SPECIAL REPORT- Appetite for destruction: Soy boom devours Brazil's tropical savannah

Record ID: 1353932

  • Title: SPECIAL REPORT- Appetite for destruction: Soy boom devours Brazil's tropical savannah
  • Date: 28th August 2018
  • Summary: TOCANTINS STATE, BRAZIL (FILE) (REUTERS) FEET OF MEN WALKING OVER DEFORESTED AREA OF BRAZIL'S SAVANNAH ECOLOGICAL ZONE KNOWN AS THE CERRADO MAN WALKS ACROSS DEFORESTED CERRADO MAN SHOWING FALLEN TREES UPROOTED TREES MAN SHOWING EROSION (SOUNDBITE) (Portuguese) BRAZILIAN FARMER, RONIVON DE ANDRADE, SAYING: "Those of us who are used to getting raw materials from the Cerrado,
  • Embargoed: 11th September 2018 01:49
  • Keywords: savanna soy Brazil deforestation habitat destruction cerrado agriculture environment agro-business
  • Location: TOCANTINS STATE & SAO PAULO, BRAZIL
  • City: TOCANTINS STATE & SAO PAULO, BRAZIL
  • Country: Brazil
  • Topics: Environment
  • Reuters ID: LVA0018V3OW8Z
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: When farmer Julimar Pansera purchased land in Brazil's interior seven years ago, it was blanketed in tiers of fruit trees, twisted shrubs and the occasional palm standing tall in a thicket of undergrowth.
    He mowed down most of that vegetation, set it ablaze and started planting soybeans. Over the past decade, he and others in the region have deforested an area larger than South Korea.
    Permissive land-use policies and cheap farm acreage here have helped catapult Brazil into an agricultural superpower, the world's largest exporter of soy, beef and chicken and a major producer of pork and corn. This area has also lured farmers and ranchers away from the Amazon jungle, whose decline has spurred a global outcry to protect it.
    The trade-off, environmentalists say, is that while Brazil has slowed destruction of the renowned rainforest from its worst levels, it has put another vital ecological zone at risk: a vast tropical savannah that is home to 5 percent of species on the planet.
    Known as the Cerrado, this habitat lost more than 105,000 square kilometers of native cover since 2008, according to government figures. That's 50 percent more than the deforestation seen during the same period in the Amazon, a biome more than three times larger. Accounting for relative size, the Cerrado is disappearing nearly four times faster than the rainforest.
    The largest savannah in South America, the Cerrado is a vital storehouse for carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas whose rising emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation are warming the world's atmosphere. Brazilian officials have cited protection of native vegetation as critical to meeting its obligations under the Paris Agreement on climate change. But scientists warn the biome has reached a tipping point that could hamper Brazil's efforts and worsen global warming.
    The toll can already be seen in the region's water resources. Streams and springs are filling with silt and drying up as vegetation around them vanishes. That in turn is weakening the headwaters of vital rivers flowing to the rest of the country, scientists say. The imperilled waterways include the Sao Francisco, Brazil's longest river outside the Amazon, where water levels are hitting never-before-seen lows in the dry season.
    Wildlife, too, is under threat, including rare hyacinth macaws, maned wolves and jaguars that call the shrinking savannah home. So are thousands of plants, fish, insects and other creatures found nowhere else on earth, many of which are only beginning to be studied.
    Farmers see the Cerrado's development as critical to global food security and their nation's prosperity. Brazil's agriculture sector grew a sizzling 13 percent in 2017, while the overall economy barely budged. The nation's ability to keep producing new farmland cheaply has given it an edge over rivals and cemented its status as a vital supplier to the world's tables.
    Roughly the size of Mexico, straddling Brazil's mid-section from its far western borders with Paraguay and stretching northeast towards the Atlantic coast, the Cerrado has seen about half of its native forests and grasslands converted to farms, pastures and urban areas over the past 50 years.
    Deforestation in the region has slowed from the early 2000s, when Brazil's soy boom was gaining steam. Still, farmers continue to plow under vast stretches of the biome, propelled largely by Chinese demand for Brazilian meat and grain. The Asian nation is Brazil's number one buyer of soybeans to fatten its own hogs and chickens. China is also a major purchaser of Brazilian pork, beef and poultry to satisfy the tastes of its increasingly affluent consumers.
    Rising trade tensions between China and the United States have only deepened that connection. Brazil's soybean exports by value to China are up 18 percent so far this year as Chinese buyers have cancelled tens of millions of dollars' worth of contracts with U.S. suppliers.
    The trend bodes well for producers in the Cerrado's frontier region known as Matopiba, shorthand for the northeastern Brazilian states of Maranhao, Tocantins, Piaui and Bahia. Land here is cheap. Soy planting in Matopiba has more than doubled over the past decade.
    Pansera, 50, is part of wave of industrious transplants from southern Brazil who are remaking the region. His formal education stopped at middle school, but he found land enough in the Cerrado to match his big ambitions. He now presides over nearly 19 square miles (49 square kilometers) of manicured soy fields and has about 20 full-time workers on his payroll. Pansera's soybeans will bring in an estimated profit of nearly 5 million reais ($1.29 million) this year, most of which he plans to invest back into the farm.
    Government policies have intentionally driven industrial-scale farming here. Short on farmland to feed its growing population, Brazil in the 1970s looked to its vast savannah, a region early explorers had dubbed "cerrado," or "closed," because of its tangled woodlands.
    State agriculture scientists developed fertilizers and additives to fix the acidic, nutrient-poor earth and created soybean strains that could thrive in the tropics. Arable land exploded. Within a decade, Brazil transformed itself from a food importer to a net exporter. By the 1990s it was moving global commodities markets.
    Maggi said growers are respectful of legally allowed limits on deforestation. Their "rational" occupation of the Cerrado has helped Brazil's economy, he said.
    Farmers have emerged as a powerful political force bent on keeping Brazil's countryside open for business. Lawmakers in the country's largely rural, pro-agriculture voting bloc, who comprise more than 40 percent of the nation's congress, have led a roll-back of environmental laws in recent years.
    Those efforts include a 2012 loosening of Brazil's landmark Forest Code that sets requirements for preserving native vegetation. The change reduced potential penalties for farmers, ranchers and loggers charged with past illegal deforestation, and made it easier for landowners to clear more of their holdings. Annual deforestation in the Amazon last year was up 52 percent from a record low in 2012.
    Still, environmental protections there remain the most robust in Brazil. Rainforest farmers are required by law to preserve 80 percent of native vegetation on their plots. And global grain traders in 2006 voluntarily agreed to stop purchasing any soy harvested from newly deforested Amazon jungle areas. As part of its obligations under the Paris Agreement, the government pledged to eliminate illegal Amazon deforestation by 2030.
    Brazil has made no similar push to preserve the Cerrado, which has long been viewed as a resource to be developed.
    Cerrado farmers are required to preserve as little as 20 percent of the natural cover, and up to 35 percent in areas neighbouring the Amazon. Those who don't maximize use of their tracts risk having their land declared idle and subject to redistribution under a 1980 federal land-reform initiative aimed at assisting rural, low-income people, said Elvison Nunes Ramos, sustainability coordinator with the Ministry of Agriculture.
    Environmentalists say the Cerrado's wooded grasslands have failed to capture the public's attention the way the Amazon's lush jungles have.
    Plants in the Cerrado send roots deep into the earth to survive seasonal drought and fires, creating a vast underground network that some have likened to an upside-down forest. Destruction of surface vegetation, and the resulting die-off of the life below, released 248 million tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere in 2016, according to estimates by Climate Observatory, a Brazilian conservation group. That's roughly two-and-a-half times the annual tailpipe emissions from all cars in Brazil.
    Watersheds are hurting, too.
    In Palmeirante, a rural municipality in the state of Tocantins, subsistence farmer Ronivon Matias de Andrade blames expanding mega-farms for damaging a community water source. Dressed in faded shorts and flip flops, he showed a visitor the remains of what until recently had been a shady woodland: uprooted trees and freshly exposed earth pocked with heavy-equipment tracks.
    Stripped of its vegetation, sandy topsoil is now filling a nearby creek and an adjoining freshwater pool where he and other rural families draw drinking water.
    Environmentalists say vanishing creeks like those in Palmeirante are threatening the nation's water supply. Seemingly insignificant sources - tiny brooks, nameless rivulets - are vital building blocks supplying water to tributary streams that in turn feed some of Brazil's largest rivers.
    Loss of native ground cover is also driving microclimate change in the region, they say. Reduced vegetation leads to higher ground temperatures and lower humidity, a recipe for less rainfall. A study conducted at the University of Brasilia links deforestation to an 8.4 percent drop in precipitation from 1977 to 2010 in the Cerrado.
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