Land cleared for planting as world demand rockets
The dry, yellowing fields stretch out to the horizon, past shiny new silos, their polished tin gleaming in the noon sunshine. Beside freshly hoed fields stand new tractors and ploughs. This is the Amazon, a vast lung producing 20% of the earth’s oxygen, and home to 30% of all plant and animal species. It is so immense that it would swallow Europe in full and three more Englands besides. The rainforest is shrinking at a rate that is staggering environmentalists. Around 25,000 sq km (10,000 sq miles) disappeared last year – an area about the size of Belgium. Huge swaths of the land are being transformed not only by illegal logging companies and cattle ranchers, but also by a newer invader, the soya bean. For many the extraordinary expansion of this bean – used not only for its oil and food for humans but also as feed for cattle – is the new front in the battle for the Amazon.
Cargill, the US food giant, has spotted the potential and built a vast soya terminal on a river bank in the town. The company is being challenged by the Brazilian government’s environment agency, which is concerned that the terminal was built without an environmental impact report; but the evidence points to an escalation in development all around.
Cristovan Sena, a government forestry engineer, said: “Native primary forest is being destroyed at a much faster rate than was achieved by the loggers. In our region we will soon see the irreversible substitution of the rainforest by a landscape of grains… Saying that growers will respect the 20% limit is nonsense. You just have to look at what is being done now to see they don’t respect legal reserves.” The soya growers are following the loggers into land that was forested, and there have been cases of small farmers suffering threats or actual violence when they refuse to sell.
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