In its drive to become the world leader in agriculture, Brazil is sacrificing a vast stretch of savannah
IN THE waters around the Amazonian port of Santarém fishing is just a matter of casting one’s net and hauling in another bounteous catch from the world’s mightiest river.
Even so, times are hard for local fisherman Anselmo Cardoso who now rarely goes out and when he does often has to dump his catch because he cannot find a buyer, despite slashing prices down to his costs.
“There are just too many people these days trying to live off fishing. Many who had to give up logging took it up because in these waters it is easy,” he says.
Cardoso should know as he is one of this new generation of fishermen. For 25 years he ran a restaurant serving up hearty portions of fish stew, rice and manioc to loggers on Marajó, an island half the size of Ireland in the mouth of the Amazon, several days’ boat journey downriver.
“But then the government came and ended the logging industry. First they shut down the illegal lumber mills and then they stopped renewing environmental permits for most of the legal ones,” he says.
“Overnight they ended the whole timber culture.”
He headed back to his hometown and invested his savings in a new boat, the Halley II, but too many others left jobless by the logging crackdown had the same idea.
“It is right to protect the rainforest but we are in this richest of regions and we live in poverty,” he says ruefully.
Stories such as Cardoso’s heard across the Brazilian Amazon are testimony to a dramatic turn in the region’s history. For decades a great migratory wave of miners, loggers and farmers cleared large swathes of the world’s biggest rainforest giving birth to wild boom towns and sparking international fears that the destruction of the world’s green lung would accelerate global warming.
But three years ago the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called a halt. The rate of deforestation has collapsed while the amount of timber extracted from the region has halved in the last five years.
“It is early in this process and there are still regions of concern but there are reasons to be optimistic,” says Raquel Carvalho of Greenpeace’s Amazon campaign.
Despite the cautious optimism about the Amazon’s prospects, many environmentalists are still reluctant to give Lula’s government a green seal of approval. The reason lies to the south of the rainforest in a region called the cerrado – the Brazilian savannah.
Covering over a fifth of the country, this vast region is being destroyed at over twice the rate of the Amazon by the inexorable expansion of Brazil’s world-beating agricultural industry. In the cerrado the agribusiness sector faces few of the environmental restrictions now in place to protect the rainforest.
By law, landowners in the Amazon must preserve between 50 and 80 per cent of their property as native forest. In the cerrado this requirement is no higher than 35 per cent and often as low as 20 per cent.
While Lula’s government has clamped down on large-scale farming in the Amazon it has provided cheap credit, technical expertise and other incentives for those pushing ever deeper into the cerrado.
Brazil’s government has sought to reassure the international community that the Amazon will not be affected by the country’s rise to become the world’s leading agricultural superpower by pointing out the expansion of the farming frontier is occurring in the cerrado. But this brings little reassurance to those worried about Brazil’s carbon emissions, largely the result of deforestation.
“The importance of the cerrado as a carbon store is greatly underestimated because much of it is underground,” says Isabel Figueiredo of the Institute of Society, Population and Nature, a Brazilian organisation campaigning to protect the cerrado.
“The native flora has very deep roots. As the cerrado is being cleared at over twice the rate of the rainforest it is possible that carbon emissions from its destruction are equal to or greater than those in the Amazon.”
And what happens in the cerrado will, environmentalists warn, have a negative impact even on a preserved rainforest. With the savannah’s scrub forest and thick grasses being cleared to make way for soy, cotton and eucalyptus plantations the soil’s ability to absorb water and hold it is being compromised causing flooding in the rainy season and increasing drought in the dry months with dire consequences.
“The levels of humidity in the air in the cerrado are important for rainfall in the Amazon. Deforestation in the cerrado will affect the amount of rain in the rainforest. Also, important tributaries of the Amazon river rise in the cerrado and if you have less water flowing into the Amazon you will obviously affect the rainforest,” warns Figueiredo.
The rapid expansion of agriculture into the cerrado under the Lula administration has disappointed not just environmentalists but also land reform campaigners. In opposition Lula’s Workers Party vowed to tackle the country’s unequal land settlement, winning it the backing of the country’s land reform campaign, the biggest social movement in South America.
But in power the hopes of land reformers have been disappointed with the progress of settling the landless peasant little improved under the Lula administration.
“We had hoped for a country where land would not just be a commodity but would also have a social function. But Lula’s agricultural policy has not been for peasants but instead about producing grains for export,” says Dirceu Fumagalli, national co-ordinator of the Pastoral Land Commission, a land reform organisation linked to the Catholic Church.
The expansion of agriculture into the cerrado has largely come in the shape of huge holdings often made up of thousands of hectares owned by investors from other regions in Brazil who provide limited local employment. While the Lula administration has directed more money to assist traditional family farming the amount is just one-fifteenth of that handed over to the agribusiness sector, says Fumagalli.
Rural regions are overrepresented in Brazil’s congress and the farming caucus is powerful. Flush with funds from the farming boom it expects to be further strengthened in Sunday’s election leaving environmental campaigners worried about renewed assaults on the few restrictions in place to protect regions like the cerrado.
Of the three leading candidates running to replace Lula only Marina Silva has placed the environment at the heart of her election campaign by calling for a rethink of Brazil’s agricultural policy. But at 10 per cent in the polls she has little chance of winning.
The two frontrunners, Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party and José Serra of the opposition Social Democrats, are both development-minded economists who analysts say are unlikely to impede the expansion of one of Brazil’s main export industries.
So while recent years have seen great strides in preserving the rainforest the prospects are bleak for the cerrado with some estimates predicting Brazil’s native savannah will have largely been replaced by agriculture by 2030.
“The rainforest awakens the imagination of people while the threat to the cerrado is little reported,” says Figueiredo.
“It is very difficult to be the cerrado in a country that has the Amazon rainforest.”
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