Actually, much of the land in Brazil that's being used for biofuels was previously deforested for logging and cattle. Of the remainder, yes, some of it is biofuels, but the vast majority is simply logging, with agriculture (both crops and livestock) a distant second.
Biofuels produced by growing plants is limited by the available biomass. Brazil powers it's automobiles with biofuel, but not ships. And more importantly, Brazil is a huge country with massive amounts of arable land.
Many sources, spanning many years, and both private (such as newspapers or NGOs) as well as governmental (e.g. the UN), have found that an overwhelming percentage of razed rainforest in Brazil was used for cattle farming [1][2], with a large part of the remainder going to large-scale soy farms, and a tiny bit for small-scale subsistence farming.
How land is utilized has a huge impact. You'd think Brazil's rainforests would be on incredibly fertile land, but the soil actually stinks for agriculture. Brazilian farmers use Swidden (a.k.a. Slash-and-Burn) agriculture. They clear the land and generally only get a few useful growing seasons before the soil is infertile. Then they move on.
Land has more uses than agriculture of course. Forestry is huge. The amazon, were it sustainably logged instead of hastily burned, could supply a tremendous amount of lumber. Canada and Russia do have a lot of perma-frost in the far North, but an even larger portion of their uninhabited land is boreal forest. This land is far from useless even if much of it is not suitable for agriculture.
I agree it's necessary to force Brasil's hand to take some immediate action, but I just don't like these tactics. What else is in the news for similar type of reasons?
> Modern car fuel contains ethanol (10% in the EU).
Here at Brazil, ethanol is produced from sugarcane. And sugarcane farming is actually illegal in the Amazon. The President tried to make it legal, but fortunately his decree was suspended by the Judiciary [1].
I don't doubt there may exist a few illegal sugarcane farms in the Amazon, but given how huge sugarcane farming is in southeastern Brazil, I don't think any Amazon sugarcane would significantly contribute to Brazilian ethanol production.
> Soy culture is used to create a cheap protein feedstock for the meat industry.
Soy is more of an issue for Amazon than sugarcane. But, just as you said, it is used to feed cattle, and the main issue resides in the cattle. Cattleman in Amazon usually adopt the extensive breeding system, so lots of area are required to breed cattle.
The page you link shows 18% of Brazil's energy is from sugar cane (making ethanol, mixed with petrol in cars). This is very high comparex to most of the world.
Yes. Correct. Thank you @evgen. Brazil == soybeans mostly. Those slashed rainforest acres are being chopped with safrinha corn in mind. Those statements by the parent are an easy filter to someone not knowledgeable
The modern situation is different though. All those trees were used to bootstrap the current level of technological progress that Brazil doesn't need to do.
Ideally wealthier countries would purchase/subsidize these areas so they don't need to be logged
This is over 631 million hectares of land destined for preservation,
Equivalent to 48 European countries COMBINED.
Amazon is not just IN BRAZIL, but spans over 9 nations.
No, I am not saying that’s a “green light” for full on deforestation nor I am saying that Brazil is doing a the most fantastic job preserving it.
What I am saying is that Brazil IS doing something to preserve the Amazon AND other forest land such as “Serra do Mar” and that a coalition of funds/resources could help improve enforcement of the law in these Protected areas. This much more “attainable” or acceptable by the current Brazilian government, which is currently very nationalist and patriotic. (President is retired Army captain, very right wing)
Brazil would not part/sell with a piece of its national sovereign territory to anyone, even if it’s for a “greater good”, just as US would not sell the Tongass forest in Alaska or the Humboldt-Toiyabe in California/Nevada “for greater
good”
Every country has it’s share in controlling carbon emissions and global warming. No country should “outsource” their share of responsibility by enforcing environmental protection standards they are not willing to withhold themselves.
TL;DR: Brazil has some protections in place, could use some help, would not sell the Amazon because it’s part/territory of Brazil and 8 other countries.
Full disclosure: Brazilian by birth, American by choice
If you live in the U.S. and drive a car and eat meat, you are very unlikely eating illegally-raised Brazilian beef, or consuming illegally-mined Brazilian gold.
Most likely, you eat U.S.-raised beef and burn gasoline from oil that comes from the U.S. or Middle East. Surely you are adding to the global warming, but it has nothing to do with Amazonian forest being illegally cut.
In Brazil, most if not all cars run on ethanol [1]. The U.S. produce massive amounts of ethanol domestically [2] so, most likely, whatever gasoline you might be buying in the US, it's not using Brazilian ethanol, even though the U.S. does import some Brazilian ethanol [4], it's dwarfed by the domestic production [2].
U.S. beef is raised so efficiently that farmers manage to export it to Mexico an China, among other places [3], while receiving virtually no subsidies. You likely need to specifically look for gourmet Brazilian beef if you want to have a chance to taste a cow illegally raised on a pasture which used to be Amazonian forest.
That just isn’t true. Most arable land is used to grow animal feed. And maybe the Brazilian rainforests can’t be used for much which has economical value, only things like producing oxygen and being one of the richest and biodiverse ecosystems on earth, but I still think it would be better to try to preserve them instead of converting them to land for grazing.
This is so short-sighted and ignorant, it's hard to even read about. Brazilians should cherish their rainforest, legacy of millions of years of evolution, with wondrous biodiversity and an amazing carbon sink the planet desperately needs.
Instead, they're chopping and burning this vital carbon store to make room for beef production. This is so short sighted it's painful. We know beef has to be massively ramped down, it releases a ton of methane. Hopefully meat alternatives will render all these cattle farms obsolete.
Then what? Once we figure out artificial meat, all of these ranchers lose economically, and the million year old ecosystem is already destroyed. Sickening.
"The cattle sector of the Brazilian Amazon, incentivized by the international beef and leather trades,[2] has been responsible for about 80% of all deforestation in the region,[3] or about 14% of the world's total annual deforestation, making it the world's largest single driver of deforestation.[4] By 1995, 70% of formerly forested land in the Amazon, and 91% of land deforested since 1970, had been converted to cattle ranching.[5][6] Much of the remaining deforestation within the Amazon has resulted from farmers clearing land for small-scale subsistence agriculture[7] or mechanized cropland producing soy, palm, and other crops.[8]"
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