CRISIS IN THE RAIN FOREST
(Page 4 of 6)
July/August 1987
By David Schoonmaker
RAIN FOREST
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What do you get when you clear a rain forest? Hamburger.
Why?
The causes of rain-forest destruction are various but mostly arise from a combination of social, economic and political problems. Worldwide, the most significant contributors have been land reform, cattle ranching, logging and hydroelectricity.
In 1970, Brazil's President Medici devised a plan to solve two problems at once: squalid conditions for peasants in northeast Brazil and concern about the country's sovereignty in the largely uninhabited western and northern states. He initiated construction of the Transamazon highway in hopes of moving a million settlers west—it would have seemed to be a brilliant scheme in a country where 2% of the people own half the land.
But initially, at least, it was a miserable failure. Fewer than 20,000 people settled permanently in the first years. The land just wouldn't support the monocultures the government was advocating. Slash-and-burn clearing gives the soil a temporary boost— from the nutrients bound in the vegetation— that is quickly burned up. Most of the immigrant farmers found that after one good year, crops failed. They abandoned the devastated land and moved back east.
In an attempt to salvage the program, the next president, Ernesto Geisel, instituted tax incentives for cattle ranching in the Amazon—a purpose for which the rain-forest soils are also uniquely unsuited. Monoculture grasses do poorly on infertile soils, where the nights are warm (requiring calories to be burned in respiration) and there's no cold season to control pests. It generally takes from five to 20 acres of converted rain forest to support a cow. Dedicate 55 square feet over an eight-year period, and you get one hamburger.
Colonization of the rain forests has thus followed a consistent cycle. Peasants cleared the land, failed within a few years and turned the property over to large cattle operations (for next to nothing), which got by on tax breaks and land speculation. Cattle ranching receives 70% of the tax credits offered by the government in Brazil, but it still wouldn't be a going concern without inflation of property values.
The real acceleration of Brazilian deforestation began in the mid-'70s, when the roads reached Rondonia, where soils are at least marginal for food crops. Since 1968, Rondonia's population has grown by 1,000%. Movement to the western states now amounts to a half-million people per year—30 busloads per day down the Transamazon Highway.
Cattle ranching has been the indirect (but major) cause of rain-forest clearing in Central America. Peasants displaced from more fertile lands by rapid conversion of fields to pasture have had little choice but to move into rain forests. Two-thirds of Central American agricultural land is used to grow beef, and the number of cattle in Central America doubled between 1959 and 1979. During the same period, per capita consumption declined. Most of the beef went to the U.S. to make fast-food hamburgers.
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