture and natural area like the Pantanal, a huge wetlands that saw wildfires torch a third of its area last year.

Such shifts could have enormous economic consequences for Brazil’s broader economy, from agriculture to tourism, economic experts say.

Continuing forest losses also threaten to push the world’s biggest tropical forest into a death spiral where it begins to shift toward becoming a grasslands – a switch with huge global consequences for climate change.

“We are very close to that point of no return. If global warming continues with its pace, and if we go from 20% to 25% (deforestation), we will reach a process of savanization of 50% of the Amazon,” Nobre said by phone.

But what Nobre calls an “Amazon 4.0” development model – a shift from the current system built on expanding cattle and soybeans – could change that trajectory.

The model – based on forest conservation and better use of the region’s vast biodiversity, and involving indigenous and other traditional communities – aims to generate lasting incomes by better understanding and tapping into forest riches.

Amazon Brazil nut harvesters and acai growers, for instance, have long earned an income from standing Amazon forests.

But carrying out genetic sequencing of more of the region’s biodiversity is likely to unveil new potential harvests – including potentially new medicines.

Nobre envisions a future of Amazonian communities using 3D printers to produce fancy chocolates for the international market.

Growing use of drones could also help deliver Amazon-manufactured products to urban areas without the need for new roads and rail lines that spur forest destruction, he said.

Expanding production and processing existing forest products – including the Amazon’s huge variety of fruits and nuts – into higher-value items, rather than simply exporting the raw materials, could also bring the region boosted incomes, he said.

Researchers aim to work this year, for instance, on creating new varieties of chocolate from the Amazon’s native cacao trees but also from cupuaçu, a tree fruit often made into a sour juice but with a pod similar to cocoa.

As well, researchers are looking at how to create new products from Brazil nuts, and to produce more gourmet oils from the Amazon’s plethora of indigenous fruits and nuts, such as patauá and buriti, both harvested from forest palms.

Some of the ideas and processes are currently being tried out in an experimental laboratory in São José dos Campos in São Paulo state, Nobre said, with hopes the first of four planned laboratories in the Amazon will open by mid-year.

The local labs aim to help generate “an ecosystem” of start-ups and innovation in Amazon communities, Nobre said.

The fledgling Amazon 4.0 project, launched in 2018, is led by a group of Amazon researchers, including Nobre, and experts in new technologies.

It hopes to attract funding from banks and investment firms in 2021 to begin developing small companies in traditional Amazon communities to boost local processing industries and export businesses.

It has already received initial backing from a range of Brazilian and international foundations and institutes, as well as Australia’s government and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Perhaps its most ambitious aim is to help traditional communities in the Amazon sequence the genomes of species and microorganisms they depend on and use in things such as traditional medicine.

That could potentially provide new medical treatments or other discoveries that could be commercialized while ensuring communities that hold the traditional knowledge benefit from it.

It could also help persuade policymakers that leaving forests intact has important economic value, backers say.

Better harnessing the forest’s potential medicinal wealth is particularly important as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the world, raising demand for new medical treatments.

Hints of such benefits are already emerging, with the Kayapó indigenous people of Brazil’s Amazon Pará state currently using a drink made from vines that they say has helped them ward off the worst effects of COVID-19 – though its usefulness has not been confirmed by scientists.

What remains hugely unclear is whether income from genome sequencing and better use of the region’s biodiversity could eventually match the money to be made from ranching, mining and logging.

Displacing a development model built on agribusiness expansion also will be very difficult in a country where the industry has close ties to political power, Nobre said.

But Amazon researchers say the need for a shift in development models is obvious.

With forest losses surging, threatening to spark runaway climate change, “we need a zero-deforestation policy,” Nobre said.

Fábio Zuker is the author of The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon. He is a writer of essays, chronicles, and reports. He holds a master’s degree from Paris’s School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences and is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of São Paulo

This article was produced by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Visit them at https://news.trust.org/

Since 2000, Brazil has doubled its total area of soy plantation to 36 million hectares and become the world’s largest producer. This expansion has erased vast swathes of forest and other habitats in some of the country’s most biodiverse regions.

About 75% of the soy produced globally is used as animal feed, and a large proportion of soy imported to Europe goes to chicken and pig farms. As a result, the future of the rainforest and savannas of Brazil – not to mention the biodiversity and carbon storage they support – depends on the contents of dinner tables worldwide.

The connection between meat, soy and deforestation might be invisible to consumers, but that link is well known by those in the business of producing and trading both products. Together with colleagues, we investigated this supply chain to find out what’s preventing businesses from halting habitat destruction in the Cerrado of Brazil, a tropical savanna where soy agriculture is making inroads.

A Lucrative Industry

The savannas of the Cerrado surround the westerly borders of the Amazon rainforest. Much of the ongoing deforestation and habitat clearing here is legal – landholders are permitted to deforest up to 80% of their land for agriculture. Clearly, solving this problem isn’t a matter of weeding out offenders.

When we spoke with a local association of soy producers, they said that regulation compels them to reserve between 20% and 35% of the Cerrado for nature, but that it’s hard to achieve. Asking them to improve on this without compensation would apparently only elicit complaints, and could make landholders more likely to clear habitats from their property while the law still allowed them.

Making demands on Brazilian producers to stop deforesting their land because it troubles European consumers evoked Brazil’s colonial past, some argued, and threatened their rights. Soy is seen as a path to national development. Any rules imposed from abroad that threaten this are likely to make matters worse.

Why not compensate people in the Cerrado for producing soy without deforestation? Well, it’s not clear who should pay for it. Separating deforestation-free soy from other products would increase the cost for companies sourcing and exporting the soy.

While European retailers sign agreements to end deforestation in their supply chains, implementing them depends on producers and traders cooperating. Retailers argue that passing the cost onto consumers by increasing the price of products like pork is a dead end too.

Soy’s role in the meat industry is unfamiliar to most people browsing supermarket aisles, so how can consumers be convinced to pay more for a sustainable product they might not understand the benefit of?

Growing soy on deforested land is a very profitable business for those involved, from land speculators looking for cheaper plots at the forest frontier, to the growers and distributors of soy, to the banks financing it. The indigenous communities displaced by expanding farmland are the clear losers. If they fight back, they might be killed.

Such a lucrative business can only be made sustainable if there is a financial case for it. Right now, there isn’t. Soy producers are well organized with political clout, and they demand equal partnership in the transition to sustainability, rather than having green rules imposed on them.

Global Cooperation for Local Solutions

Commodities pass between countries and markets in a dense web of exchanges. Data tools are getting better at separating these to reveal the companies and consumer countries linked to deforestation. This recently helped France to reject Brazilian soy, a move which increases pressure on Jair Bolsonaro’s government but might mean producers simply supply other markets with lower standards.

Helping soy producers comply with national laws, such as preserving habitats on at least 20% of their property, could help build trust between producers and the people and organizations demanding deforestation-free soy.

This might not sound very ambitious, but even small improvements have been difficult in Brazilian soy agriculture. The Bolsonaro government has slashed the budget for environmental inspectors and signaled to some producers that it’s reluctant to enforce national laws.

Supporting partnerships between national and state government, and local and international organizations who want to uphold Brazil’s own standard could create the necessary trust for enabling bigger changes.

Another option is encouraging farmers to produce on degraded land, rather than seek to convert new forest. Research shows that the amount of land where forest has been cleared could be used to double current soy production. But growing crops on degraded land is actually more expensive than starting it on forested land.

This is where international initiatives can help. The UN Environment Program and other partners have launched the Responsible Commodities Facility to provide low-interest credit lines to Brazilian soy and corn farmers who commit to using degraded pasture and avoid clearing forests and native grassland for agriculture.

Solutions like this require people in Europe to think beyond their needs – a juicy chicken leg produced without the guilt of deforestation – to consider the values and priorities of people who work to put that chicken on the table in the first place.

Angela Guerrero is a postdoctoral researcher in Environmental Governance at Stockholm University

Malika Virah-Sawmy is a visiting scientist, Humboldt University of Berlin

This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/demand-for-meat-is-driving-deforestation-in-brazil-changing-the-soy-industry-could-stop-it-151060

She ties a bag crafted from babassu palm fronds around her waist and walks out with a group of women from Quilombo São Caetano de Matinha (a Brazilian settlement made up of 200 runaway slave descendants), to the palm groves surrounding their community. There, where the northern edge of the Cerrado savanna blends with the Amazon rainforest, the women gather basketsful of babassu nuts — small, brown oblongs, resembling coconuts.

Later, Trindade Mendes takes each fist-sized nut she’s gathered and, with the grace of someone who has repeated the same motion thousands of times over five decades, cracks it open to extract the half-dozen or so kernels within. These she sells to a cooperative that separates the oil for use in cooking or beauty products. The babassu harvest lasts six months, and the money earned must support her family for an entire year.

But this August, Trindade Mendes wasn’t preparing for the babassu harvest season. Instead, she was in Brasília taking part for the first time in the “Daisies’ March,” Latin America’s largest demonstration organized by female rural workers that happens every 3-4 years.

There, amid the dust, shouting and clamor, the unique hats of the “coconut breakers” could be seen streaming in and out of the vendor exhibit hall, and to and from the temporary camp that housed the roughly 100,000 women attending from across Brazil.

Trindade Mendes took to the streets this year to protest threats to herself, her livelihood and to her traditional way of life: especially the increasing violence directed at coconut breakers, and the ongoing privatization of the common land on which babassu groves grow.

“Before we lived free, went out at night, and during the day. We were not afraid,” she says. “Now, they are taking away everything. The only things that have rights are cattle and agribusiness.”

“We suffer and fight for our survival”

Babassu palms grow naturally along the sweeping ecotone arc at the Amazon-Cerrado biome junction covering more than 25 million hectares (96,526 square miles), mainly in the northern Brazilian states of Piauí, Maranhão, Tocantins and Pará.

Known as quebradeiras de coco babaçu, or coconut breakers, women like Trindade Mendes depend on the babassu palms for their traditional livelihoods and their identity — and have done so for generations.

While some palm nuts grow and are harvested on land owned by small agricultural producers, most flourish on common lands held by the Brazilian government — and increasingly claimed by private landowners — with the nuts collected by landless women between September and February.

The quebradeiras are recognized nationally as one of Brazil’s “traditional peoples and communities,” a legally recognized designation that applies to groups with distinct forms of social organization whose traditional sustainable use of natural resources and land is a condition for their cultural, social, religious, ancestral and economic existence.

However, in a country where agriculture makes up almost a quarter of the GDP, and land concentration among rural elites is at an all-time high, agribusiness claims made on the commons are increasingly in conflict with long-time uses by traditional communities.

Explosive expansion by industrial agribusiness, planting crops for international export, has not only reduced the amount of babassu grown along the Amazon-Cerrado ecotone, it has also fenced off lands where the palms still thrive, restricting access to the 400,000 coconut breakers, reducing their income and threatening their traditional livelihood in one of the poorest regions of Brazil.

The way things are going, “In less than ten years we will have no more babassu to remove the fruit and ensure our survival,” states Dona Cledeneuza Maria Bizerra Oliveira, the regional coordinator for the Interstate Movement of Babassu Nut Breakers, or the MIQCB as abbreviated in Portuguese.

Deforestation and enclosure of the commons aren’t the only escalating threats; the women also report increased physical intimidation, sexual assault, pesticide pollution and even electrocution.

“We suffer and fight for our survival,” Maria dos Santos, a 67-year-old Maranhão coconut breaker said. “There are electric fences in the field and in the woods. Sometimes to gather the coconut, we have to put a hat over our heads, crawl on the ground, go under the wire, and go back through the fence. It is an arduous, very big struggle that the breakers face against the farmers.”

Several women have been killed or disabled by electric fences which have been installed by agribusiness to stop the coconut breakers from entering once commonly held land, according to newspaper reports and testimonies of women.

The state government acknowledged that “Maranhão is a state of great territorial proportions and historically marked by land conflicts.” However, “within its constitutional competence, [Maranhão] has sought to protect the traditional communities existing in the state with the development of policies in the area of conflict prevention and combat, valorization of rural production of family farming, preservation of popular knowledge and promotion of racial equality.”

According to the Maranhão government, policies and initiatives are in place to address conflicts, including the State Commission for the Prevention of Violence in the Countryside and in the City (COECV), the Quilombola Table for Land and Land Issues of the Institute of Colonization and Lands of Maranhão (Iterma), a police subdivision specializing in Racial Crimes, Intolerance Crimes and Agrarian Conflicts.

Maranhão has also launched “Operation Baixada Livre,” which inspects for, and removes, illegal electric fences inside the Baixada Maranhense Environmental Protection Area (APA) — covering 1,775,035 hectares (4,386,208 acres) in 32 municipalities in the northern part of the state.

The Federation of Agriculture and Livestock of Maranhão, FAEMA, which represents farmers and rural producers and is a member of the Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock (CNA), did not respond for comment.

Conflicts Multiply in Matopiba

While public attention has long focused on Amazon deforestation caused by Brazil’s encroaching agricultural frontier, little notice has been paid to the staggering loss of native vegetation in the Cerrado biome, which has proceeded at a far higher rate as its unique biodiversity has been cut down, burnt and plowed under to make way for soy, corn, eucalyptus, cattle and other agricultural commodities.

Between 2000 and 2014, the Cerrado lost 2.5 times more native vegetation than the Amazon. And in recent years, the rate of native vegetation loss in the Cerrado has been up to 5 times higher than in the Amazon. More than half of the Cerrado biome’s 200 million hectares (789,600 square miles) is already gone.

And while coconut breaker livelihoods have been under threat from commons agricultural encroachment for decades, the squeeze in recent years has been felt more severely largely due to government efforts to develop the northern part of the savanna, now known as “Matopiba.”

That acronym was coined by agribusiness and the government, utilizing the first two letters for Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia, states that also contain some of the last large intact remnants of the worlds’ most biodiverse tropical savanna, but a region that includes few parks to protect that diversity. Soy expansion in Matopiba has been higher than any other part of the Cerrado in recent decades, increasing by 253 percent from 2000-2014.

It is along the northwestern border of Matopiba that the majority of Babassu stands are located, an estimated 18 million hectares (69,5000 square miles), according to Alfredo Wagner, an Amazonas State University anthropologist.

Advocates for the coconut breakers note that much agribusiness destruction of babassu, and the denial of access to Cerrado common lands, is illegal. “Because of the privatization of land, women are being cut off from accessing land that they constitutionally have the right to access,” Anny Linhares, coordinator of traditional lands for ITERMA, a Maranhão state institute responsible for land titling, told Globo Rural in a video interview.

Because Babassu stands can survive a wide range of disturbances, such as fire, they can often be found growing in monospecific, or pure stands, dominating the landscape. Historically they have been integrated by farmers into pastureland or agroforestry systems, but the onset of mechanized industrial agriculture has eroded this practice.

The Matopiba region, referred by the Brazilian government as the “last agricultural frontier in the world,” now produces 10 percent of Brazil’s crops, a statistic expected to soar if the government gets its way. A federal presidential decree in May 2015 made the Matopiba Agricultural Development Plan (MADP) official.

It is the brainchild of Kátia Abreu, former president of the ultraconservative Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock (CNA), who was the governor of Tocantins until 2014, when she became the federal minister of agriculture. The plan was created to guide federal projects and actions in the region, focusing specifically on agricultural development.

However, MADP has been heavily critiqued for not meeting the requirements of global agreements such as prior consultation under the International Labor Organization’s ILO Article 169, and for not including in its governance body any environmental or social representation from the Cerrado’s many diverse traditional groups, including the coconut breakers.

In November 2015, a group of 40 civil society organizations, including MIQCB, which represents a large percentage of coconut breakers, wrote an open letter to Brazilian Society and the Presidency, arguing that the Matopiba agricultural development plan will “promote even greater destruction of life and exclusion of Cerrado people, reinforcing the growth of the rural exodus, the increase of poverty and the invisibility of populations existing in the territory.”

The Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (Mapa) replied that babassu breakers are part of its Bioeconomy Brazil – Sociobiodiversity Program, which promotes income generation and quality of life improvement through its bioeconomics efforts.

“In the specific case of babassu, a partnership with the Osvaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) allows the insertion of traditional peoples and communities into the value chains of babassu oil and medicinal and herbal products. Opportunity mapping actions are carried out, as well as training of farmers in production processes.”

However, the ministry added that “It is important to note that it is not up to Mapa to oversee labor and safety issues mentioned.”

Suzano: a Case Study

It’s not only soy and cattle devouring the Cerrado biome; tree plantations, most notably eucalyptus, are also a significant cash crop in conflict with traditional communities.

One of the most publicized fights between traditional peoples and agribusiness in Matopiba involves the Suzano pulp and paper mill in Imperatriz, Maranhão’s second largest city. The mill opened in 2014 and has an annual production capacity of 1.65 million tons of pulp and 60,000 tons of toilet paper. That demand has prompted quick conversion of native vegetation to eucalyptus plantations over the surrounding area.

“Suzano, with its plantings, devours the babassu. To plant that [eucalyptus] tree, that is not sustainable for anything,” says Maria do Socorro Teixeira Lima, who lives just south of the Ciriaco Extractive Reserve, created to preserve babassu stands for use by traditional communities, “The palm tree is sustainable, as is the nature that made it, and [as is] our own work.”

According to quebradeira Rosalva Gomes, when the paper mill was constructed many coconut breakers not only lost access to large stands of babassu, but they were also impacted by increased rates of sexual violence due to the influx of mostly male agribusiness workers.

Suzano denies these claims saying that “Such allegations are unfounded and do not correspond to the practices adopted by Suzano.” Furthermore, the company “values its strict compliance with current legislation, which guarantees coconut breakers and their families the right of free access and communal use of babassu.”

According to a Mongabay investigation published last year, Brazil’s eucalyptus plantations are primarily owned by, or sell their trees via contract to, Suzano Pulp & Paper, a mega-company. The firm recently acquired Brazilian eucalyptus pulp producer Fibria to become the largest eucalyptus pulp producer in the world, overseeing an area of eucalyptus plantations the size of the U.S. state of New Jersey.

And Brazilian eucalyptus is only set to grow. Under the Paris Climate Agreement, the government pledged 12 million hectares (46,332 square miles) in reforestation. However, a new paper published in Nature shows that much of this forest regrowth will not come as natural forest, but rather be accomplished via new plantations, including eucalyptus, accounting for 82 percent of Brazil’s reforestation goal.

One big buyer of Brazilian pulp is Kimberly-Clark, which sources significant eucalyptus in Brazil from Fibria and Suzano to make tissue and paper towels under brand names that include Scott, Cottonelle, Kleenex and Andrex. The Brazilian National Investment Bank (BNDES), one of the world’s biggest development banks, owns significant stakes in both Suzano and Fibria — economic clout that puts the coconut breakers at great disadvantage.

Kimberly-Clark did not respond to a request for comment.

“She is the mother of everyone”

Eucalyptus, mostly native to Australia, is a thirsty plant, sucking vast amounts of water out of soils and aquifers, giving back massive export profits, but little else in return.

Walk through a eucalyptus plantation in Brazil and you will notice a peculiar silence — the lack of water and biodiversity, along with eucalyptus leaves that are toxic to many animals, results in few insects, birds or endemic plants living among the exotic trees.

The number of uses for exotic eucalyptus — made mostly into bathroom tissue and paper — stands in meager contrast to the many uses for the native Babassu by traditional communities. The average palm begins bearing fruit when it is 15 to 19 years old, and doesn’t stop producing until around age fifty.

It is “like a woman,” explains coconut breaker dos Santos. “We take the nut, make the oil and milk for the children and grandchildren’s breakfast, and the shell makes charcoal. From the bark we make flour of the mesocarp [the fleshy part of the fruit]. All of this is [provided by] the babassu coconut.”

More than this, the babassu is emblematic of the struggle by traditional rural women to maintain their identity, traditional way of life, livelihood, and the environment itself — with a vital emphasis on their roles as women:

“The palm tree is not only the mother of the breakers, it is the mother of the Brazilian people,” declares Lima, who has been breaking babassu nuts since she was a child. “The last air we breathe is from her leaves. She is the mother of everyone, the guardian of the forest!”

Rural Women United

Today, the quebradeiras are federally protected under Decree 6.040/2007 — the law that guarantees protection of Brazil’s many traditional communities and peoples, including quilombolas, Amazon rubber-tappers, and small-scale fishing communities. And like other traditional agroextractivist groups, the coconut breakers have built their social and political identity around their trade.

“We fight to conserve [the babassu trees] against the farmers who want to take the land,” explains dos Santos, “Without land we have no palm tree. And without the palm we can’t live.”

The majority of coconut breakers remain organized around the MIQCB, founded in 1991. That organization quickly became a voice for rural women at a time when they didn’t even have the right to vote in union assemblies, or discuss labor demands specific to women.

One of the greatest successes of the movement came with the establishment of a municipal “Free Babassu Law,” first implemented in Lago do Junco in Maranhão in 1997. In municipalities where the Free Babassu Law is upheld, rural women can enter private farms without negotiation, and farmers are prohibited from cutting and burning, or using pesticides, on the palms.

But this initiative’s protections success remain limited. Of Maranhão’s 217 municipalities just 15 currently have laws giving free access to coconut breakers. MIQCB’s goal is to make the “Free Babassu Law” a national one.

But while a bill to that effect was introduced in the Brazilian House of Deputies in 2007, the legislation has yet to achieve passage — a prospect grown less likely under the Jair Bolsonaro administration and bancada ruralista, agribusiness lobby that dominates the congress.

“The president [Bolsonaro] comes and says he won’t do anything [for us], only acts for agribusiness,” says Trindade Mendes. “Before, the land was all common; we lived and worked freely, and did what we wanted. Not now. Now we are caged in more than cattle.”

Today, the coconut breakers are in something akin to a state of siege, with MIQCB presently monitoring over 30 conflicts related to babassu access. And those battles are only likely to multiply as global investment in Matopiba focuses almost exclusively on cash crops for export. But that harsh reality has only hardened the resolve of coconut breakers in a fight for their livelihood, identity and constitutional rights.

“I tell the younger people, ‘what rights are you going to have?’ They are taking everything away. There is almost nothing left, just the fight,” says Trindade Mendes. But for her, and other quebradeiras de coco babaçu, giving up isn’t an option. “We were born breaking coconut, and we will die breaking coconut!”

This article appeared originally in Mongabay – https://news.mongabay.com

In its recent report, the UN and the International Panel of Climate Change estimates that global food production is responsible for 21-37% of “anthropogenic emissions”. What lies behind this Anthropogen that treats humankind in general as responsible for the climate change emergency? The destruction of the Amazon is in fact the consequence of a geopolitical conflict, connecting Brazil to China, China to the US – and Brazil, as a member of the Mercosur, to the EU.

When it comes to the climate change crisis, the humble soybean has a lot to answer for. Not the bean itself, of course, but the human production and consumption related to it, and more particularly the national politics surrounding it.

When President Trump declared trade war on China, one of the direct impacts was a Chinese response placing 25% tariffs on soy imports from the USA. At the same time, after the election of President Bolsonaro in Brazil, previous legal limitations on deforestation of the Amazon and expansion into the Cerrado, in significant part for soy production, were relaxed.

As the deceptively named Environment Minister, Ricardo Salles, said in a recent interview for the Financial Times (23.08.2019), laws were too restrictive, and commercial development must instead “monetize” the Amazon. Turn fires into dollars.

The result is a perfect climate-change storm. Brazil had already overtaken the USA as the main exporter of soy in the second decade of the twenty first century. This trade war has stimulated a great leap forward in exports to China, already by far the largest importer of soy from Brazil – over 85% of Brazil’s exports by 2018.

Two climate-change denying Presidents, plus growing demand for soy as animal feed for China’s growing meat consumption, plus deforestation and land conversion in Brazil. Result? An explosive climate change acceleration event.

While this event is significant in its own right, it also challenges how we need to think about the nature of the climate change crisis. Two highly influential recent publications in Nature and The Lancet identifying the greatest risks of transgressing planetary boundaries for the sustainability of human (and non-human) life affirmed strikingly that “food production is the largest cause of global environmental change”.

It accounts for up to 37% of total global greenhouse gases, two and a half times more that total global transport. The urgency of addressing land use and food production and consumption has just been highlighted by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change report, Climate Change and Land. It appeared only days before the news of the burning Amazon hit the headlines.

Moreover, world population is set to rise from nearly 7 billion to 9 billion. At least as significant, there are dramatic shifts in the food people consume, particularly transitions to greater meat consumption.

So, food perhaps presents the biggest but also the most intractable threat of the climate change crisis. In all the National Plans for climate change mitigation and underpinning the 2016 Paris Agreement, food production and consumption was marginalized, or even in many cases omitted. This potato was politically too hot to handle in many national contexts.

So, is this a crisis brought about by the human species in aggregate: The Anthropogen of the IPCC? Or, as many on the left have also argued, is this crisis a product of global capitalism, a general economic engine of limitless expansion and appropriation of nature: The Capitalogen of climate change crisis? Present profit before future planet.

The Trump-Bolsonaro, Brazil-USA-China, climate change crisis event illustrates why we need better social science than either of these globalist accounts, and certainly why we need to pay more attention to national politics in any analysis.

Food production and consumption are especially useful for forcing us to think directly of how different societies are endowed with different environmental resources, as an almost taken for granted, but nonetheless formative background for economic development, and for the national politics of that development.

Societies, and different political economies, differ enormously in how they generate greenhouse gases, how they consume energy, food, water, and how they trade internationally, with different climate change impacts. They also face different political challenges in confronting the climate change emergency. Not every country has the Amazon in its back garden.

Before I started my research into food production and consumption in China, I had not fully appreciated the scarcity of its agricultural land, in spite of its extensive national territory. It has less quality agricultural land per capita than even the UK, and a fraction of that of the USA or Brazil.

Its water resources for food production are even scarcer, a quarter of the world average. Within this environmental context, and following a long history of famines, the politics of food production was dominated by the twin imperative of food security and food self-sufficiency.

Following the death of Mao Tse Tung and the market socialist reforms of Deng Xiaoping, agricultural intensification was combined with a major fragmentation of land ownership under the Household Responsibility System. Egalitarian distribution of leasehold land to 250 million peasant farmers, market incentives, and huge increase in the use of chemical fertilizers aimed to satisfy the twin imperative.

As a consequence, from being a net importer of nitrogen phosphate fertilizer to a net exporter, China now uses more than 30% of the world total, more than the whole of Northern Europe and the USA put together. With peasants given subsidies to use fertilizers, the amount of fertilizer per hectare is many times that of Europe.

Both Chinese experts and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization recognize the result: an ecological catastrophe. Overuse of nitrogen fertilizer is a major source of nitrogen oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas. So, apart from acidification of the soil and eutrophication of surface water, rice production in particular contributes significantly to China’s greenhouse gas emissions.

And now, as agricultural productivity itself was threatened, China recognizes the problem, and has come up with its distinctive political solutions, a limitation of the use of nitrogen phosphates to a 1% increase until 2020, and a cap on total use thereafter.

This brief account exemplifies the need for the concept of sociogenesis of climate change. A distinctive political economy, operating within its specific land and water resource environment, generates a climate change crisis and then its own characteristic mitigation policies.

This is not a dynamic of a socially amorphous Anthropogen or a globalist Capitalogen in interaction with Nature in general. This is a distinctively Chinese dynamic, in its own environmental context.

Then, at the turn of the century, China recognized that limits of its own land-water resources were such that it could no longer equate food security with food self-sufficiency. Especially to meet the demand for increasing meat consumption, pork in particular, for a population previously unable to afford it, China decisively shifted to importing soy beans from Brazil to feed its expanding pig production.

Enter Brazil. Although Europe had led the way in using soy protein to replace animal protein after the BSE crisis, China followed on to become its biggest market. Brazil’s climate change crisis is almost the opposite to China’s.

From the time of the military dictatorship (1964-1975) there has been a politically driven process of expanding agricultural production through extensification, converting uncultivated land into agricultural land, in an inexorable progression from timber extraction, to cattle and soy production.

This led to the earlier “arc of fire”. Brazil is now the largest exporter of beef, poultry, coffee, orange juice, and, overtaking the USA, soy. Where China’s agricultural land was shrinking, Brazil’s was increasing by 5 million hectares every year since the 1990s, particularly into the Legal Amazon.

In Brazil, big multinational capital, much of it Brazilian, is certainly involved, dominating agricultural production. The top 1% of farms with over 1000 hectares occupy over 45% of cultivated land.

The Roncador Group has a farm of 150,000 hectares, the Amaggi Group Tanguro farm, 80,000 hectares. JBS is the top global meat producer and exporter in the world, and the total Brazilian beef herd now exceeds 200 million.

It is calculated that the methane production of this herd from enteric fermentation exceeds the CO2 emissions from Brazilian land clearance and deforestation.

This is the distinctive Brazilian climate change crisis, not a generic Capitalogen, but a politically fostered national economy in interaction with a unique resource environment. And, until the arrival of Bolsonaro, a distinctive set of policies was put in place to limit land extensification: the registration of land-ownership, pioneering satellite tracking of land incursions, moratoriums on soy and beef production on any newly converted land.

These mitigation policies succeeded in radically reducing, but far from eliminating Amazonian deforestation, and significant ecologies, notably the Cerrado in Mato Grosso, were much less protected.

One more sociogenic contrast. In both China and Brazil, with increasing per capita income, there has been a transition to eating more meat. China now outstrips the USA for pork consumption, and in overall meat consumption had reached an annual per capita quantity of 52.4 kilos in 2011.

Brazil has overtaken the European average, with 92.6 kilos, with beef the premier meat with its much higher GHG impact. None approach Trump beef steak America, with an average of 135 kilos for all meats.

At the opposite extreme, India with its Hindu nationalist vegetarianism, persecuting Muslim beef eaters, has the lowest per capita meat consumption, with a less pronounced transition to more people eating more meat. Cultures of consumption – not individual consumer choices – have major climate change consequences.

Out of sociogenic contrasts come sociogenic connections. Global food trade is not from anywhere to anywhere. Trade flows are highly structured, and in the case of China and Brazil, opposites attract. China’s lack of land and water resources creates the demand for Brazil’s abundance.

China’s politics of trade condition this trade: it imports only whole soybeans, for its own animal feed industry to process. A deal between Brazil and China to trade in national currencies escapes the dominant dollar as reserve currency for international trade. This is a specific nation-to-nation connection between production and consumption. From Brexit, as we know only too well, trade connections are politically made and un-made.

One of the major limitations of the UN brokered Paris Agreement with its national plans for climate change mitigation is that it only treats nations as GHG producers. Trade, and the connection between producers and consumers, is a sustainability black hole.

As has now become only too clear from President Macron’s finger-pointing at Bolsonaro, the trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur failed to enshrine legal commitments on conserving the Amazon or the Cerrado. The soy connection between China and Brazil shows that nation-to-nation trade is a critical dynamic of the sociogenic climate change emergency.

This takes us back to the beginning. Trump and Bolsonaro have just pressed the accelerator on that dynamic. Economies are political, and the politics of economies are driving the climate change emergency. Combating climate change involves contesting those politics within our different societal and environmental contexts.

One more reason to be European in a European Union context, engaging in the politics of our shared environmental resources and for legally enforceable sustainable international trade. Or go down the route of environmental catastrophe with the Trump-Bolsonaro politics of planetary destruction.

Mark Harvey is Emeritus Professor at the Center for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation at the University of Essex. He is also Honorary Professor, Department of Sociology, Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester.

His latest book is Inequality and Democratic Egalitarianism. Marx’s economy and beyond and other essays published by Manchester University Press.

This article appeared originally in Open Democracy – https://www.opendemocracy.net/