Deforestation and demand for cheap meat accelerate the Amazon rainforest’s destruction.
Story and photos By Anisa Abid
Spring 2008
As I look out my small window as the plane descends into the Amazon, I see we are flying just a few feet over a vast expanse of tall mountains and valleys, carpeted in a thick blanket of lush green. We dip in and out of the tufts of clouds floating above the canopy of the rainforest and my stomach drops, thinking we could touch the treetops at any moment. From my view, the green rolling mountains seem to stretch on forever. But the concept of forever paired with rainforest is as dreamlike as the view today. Indeed, looks are deceiving, for what is taking place down below is a harsh reality unseen.
The Amazon rainforest is vanishing at a frightening rate of more than 9,000 square miles a year, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Between August and December of 2007, the Brazilian Amazon lost 2,700 square miles of forest, according to the Associated Press. This reversal of what was a three-year decline in deforestation prompted the Brazilian government to swiftly increase the federal police and environmental agents that protect and monitor the rainforest.
Land use in the Amazon has rapidly increased due to a massive demand for agricultural products and beef. “Twenty-one percent of all beef is exported from the Brazilian Amazon,” said Robert Walker, a professor of geography at Michigan State University who has worked extensively in the region and studies the Amazon’s cattle economy.
After a ban on beef from areas containing mad cow disease in 2000, Brazil was in a good position to make a profit by exporting beef because the disease did not exist there. Farmers soon caught on and traded plows for cows.
“The reason [beef production] does so well, is because it’s the most stable [market], said Mark Cochrane, adjunct professor at Michigan State University’s Center for Global Change and Earth Observations who also studies land use in the Amazon.
“You can always get a good price for your beef, ” he said.
The biodiversity-rich rainforest that tourists come to see is being transformed, seemingly overnight, into a farming factory. It seeks to be a competitor in the world market for beef and other crops, like soybeans, in high demand. The result is a great loss of habitat as well as a loss in biodiversity that won’t soon recover.
The Brazilian government is trying to protect what it considers to be a jewel. Currently, 48 percent of the Amazon is protected in some manner. Protectiv measures include watching deforested areas to prevent people from planting crops or raising cattle, placing bans on new logging permits and fining those who buy anything produced on the deforested land. Despite these measures, illegal logging can be difficult to control and roads continue to be built throughout the rainforest. These roads lead to an increase in development, fires and forest fragmentation.
While 17 percent of the Brazilian Amazon is deforested, Cochrane thinks close to 30 percent of the remaining forest may be partially deforested or unsuitable for wildlife. “Nobody’s done the research…but undoubtedly, we wiped out a lot that we don’t know,” he said. The main culprits are logging, cattle ranching and the harvesting of soybean and other cash crops.
On the first day of my jungle trek through the Ecuadorian Amazon, known as “el Oriente,” we come to several clearings that span from a few meters wide to the size of a football field. One clearing is an indigenous corn farm that recently underwent a “slash and burn.” That happens when farmers cut down vegetation and burn the remains to regenerate the soil. This allows them to plant more crops after a harvest has used up the soil’s nutrients. The scorched earth beneath my feet and the bare land surrounding me is a rude awakening to the beautiful scenery.
Literature on slash and burn of rainforests says that soil becomes infertile after a period of time, making the loss of so much rainforest seem unnecessary and foolish. Walker disagrees. “That is grotesquely overstated,” he said, explaining that farmland can be used repeatedly for growing various crops.
Cochrane agrees that the process is efficient in recycling nutrients back into the soil. But he said after one to seven slash and burns, a farmer must abandon the site and return to it later. Native farmers use the land for cattle ranching only after it’s no longer useful for farming. Cattle ranchers are “just looking for profit” and slash and burn their land directly for cattle ranching, Walker said. This practice may be profitable, but is certainly not sustainable. It comes down to a conflict of values––protecting the rich biodiversity of plants and wildlife the rainforest sustains or making a short-term profit.
The selling of beef started as an internal trade but activity has been heightened with the development of transportation routes and the demand for beef free of mad-cow disease. The rise of globalization has created a situation in where competition is high for products both cheap and of good quality and that can be bought in large quantities. For a few cents less per burger, fast food companies can get meat from the Amazon instead of the U.S. or United Kingdom.
As my group approaches a small clearing, about the size of two tennis courts, a couple of chickens emerge from the bushes and chase each other across our path. I am astonished to find a small chicken farm in the middle of the jungle, but this would not be the only time I would meet a non-native farm animal in the wild, biodiverse Amazon.
Later that day, when floating down the Rio Napo with piranhas and caymans swimming beneath me, I am startled by a sudden and loud “mooooo”. I turn to see that I am within a few feet of a cow, grazing very close to the riverside, who makes her presence known to the strange thing floating in the river.
Though the deforestation rates in Ecuador’s Amazon are just as dismal as Brazil’s, the reasons are different. Cattle ranching is not profitable. When Ecuador abandoned its form of money (the sucre) for the dollar in 2000, exported products became comparatively more expensive than the other competing countries’ products. Oil production and homesteading have become the drivers behind the deforestation of Ecuador’s Amazon. It is the fastest rate of deforestation in South America.
Joseph Messina, assistant professor of geography at Michigan State University, explained that drastic changes to the rainforest occurred from the 1970’s to 2000, when homesteaders claimed the land. Most of the “indigenous” people in Ecuador’s Amazon (as they are often incorrectly referred to) are not actually natives, but mostly immigrants from the surrounding Andes Mountains, where there is little land to farm. They claim plots of land in the virgin rainforest and the government endows them with landownership after some years of residency. Messina says there are no official rules as to how long “some years” may be.
Land conflicts between ranchers in Brazil have been going on for a long time and have recently escalated. A big share of deforestation is done by large landholders threatened with land reform by the Brazilian government, said Steven Aldrich, a Michigan State University Ph.D. student who studies land conflicts in the Amazon. These farmers are conflicted by mixed messages from the government. They are required to keep 50 to 80 percent of their forest intact, but also must use their land or lose it. Researchers speculate that the conflicts cause more deforestation because ranchers want to clear land to show that they are using it so the government won’t take it away.
Back in the jungle, our group reaches a small expanse of protected jungle, part of the preserve owned by the resort that I am staying at. Everywhere we walk, butterflies in impossible hues of purple, yellows and blues dance in the streams of light piercing the forest canopy. Mushrooms litter the ground in all sizes, shapes and colors. Our guide passes us a ‘martini’- a neon pink upturned mushroom that looked astonishingly like a miniature martini glass. I wonder if the natives indulge in these martinis now and then.
More than one third of all species in the world live in the Amazon, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Exotic plants provide the indigenous people with medicine, shelter, food and dyes that can also be used for craft-making and selling to tourists. To think that the trees so rapidly cleared for profit could hold the cure for cancer, or be a remedy to a yet undiscovered illness, is upsetting. Trees in the Amazon live to be hundreds of years old and allow such rich biodiversity to thrive by providing canopy and habitat for flora and fauna. They fulfill the important job of absorbing carbon dioxide, a gas causing global warming. Cutting them down releases large amounts of this gas, and this fact brings more attention of scientists and policymakers to deforestation.
The beauty of the Amazon is enough of a treasure to protect in and of itself. Pairing that beauty with the forest’s utility leaves a strong case against destroying it to feed the world’s growing demand for food and products. It’s promising that the Brazilian government has stepped up its protection measures for the Amazon, but it remains unclear whether sustainability can exist in the Amazon rainforest.
Leaving the Amazon, the view from the plane remained just as beautiful but was this time paired with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, knowing the complex problems that exist. There seems to be no easy answer that would appease both those who want to preserve the natural beauty of the Amazon and those who rely on destroying it for their livelihood.
Anisa Abid is a first-year graduate student in the environmental journalism program at MSU. This is her first appearance in EJ. Contact Anisa at abidanis@msu.edu