The food crisis has been used as an excuse to continue deforesting the Amazon. Blairo Maggi, the governor of Mato Grosso, and that state’s largest soy producer spoke his mind when he said.
“With the worsening of the global food crisis, the time is coming when it will be inevitable to discuss whether we preserve the environment or produce more food. There is no way to produce more food without occuping more land and taking down more trees.”
Brazil’s economy is developing and soy farming and ranching are putting pressures on the rain-forest. Official figures between August and December of 2007 have demonstrated that about 2 700 square miles (7 000 square km) of rain-forest have been logged illegally. It was the first increase in deforestation after three years of declines and happened at the time of the global food crisis.
Brazil has launched an enforcement campaign to stop at least illegal deforestation but the farmers have been up in arms. Many local farmers and ranchers are claiming that the enforcement action is unnecessary and that the satellite photos are misguiding and have been misinterpreted. This is because deforestation that is presented as illegal and recent had happened a long time before the current restrictions were put in place. Many of the ranchers and farmers are claiming that they feel betrayed since they were enticed to the region by the Brazilian military government in order to ensure the security of the region and “now they are treated like criminals.”
News Source, Brazil “soy king” sees Amazon as food solution”, Reuters, April 25, 2008
Thomas Omestad, Tensions Over Protecting the Amazon Rain Forest: Brazilian Farmers Complain about a Government Campaign against Illegal Deforestation, US News and World Report, May 16, 2008
The above image is taken from the NASA website
“In the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, verdant green Amazon Rainforest is broken up by broad tracks of pale green and tan deforested land. In 2005, the government of Brazil said that 48 percent of Amazon deforestation that took place in 2003 and 2004 occurred in Mato Grosso.
The transformation from forest to farm is evident in this pair of photo-like images (rollover the image to see an earlier image of the same area), taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The top image was taken on June 28, 2006, while the rollover image is from June 17, 2002.
Although some deforestation is part of the country’s plans to develop its agriculture and timber industries, other deforestation is the result of illegal logging and squatters. The Brazilian government uses MODIS images such as these to detect illegal deforestation. Because the forest is so large and is difficult to access or patrol, the satellite images can provide an initial alert that tells officials where to look for illegal logging. ” (excerpt from NASA website above).
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