More Than Living

Is biofuel behind the acceleration in Brazil’s rainforest loss?

Back in August 2007, Brazil’s gov­ern­ment announced what appeared to be pretty good news for the envir­on­ment: the rate at which the country’s huge rain­forest was being chopped down had fallen by 25%.

In Decem­ber, interim fig­ures sug­ges­ted that the rate had fallen again, but envir­on­ment­al­ists accused the Brazilian gov­ern­ment of using a past achieve­ment to con­ceal an accel­er­a­tion in rain­forest clear­ing. Sadly it appears they were right.

Last Friday, the Inde­pend­ent quoted a Brazilian gov­ern­ment sci­ent­ist who warned that the rate of defor­est­a­tion had surged at the end of 2007, and that it would be “much higher” this year than last. Now the BBC reports that satel­lite mon­it­or­ing revealed almost a four-​​fold rise in the defor­es­ted area between August and Decem­ber 2007.

So why the sudden increase? Roberto Smer­aldi from Friends of the Earth Brazil explained to the Inde­pend­ent: “We had a real over­dose of defor­est­a­tion between 2002 and 2005, which led to abund­ant avail­ab­il­ity of cleared land. Now this land has been occu­pied, the pro­cess heats up again.”

Other sources point the finger at the increased demand for ‘cheap’ land, for which bio­fuel may be doubly respons­ible. There’s wide­spread con­cern that fra­gile eco­sys­tems are being des­troyed to pro­duce bio­fuel crops, with Indonesia’s drain­ing of its peat swamps for agri­cul­ture singled out as a par­tic­u­lar folly.

At the same time, com­pet­i­tion between food and bio­fuel pro­du­cers for agri­cul­tural land – and for crops such as corn – have helped to drive food prices up, with poor har­vests fur­ther con­trib­ut­ing to record wheat prices in Septem­ber 2007. And as crop prices go up, Brazilian offi­cials have said that yet more land is illeg­ally cleared to grow food crops.

On Thursday even­ing the Brazilian gov­ern­ment, which pre­vi­ously claimed that its envir­on­mental policies were respons­ible for three years of slow­ing defor­est­a­tion, announced emer­gency meas­ures. These included a 25% increase in the police force in the Amazon basin, and fines for people and busi­nesses buying items pro­duced on illegally-​​cleared land.

IMAGES - Defor­est­a­tion in Brazil’s Mato Grasso, cour­tesy NASA.

Top image taken June 2002, lower image taken June 2006.

Banner image by flickr user wricontest

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​01-​​24 01:18:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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