Agriculture and ranching in the Amazon

The hidden costs of soy and burgers

Every year, fires creep across parts of the Amazon, the unmistakable mark of advancing agriculture (especially soy) and cattle-ranching, both significant economic activities.

Visible from space, these fires reduce everything in their paths to cinder, including rainforests.

But unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

During the dry season (May-September), Brazil is in the world headlines because of raging fires, a practice of agricultural management for opening rudimentary subsistence plantations (slash-and-burn agriculture) and cattle pastures. These fires destroy natural areas such as savannas and rainforests.

Causes of fires

In the Brazilian Amazon, fires generally spread into forests from adjacent agricultural lands. Between 2000 and 2002, forest hotspots almost tripled from 16,000 to almost 42,000 per year¹.

These fires make way for cattle-ranching, the most important cause of direct conversion of rainforests.² Soy developers then capitalize on the cattle ranchers and take over their land, pushing cattle ranching (and deforestation) towards new pioneer areas.³ And so the natural frontier recedes…

Introducing the wonder bean

Soy (Glycine max) provides more than one-fourth of the world’s vegetable oil. In its meal form, it is the preferred food for domesticated animals as it is high in protein - and this demand is growing rapidly.

There are several reasons why soy cultivation is expanding:⁴

• Growing global demand, which has propelled soy to the single most important agricultural export commodity of Brazil and Bolivia. For the latter, this accounted for more than one-fourth of total export revenues in 2004.⁵
• Poor law enforcement, facilitating illegal or irregular acquisition of (public) land.
• 'Perverse incentives' that favour the production of raw materials (such as soy) over processed products.
• Global trade arrangements and trade barriers.
• Cheap international credit that allow soy traders to offer financially attractive ‘technology packages’ to producers - even where soy is not the most suitable crop from an ecological or food security perspective. With their new gains, producers expand their cultivated areas without depending on expensive domestic loans.⁶
• According to the Brazilian Forest Code, 50% of a property under transition forest can be cleared, while for rainforests, only 20% is allowed for clearance.⁷

Looking at the ‘footprint’ of soy cultivation

• Loss of natural areas: The expansion of soy cultivation is a powerful agent of rainforest loss. But this is not limited to rainforests. Bush savannah biomes are also threatened.⁸
  
  Transition forest is naturally subject to longer dry seasons than rainforests and its soils are more suitable for agriculture.⁹ In Bolivia, 24,000 km² of forest were converted between 1978 and 2001.¹⁰
  
  Because soybean production is an intensive activity, between 1961 and 2002, the area under soybean production in Brazil has increased 57 times, while production volume has increased 138 times.¹¹
• Erosion and subsequent siltation of rivers and wetlands, caused by the indiscriminate clearing of vegetation along waterways.
• Pollution of surface water with pesticides threatens human populations and aquatic life.¹² There is concern that agrochemicals such as herbicides will contaminate lakes, lagoons, people and fish in the Brazilian Amazon River floodplains.¹³
• Social impacts: Labour conditions during land preparation are generally poor. In the 1970s, 2.5 million people were displaced by soybean production in Paraná state and 0.3 million in Rio Grande do Sul, both in Brazil. Many of these people moved to the Amazon Basin where they cleared pristine forests.¹⁴

The outlook

The global demand for soy and its derivatives (vegetable oil, animal feed) is expected to remain strong. Demand for soy will probably increase by 60% to over 300 million tons per year in 2020.

As China and the US have limited spaces of arable land, future expansion will take place primarily in South American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay.

The completion of the highway BR-163 in Brazil is likely to promote the expansion of soy cultivation further into the Amazon forests in the western Pará State.

It is expected that 22,000 to 49,000 km² of rainforest will be cleared to make way for pasture and agriculture development - if spatial planning and environmental enforcement measures are not adopted.¹⁵