Greenpeace study: Cattle Ranching claims 80% of Amazon Deforestation

Greenpeace Brazil has released a report at the World Social Forum in Belém showing that up to 80 percent of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest is due to an increase in raising cattle for human consumption.

Brazil has quickly become the largest exporter of beef in the world, but they are not satisfied with their current market share and plan to increase production. The plan flies in the face of their supposed commitment to tackle climate change. The country is currently the fourth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, 75% of which stem from deforestation.

Unfortunately, similar as in the United States, the government fully backs the agriculture industry with many politicians firmly in the pockets of agribusiness. They’ve even recently proposed legislation to prevent environmental groups from setting up in the Amazon.

However, with the economy moving how it is, expansion is becoming less and less of an option.


Further reading:
UN’s top climate scientist urges people to combat climate change by eating less meat.


Try going vegetarian in an attempt to help to ease climate warming.

Meat is murder on the environment

Listen to the Children

Too often we adults shun advice from children as too naïve and not worth our time to listen to.

Here is a twelve-year-old who has something meaningful and worthwhile to say and actually says it better than most adults. She addressed the United Nations meeting in Brazil with an elegance and style far beyond her years.

Please, take the time to listen, it is only a five minute segment of her speech but in that short time she paints reality far more succinctly than any adult I know ever has.

From her we have so much to learn and just maybe we can learn to share what we have with those who have nothing.

Forests are becoming a memory

In the U.S., many people value our National Parks system for the relaxation and the chance to commune with nature that these great, legally protected, expanses provide. It’s the solitude that make these destinations so desirable. The ability to escape the concrete and asphalt creep that claims so much of our natural surroundings, more and more every year, is priceless.

Trees, with their almost magical ability to immediately sooth the wary soul with their presence and grandeur, is what most people mention as their reason for traveling to our national parks.

The world’s rainforests, and the life-sustaining qualities they impart onto the world as the single most important buffer between clean air (providing 20% of our oxygen) and the destruction of our atmosphere, are disappearing at alarming rates. Not from what nature itself has wrought against them, but from mankind’s quest for survival.

Deforestation, by ranchers, farmers and timbermen, is occurring at the rate of 60 acres per minute! Take a moment to let that figure sink in. Every second, one acre of this world’s tropical forest is destroyed. For perspective, this amounts to an area the size of Mississippi being cleared every year!

Twenty years ago, tropical forests were cut down at the rate of 50 acres per minute, now it’s 60 acres per minute.

Warnings go unheeded
Warnings from scientists, conservation groups, religious leaders and others were repeated at December's climate conference in Bali, Indonesia and remain unheeded while the world’s consumers continue to support the very reason that these forests are being cut down.

It may surprise you to learn, it certainly surprised me, that Africa is now the leader in deforestation. Almost 1 percent (10 million acres) of the forests of Sudan, Zambia and Tanzania are lost every year to small-scale farming.

South American forests are replaced for cattle ranching and growing soybeans.

Southeast Asians cut down or burn forests for giant plantations of palm trees for the palm oil they produce. This palm oil is used in food processing, cosmetics and other products.

Clearing these forests for profit has led to the extinction of animal and plant life, soil erosion, changes in weather patterns, loss of forest peoples’ livelihoods, and the increasing threat of climate change. None of these considerations have any effect to motivate those responsible for deforestation.


Deforestation creates pollution
Not all trees that are cut down make it to the lumber industry, some are not suitable, some are in areas that make it unprofitable to haul them out, so they are burned where they fall, or they are left to rot. The pollution from burning these trees accounts for 20 percent of manmade emissions. This number blows me away. Only the burning of fossil fuels creates more pollution than the burning of these trees.

To exacerbate the problem of pollution, hauling ‘profitable’ trees away by truck, cutting trees down with chainsaws (much larger ones than you see at your neighborhood home improvement store) and tearing trees down with tractors, all add to the fossil fuels pollution numbers.


What is the alternative?
The more trees we lose to individual profiteers the fewer there are to absorb the global warming carbon that is emitted by cutting them down. The effect of pollution increases with every tree that is removed. Growing new trees is not the answer, they grow too slowly and they are not planted where they are needed most. You simply cannot replace tropical rain forests by planting trees elsewhere. Rain forests have grown where they have because that is the best environment for them.

If we are going to allow the continued destruction of earth’s ability to absorb our pollution then we need to find a replacement for these trees. We must have ways to absorb the huge amounts of carbon we create or we are going to destroy ourselves either from the increasing temperature of the earth or by suffocating ourselves due to lack of usable oxygen.

In light of this, is deforestation necessary to continue to feed the world’s ever increasing demand for beef, biofuels and other products? Is deforestation necessary to provide livelihoods for the farmers and ranchers to support their families, their communities and the rest of the world?

If moving industries to third world countries in order to give those populations jobs so they stop replacing our forests with farms, then that is what we need to do.

Food supplies are decreasing due to global warming and a shift to farming for biofuel and cattle feed. Deforestation is the cause of the former and the result of the latter.

The world has large-scale farming operations and industrial concerns that grow food crops to help feed the world’s human population. A larger percentage of this production is being redirected towards feeding beef and for biofuel, both of which add to deforestation.

If improving the production of these farms, through bio-engineering or whatever other means, will stop deforestation, then this is what we need to do.

Meat producers spends millions in advertising trying to sell us on the health benefits of eating more meat. The resulting debate between the pro and con issues of eating more or eating less meat will go on forever. The bottom line is that it is a personal choice. But, here is another issue that needs to be considered, the drive to produce more beef is destroying our forests. And this falls heavily on the side against eating more beef. We are destroying ourselves by trying to ‘eat healthier’, if you buy into what the meat producers are saying.

Do we really need more cattle for beef? Do we really need the extra farm land for biofuels? The argument for diverting our trend from a meat-based diet and towards a grain-based diet has never been as keenly felt as it is right now.

If we have to become vegetarians in order to save ourselves, then that is what we need to do.

If we have to turn these rainforests into living museums and promote ecotourism to protect them, then this is what we need to do.

If we have to declare rainforests as medical research labs in order to protect them, then we need to do it.

Why should so few, take away so much, for so little, that which means so much to the world’s future?

Mankind has gotten very proficient at destruction. It seems we dedicate more time, energy and money at improving ways of destruction than what we spend on anything else. Many people have tried to change this course to one of preservation but not enough is being done. The importance of maintaining these forests for what they represent as well as how they actually serve us is not being taken seriously enough.

In the opening to this post I mentioned that our national parks are legally protected. But, how long will it be before the profit mongers are able to convince a financially strapped administration to allow them access to our forests and begin the destruction of that which the rest of us prize most?

Do you think the law will protect our national parks? The U.S. Forest Service, one of those financially strapped administrations, granted a foreign mining company the rights to drill for uranium just miles from a popular lookout point in Grand Canyon National Park!

Will survival of the whole outweigh the profits to the few? Has it ever happened in the past?


For more research on rainforests:
Rainforest facts


Research shows dollars and sense in protecting rainforests

Rainforest Alliance

Rainforest Foundation

Rainforests books for children

Greed hurts us all again

The rush to make money has once again worsened an existing problem.
The U.N., and others, is warning the world that water resources, already strained by over population, will become even more scarce from the increased production of corn and other crops for biofuels.

Also, since more corn is being sold to biofuel producers, diverting it away from food producers, the price of corn for food is increasing. The price of every other crop that is being diverted away from traditional uses to biofuel production is going up as well.

Winners and losers? In the short term, the winners are the farmers who convert their lands to grow more palm trees, more sugar cane, more of anything that biofuel producers will buy. In the long term, the losers are those very same farmers, along with anyone else who requires food. It may sound like a bit of an over-simplification and melodramatic, but it is true.

These problems and others, such as increased pollution from the increased use of synthetic fertilizers to support the additional crops and the conversion of forests into agricultural lands, have been discussed in length by ecologists, scientists, farmers, food producers, environmentalists and bloggers who can see beyond the need to make an extra buck, for quite some time now.

I don’t mean to get down on those poor countries who are struggling to make more money. They need to eat too. But their shortsightedness is going to affect everyone else. Using more land that hastens the shortage of one of our most limited resources and polluting it even more borders on lunacy.

The use of biofuels is a double-edged sword. It is better for the environment than fossil fuels and it increases energy security for many countries. The pitfalls affect social as well as environmental issues.

New studies from scientists, private agencies and governments are saying biofuels could do more harm than good. Instead of helping the environment, deforestation to grow more energy crops is increasing the threat of global warming.

Converting more land to agricultural use will prevent an ever increasing population from finding land to build homes on.

Pollution from synthetic fertilizers creates the need for more water purification systems which takes up more land.

There needs to be controls put in place to decrease the competition of agricultural lands in order to maintain a percentage of land for food production only. Developing countries will benefit most from this.

We need to look at long term solutions and not jump on the first immediate answer. How many times have individuals been burned in their personal lives by doing exactly this? When are we going to learn from our mistakes. This mistake is global and will have global consequences.

Global climate concerns to be addressed in Bali

Creating a new global climate pact will be the subject of a massive UN-backed meeting in Bali, Indonesia, Dec 3 to Dec 14, 2007. 15,000 government officials and environmentalists from 190 nations will meet to discuss the next generation environmental protocol to replace the current 1997 Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.

The Kyoto Protocol, a world-wide measure to combat the rising global warming threat, was weakened due to several developing nations, including China and India, being exempted from the measure. It was further weakened because the U.S. never signed on. The U.S. is expected to once again balk at proposed key provisions under the expected treaty such as mandatory emissions cuts and targets for limiting the rise in global temperatures. It seems economics will continue to overshadow environmental concerns.

Discussions will range from deforestation and the wiping out of species to the economic destruction caused by natural disasters. A major concern is that poorer countries are replacing their forests with crops such as soy and sugar to take advantage of the emerging agrifuel industry, which is only worsening the climate threat.

Forests are necessary to help combat rising levels of carbon dioxide and if they are replaced by a product that has been shown to be an impractical solution, then it is no solution at all. We are only trading one problem for a host of others, one being that we will need to generate more synthetic fertilizer to increase production of crops that will not meet half of the U.S. fuel requirements by 2025, let alone an entire planet. The current method of composting farm waste back into feeding the soil to produce more crop would be interrupted by using that compost for ethanol production and this depletion of soil fertility would have a devastating effect on future farming. Converting food crop into fuel for automobiles is morally wrong in the face of more than 16,000 children dieing from hunger every day.

This round of talks may have more of a world consensus and more of a sense of urgency to meet the problem head on than the 1997 talks did but since one of the biggest generators of greenhouse gases isn’t willing to heed constructive solutions then other countries will feel little pressure to show their support. These smaller countries will feel more inclined to pursue a short term profit through agrifuel production which will destroy future abilities to produce more biofuels.

World leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd have all made climate change a top priority.

President Bush has recently signaled willingness by the U.S. in favor of mandatory limits on global warming pollution by citing a final Energy Department report showing U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide declined by 1.5% last year.

This is a very small move in the right but it shows signs of hope that the world can come up with a more meaningful and immediate solution to our shared, looming climate threat.