Brazil
Why destroying the forests is such a wonderful thing
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1
Extreme inequality of wealth and land tenure
Chapter 2
Undefined or insecure land rights
Chapter 3
A colonial mindset of Rape & Run
Chapter 4
Extremely nutrient-poor soils
Chapter 5
Land speculation
Chapter 6
Agricultural commodities boom
Chapter 7
Land reform settlements
Chapter 8
Conservation as "fine-weather-only" activity
Chapter 9
Environmental destruction as crisis palliative
Chapter 10
How to influence a rogue president
Conclusions
Attachment 1
Zero Deforestation Commitments (ZDCs)
Attachment 2
ZDCs in the Brazilian soy industry
Attachment 3
ZDCs in the Brazilian cattle industry
Introduction
Every year, the media are full of reports of the burning forests and savannas of Latin America. The most species-rich habitats of the planet, the best carbon sinks that prevent global temperatures from rising even more, the praised "lungs of the Earth" - they are relentlessly destroyed.
Why are forests still felt and fires still laid after more than half a century of national and international efforts to stop biodiversity loss and climate change? Why is conversion of large areas of natural land still going ahead despite scientific evidence of potentially catastrophic consequences of going beyond a "tipping point", of turning rainforests into savannas and carbon sources?
There are simple answers to these questions. One is that conversion of natural land is necessary to create progress, economic growth and prosperity, to lift the poor masses out of their misery. Another is that deforestation is a logical product of rampaging capitalist development unleashed by free market forces.
The reality is much more complicated. There are direct drivers of natural land conversion, such as the expansion of pastures, fields and plantations to increase production for national and international markets, logging concessions, surface mining, dams that inundate forested areas, land reform projects in forest areas, or the much reported intense fires, often deliberately laid. But there are also less visible indirect drivers of deforestation, including extreme social inequality, insecure land tenure, bad governance with deeply ingrained systemic corruption and poor law enforcement, contradictionary government policies, cultural traditions that favor exploitation over conservation, road building, that attracts land grabbers, and, most importantly, land speculation.
Often, very heterogenous drivers of deforestation work together to create excellent conditions for the destruction of natural land. The different actors in this environmental drama all have perfectly good reasons for their decisions to log and burn. It can be shown, that in many circumstances, conversion of natural land is a truly wonderful thing; it increases and preserves power or optimizes short-term profits, it pays off political supporters, it fends off social unrest or alleviates most sorts of crises.
This story focuses on Brazil because it is the biggest Latin American country with the largest forests, and - regarding the treatment of the environment - has at the time of writing the most harmful and hostile government. The recent history of Brazil is frustrating in several respects. In the first decade of the century, there were great hopes that real social change towards a more just society was underway, that Brazil would be able to join the circle of developed nations, and that, finally, deforestation of natural landscapes was under control. But then, the economy nose-dived, the ruling Workers' Party lost much credibility in a quagmire of corruption, social change stalled and the speed of deforestation picked up again. A reactionary roll-back, led by ultra-conservative circles such as the agribusiness lobby, Christian fundamentalists or the weapons lobby, gripped the country that finally led to the election of president Bolsonaro.
There are certainly Brazilian idiosyncracies, and other Latin American nations have different histories, cultures and political systems, but many of them also share characteristics such as the common history of conquest and colonization, the similar economic conditions as producers of commodities, the extremely unequal societies, the consequences of bad governance or the destruction of nature.
Regarding the environment, it is important to note that the much reported burning of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest that is promoted by the right-wing Bolsonaro government is only part of a much larger problem. Severe environmental destruction is happening in almost all Latin American states, no matter if the government is right-wing authoritarian, neoliberal capitalist, socialist or following indigenous sumak kawsay philosophies.
Also, the Amazon rainforest should be only seen as a symbol for all threatened biomes of the continent. Land conversion and biodiversity loss is as bad or worse than in the Amazon in lesser known biomes, such as the Cerrado, the Caatinga, the Gran Chaco, the Yungas, the Pampas, the Pantanal or the Central American forests. The once huge Mata atlantica (Atlantic rainforest) is already almost gone.
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Amazon green, Cerrado orange columns
The following ten chapters describe different drivers of deforestation and some means to stop the destruction of natural land.
To counterbalance the often rather depressing stories, "happy" pictures are chosen that show the still intact Brazilian forest and its inhabitants. Unless otherwise stated, the photos are taken from Rhett A. Butler's image collection, accessed at his website Mongabay, one of the most important sources of information on the environment in the tropics and subtropics.
https://rainforests.mongabay.com/03-diversity-of-rainforests.html
Chapter 1
Extreme inequality of wealth and land tenure
Latin American societies are among the most unequal in the world. So-called Gini Indices measure inequality, the higher the number, the more unequal a society. The Gini Indices for income distribution in South American states are usually between 0.4 and 0.5, Brazil and Suriname top the list with 0.53 and 0.57. Only African societies are more unequal.
In terms of land tenure, Latin American societies easily top the list of unequality in the world. The average Gini Index for land distribution in Central America is 0.75, in South America even 0.85 (Europe, Africa and Asia have indices around 0.56). On average, the richest 1% of Latin American landowners control over half of the land.
These extreme values mirror historic developments. All the Americas were conquered by Europeans and most of the indigenous populations were killed by force or by imported germs. However, there were great differences in the population policies of the different colonial powers.
The most important Spanish colonies, i.e. Mexico, Peru, and Colombia, still had relatively abundant populations as compared to the British colonies in North America, and therefore the majority of the overall labor force was provided by the Native Americans. Only the first waves of settlers in Spain’s colonies, particularly those from the military or from elite backgrounds, were rewarded with generous grants of land and claims on Native Americans as slave workers (encomienda). The Spanish Crown began already early in the sixteenth century to regulate and restrict the flow of European migrants to its colonies in the Americas. As a result, less than 20 percent of the population in Spanish America was composed of Europeans as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century.
In North America, there were not enough Native Americans left alive to provide the labor force needed to run the European colonies. Great Britain opted for an active pursuit of European migrants and distributed native lands to a multitude of new settlers coming from the "old continent". Therefore, land tenure became much more equal in the US and Canada than in Latin America.
Brazil had a comparative advantage in sugar, cacao, and a few other crops, and the Portuguese relatively soon specialized in producing these commodities on large plantations. Unlike neighboring Spanish America, Brazil was a slave society from its outset. The African slave trade, starting in 1532 and ending only in 1888, was inherent to the economic and social structure of the colony. Years before the North American slave trade got underway, more slaves had been brought to Brazil than would ever reach British North America. It can be estimated that around 35% of all Africans captured in the Atlantic slave trade were sent to Brazil. The slave trade in Brazil would continue for nearly two hundred years and last the longest of any country in the Americas. Because they obtained the majority of their labor force from the African slave trade, the Portuguese colonies had little need for large numbers of European immigrants. More than half of the Brazilian population today has strong African roots.
As a result of these historic developments, South American societies are heavily stratified. Typically, at the bottom are the indigenous and the black populations, in the middle the populations of mixed descent, mestizos, mulattos, zambos or pardos, and at the top a small class of people of European descent who often trace their origins back to the (real or imagined) nobility of the early colonial rulers.
Forty years ago, the Brazilian economist Edmar Bacha named his country Belindia: a combination of prosperous and modern Belgium and poor and backward India. Little has changed since then in Brazil; the Gini Index in 1981 was 0.58, today it is 0.53.
In today's Belindia, there are still many poor people trying to improve their lot by leaving their old homes and moving to the forest frontier. They either take part in official land settlement programs or try illegally to get their hands on land, timber, drugs, rare species or gold. Some work on their own account, others are employed by the rich and powerful. The wealthy elites don't get their hands dirty in illegal businesses, they pull the strings from their fazendas or city houses and let the poor do the ugly part of the job.
Sources
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI
Oxfam 2016: Land, Power and Inequality in Latin America
FAO 2017: Latin America and the Caribbean is the region with the greatest inequality in the distribution of land
http://www.fao.org/americas/noticias/ver/en/c/878998/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encomienda
Engerman, Stanley L.; Sokoloff, Kenneth L.: Once Upon a Time in the Americas: Land and Immigration Policies in the New World
economics.yale.edu › files › files › engerman-090412
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil
https://library.brown.edu/create/fivecenturiesofchange/chapters/chapter-2/african-slavery/
On Edmar Bacha
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2017/04/12/a-brazilian-inflation-fighter-becomes-immortal
Chapter 2
Undefined or insecure land rights
In Brazil, officially, 36% of lands are public, 44% are private, and 17% are unregistered or with unknown tenure. From the public land, 6% are undesignated, i.e. not allocated by the federal or state governments to a specific tenure status. Large properties is the single category which occupies the largest area of Brazil (Sparovek 2019).
Unfortunately, those numbers don't say much, because overlaps among land tenure categories sum up to a whopping 50% of the registered territory. In the state of Pará, most affected by rainforest conversion, land claims are four times the size of the entire state territory.
"It is impossible to ascertain who landowners are in Latin America: the lack of transparency in transactions, the use of shell companies, titling in the name of third parties, secrecy, and bureaucratic barriers in the institutions that manage public land and property registries create a shield that can conceal the true identity of the owners. Also, ownership is the most direct way of exercising control over land, but it is not the only one. Renting, long-term concessions, and production under contract are becoming increasingly relevant, especially in countries where there are restrictions on the sale of land." (Oxfam 2016)
The great fragilities in Brazilian land tenure make land grabs easy. In a climate of uncertainty, it is extremely difficult to determine if deforestation in a certain area is legal or illegal. Accurate statistics on illegal deforestation are not made readily available, and if available, they are scattered with little transparency among the websites of environmental agencies. In reality, only a small percentage of forest clearing is assumed to be within legal limits, thus the largest part of deforestation is illegal (Hummel 2016). Governors of the Amazon states have often warned that land ownership laws must be rewritten before they can clamp down on deforestation. The chaos regarding land tenure not only benefits illegal land grabs but also is a wonderful source of income for corrupt civil servants in land-registering authorities (more on the technicalities in chapter 5).
There are two categories of land that are especially vulnerable to attacks on the forest frontier, be it mining, logging, conversion to agricultural production or land speculation: undesignated public forest lands and indigenous territories that have not yet completed the full registration process (homologation).
Undesignated public forests have not been allocated by the federal or state governments to a specific tenure status. In the Brazilian Amazon, they comprise of 49.8 million hectares of public forestlands. 2.6 million hectares (5%) had been deforested by 2018. 11.6 million hectares (23 %) have been illegally registered as “private property” (Azevedo-Ramosa, C. et al., 2020)
Since Bolsonaro is in power, the areas most threatened by land grabbers and speculators increased to include the 277 indigenous territories that have not yet had their protection formally confirmed (homologado) by a presidential signature. Curtailing indigenous rights has been a high priority of the Bolsonaro administration. In a 2017 campaign stop in the farm state of Mato Grosso he said: "If I become president, there won't be one square centimeter of land designated for indigenous reservations." (Reuters 03.03.2019)
The overlapping land claims are causing severe, often deadly conflicts. More than 1,500 deadly land conflicts in Brazil have been registered since 1985. The great majority of the cases happen in "Amazonia Legal" and involve indigenous peoples. The killers usually walk free, less than 10 percent of cases reached a final conclusion at trial.
Sources
Oxfam 2016: Land, Power and Inequality in Latin America
Sparovek, G. et al.: Who owns Brazilian lands, Land Use Policy, Vol. 87, September 2019, 104062
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104062
Hummel, A.C.:Deforestation in the Amazon: What is illegal and what is not?
Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene (2016) 4: 000141.
https://doi.org/10.12952/journal.elementa.000141
Azevedo-Ramosa, C. et al. (2020): Lawless land in no man’s land: The undesignated public forests in the Brazilian Amazon, Land Use Policy, Vol. 99, Dec. 2020
Boadle, A. (2019): Emboldened by Bolsonaro, armed invaders encroach on Brazil's tribal lands
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-indigenous-insight-idUSKCN1QK0BG
The legal protection of indigenous territories was stripped by Normative Instruction 09/2020 of FUNAI, Brazil’s indigenous agency.
Arsenault, C. (2017): Politics of Death: Land conflict and murder go "hand in hand" in Brazil
https://www.reuters.com/article/brazil-landrights-politics-idUSL8N1HW4VP
https://lab.org.uk/land-conflicts-and-destruction-in-the-brazilian-amazon/
Chapter 3
A colonial mindset of Rape & Run
The massive destruction of the natural environment and the grabbing of public and indigenous lands today is a continuation of the colonial culture of extraction and unsustainability, often called the policy of Rape & Run.
Such a claim can't be quantified, but there is substantial anecdoctal evidence to support it.
The entire economy of Portugal's Brazilian colony was based on natural resource extractivism and the exploitation of Indigenous peoples and African slaves.
The first target of the colonial conquest of nature was the huge Mata atlantica (Atlantic Forest) with its valuable Pau Brasil (Brasilwood) that gave the country its name. The Mata Atlantica is today one of the most imperiled tropical ecosystem in the world, with less than seven percent of the original forest remaining. Lining the coast of Brazil, what is left of the forest is largely patches and fragments that are hemmed in by metropolises and monocultures.
Slavery was officially abolished by the Áurea law in 1888, but this did not resolve the situation of the slaves. Ex-slaves often stayed in exploitative conditions of indentured labour or quasi-serfdom. Today, many thousands still live under conditions of modern slavery.
The feudal system lasted until 1889, when Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca deposed Emperor Pedro II. According to the new Republican Constitution enacted in 1891, the government was a constitutional democracy, but democracy was just nominal. In reality, the landed oligarchies dominated politics, the elections were rigged, voters in rural areas were pressured or induced to vote for the chosen candidates of their bosses. The period of the first Brazilian Republic (1889 -1930) is known as "coronelismo", the "rule of the coronels". Political power was concentrated in the hands of a locally dominant oligarchs, who as "neo-feudal lords" would dispense favors in return for loyalty.
The Great Depression after the stock market crash in 1929 devastated the landed oligarchies. The main export product, coffee, is a nonessential. During the world crisis, demand dropped sharply and the coffee price plummeted.
The liberal revolution of 1930 could overthrow the oligarchic coffee plantation owners and brought to power an urban middle class and business interests that promoted industrialization and modernization.
However, the landed oligarchies always held on to a share of the power during the 20th century. Influential rural lobby groups (see box) successfully endorsed landowner interests and opposed agrarian reform.
Powerful rural lobby groups
Sociedade Rural Brasileira (SRB), or Brazilian Rural Society
Confederação da Agricultura e Pecuária do Brasil (CNA), or Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil
Associação Brasileira do Agronegócio (ABAG), or Brazilian Association of Agribusiness
Organização das Cooperativas Brasileiras (OCB), or Brazilian Cooperative Alliance
União Democrática Ruralista (UDR), or Ruralist Democratic Union
Bancada Ruralista or Rural Caucus
The representation of the bancada ruralista in Congress is called Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária (FPA), or Parliamentary Agricultural and Livestock Front
The union of the agrilobby with evangelical fundamentalists and arms lobby is called Bancada BBB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBB_Bench
The economic power of the ruralists improved markedly, when Brazil's agricultural sector was successfully modernized, especially in the two decades between 1990 and 2010. Brazil’s “Agricultural Miracle” (see chapter 6) established the economic base for the strong political come-back of the landed oligarchies in the 2010s.
In 2012, the "bancada ruralista" (rural caucus) was formed during legislative discussions about Brazil’s forest code. This group successfully lobbied to change the environmentally friendly forest code in a more deforestation-friendly piece of legislation. The representation in Congress of the bancada ruralista is called Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária (FPA), Parliamentary Agricultural and Livestock Front, an association that unites agribusiness-friendly Congress members across parties.There is also a lobby alliance of the right-wing pro-deforestation rural lobbyists (also called bancada do boi - bull caucus) with ultraconservative evangelicals (bancada da biblia - bible caucus), and armaments and ammunitions lobbyists (bancada da bala - bullet caucus). This so-called bancada BBB (caucus of bullet, bible and bull) is now the dominant force in the Brazilian Congress and usually supports President Bolsonaro, himself a member of the bancada rural.
These people are living proof that much of the colonial mindset has survived all changes in Brazilian history. They show a behavior that differs little from that of the Portuguese colonialists or the fazendeiro oligarchy of the coronelismo era (the rule of the powerful rural land owners).
Since the first days of European conquest in Brazil, the natural world is seen as a disposable collection of utilities with no inherent value. In the colonial mind, the "idle" forests and savannas have to be made productive by development, i.e. logging, conversion to mines, dams, settlements, pastures and fields. Large parts of the ruling class in Brazil is following such a neo-colonial, neo-extractivist agenda.
A current example of such a mindset is Bolsonaro administration Chief of Strategic Affairs Maynard Santa Rosa, a retired general. When he announced new Brazilian mega-infrastructure projects that include a dam on the Trombetas River, a bridge over the Amazon River, and an extension of the BR-163 highway from the Amazon River through 300 miles of rainforest to the Surinam border, he said that these Amazon biome infrastructure projects had as their purpose the integration of what he called an “unproductive, desertlike” region into “the national productive system.” (Mongabay, 2019/01)
It is harder to find such old-school-gentlemen who openly support slavery or indentured labour, but there is no doubt that forced labour systems are alive and well in Brazil. The Global Slavery Index estimates that in 2016 there were 369,000 people in conditions of modern slavery in Brazil, a prevalence of 1.8 modern slavery victims for every thousand people in the country. Enslaved individuals are concentrated in the agricultural sector where huge land holdings make social controls difficult. Data collected by the Digital Observatory of Slavery Labour in Brazil (Observatório Digital do Trabalho Escravo no Brasil) reveal that between 2003 and 2017 there have been nearly 35,000 rescues of individuals from situations of slave labour. From 2003 to 2017, the Brazilian government published lists of companies accused of modern slavery. Since the presidency of Michel Temer, this practise has been discontinued.
Just like the natural landscapes that they inhabit, the Indigenous population is also seen by the "colonialists" as primitive, idle and unproductive. Their lands should be opened for logging, mining and agriculture and the Native Americans should be assimilated and become part of the main-stream economy.
President Bolsonaro often comments on Native American people, their improductivity and their unproportional control over territory.
“Indigenous people want to work, they want to produce and they can’t. They live isolated in their areas like cavemen." [therefore, their land needs to be developed] (The Guardian, 21.07.2019)
"The Indian does not lobby and does not speak our language but, today, he has 14 percent of the national territory." "It is too much land for so few Indians." (PBS, 29.08.2019, Telesurenglish, 31.08.2019)
President Bolsonaro repeatedly spoke against the demarcation of indigenous lands in the Amazon saying he will not only refuse all requests for new demarcations but intends to review the areas previously assigned to ancestral communities.
Even clearer is the following message.
“The Brazilian cavalry was very incompetent. Competent was, indeed, the U.S. Cavalry which exterminated their Indians in the past and, today, they do not have that problem in their country.” (Telesurenglish, 31.08.2019)
Comments like this create of climate of impunity and encouragement for invaders of undesignated natural lands and Indigenous territories. To name just two examples, the Karipuna Indigenous Territory, located in Rondônia along the Jaci Paraná river, is one of Brazil’s most targeted areas by illegal logging and the common practice of "grilagem" – the illegal and irregular private appropriation of public land; and the neighboring Jací-Paraná "extractivist reserve", traditionally home to rubber tappers, has been facing invasions already for a longer time and is now half-deforested. (ejatlas, 2019)
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Brazil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronelism
Coronelismo: see also Jorge Amado's novels
Dean, Warren (1997). With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Berkeley: University of California Press.
ISBN 978-0-520-91908-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_commodities_boom
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/21/bolsonaro-funai-indigenous-agency-xavier-da-silva
https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/findings/country-studies/brazil/
Smartlab 2018, Observatorio Digital do Trabalho Escravo no Brasil. Available from: https://observatorioescravo.mpt.mp.br/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/brazilian-indigenous-people-speak-out-as-amazon-fires-rage
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/world/americas/brazil-president-jair-bolsonaro-quotes.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/brazil-landrights-politics-idUSL8N1HW4VP
Chapter 4
Extremely nutrient-poor soils
The Amazon River Basin is home to lush rainforests with the richest in-forest carbon stocks and the highest biodiversity on the planet. Paradoxically, these forests grow on soils that are the poorest and most infertile in the world.
Unlike soils that have relatively recently formed, such as the deep black soils of the tallgrass steppes and prairies, the rich volcanic soils or the fertile mineral soils of postglacial landscapes, the Amazonian soils have been without nutrient inputs for many millions of years. These fossil, highly weathered mineral sub-soils have poor nutrient availability and nutrient-retention capacity.
They are often highly acidic and suffer from severe phosphorus fixation, often with serious problems of aluminium and mangane toxicity. Phosphorus fixation means that this element reacts with other minerals to form insoluble compounds and becomes unavailable to crops. Phosphorus fixation occurs most strongly in the acid range of pH 4 and 5.5, where phosphorus precipitates with iron and aluminum. Toxic effects on plant growth by aluminium and manganese have been attributed to several physiological and biochemical pathways.
The humus layer that develops when plants or animal matter break down, is minimal nearly everywhere in the Amazon basin. This is because the rainforest feeds itself. The nutrients are constantly recycled by the plants and very little get into the soil. The plant remains that do reach the ground — fruits, leaves or wood — are quickly decomposed by fungi and bacteria thanks to the year-round warm and humid climate. The released nutrients, such as potassium, calcium and magnesium, are immediately reabsorbed by the plant roots.
When the forest is removed, almost all the nutrients are taken away with it. The thin humus layer quickly washes out. Infertile substrate such as the white, sandy soils found in many parts of the Amazon Basin remain. The traditional way of dealing with this problem is small-scale slash-and-burn agriculture. Small plots of land are cleared and the dry vegetation burned. The nutrient content of the plant ash is enough to plant crops for two or three years. Then the plots are abandoned for 40 to 60 years. During this time the surrounding forest will reclaim the small clearings and the cycle can start again. As long as there is no significant export of crops and the farmers go to toilet near their fields, the nutrient balance is maintained.
However, slash-and-burn is not sustainable on large plots in export-orientated agricultural production systems. There, the nutrient content in soils constantly diminishes, if fertilizer is not imported into the system. Adding to the problem is, that agricultural practises that work well in many agricultural zones, e.g. in southeastern Brazil or in central Europe, are not viable in the Amazon. Ploughing of Amazonian soils causes very rapid and permanent soil organic matter losses and often results in permanent recompaction, land degradation or anthropic savannization. Using just commercial fertilizer, i.e. saturating the soil solely with inorganic potassium and nitrogen soluble fertilizers, is not enough to keep up fertility.
What land grabbers therefore like to do is to cut and burn the forest, then use the land as long as the nutrients stored in the ashes last, and then move on to burn more forest. In this context, the nutrient poor soils of the Amazon Basin are drivers of deforestation.
Sustainable agriculture is possible in the Amazon with soil-enhancing techniques. The key measure is to preserve or build up soil organic matter. Zero or minimum tillage and continuous mulching protects the labile organic matter fraction. Agroforestry mimics the forest in stabilizing the soil and reducing erosion. Addition of gypsum reduces aluminium toxicity, liming increases pH.
The most promising farming systems are integrated crop-livestock-tree productions systems that could ensure long-term economic and ecological sustainability.
Already 3000 years ago, Indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin had developed a slash-and-char agriculture with ingenous soil management. They made charcoal and mixed it with bone, broken pottery, compost and manure. This combination accumulates nutrients, minerals and microorganisms and withstands leaching. They managed to build up massive humus layers on infertile Amazonian sub-soils, so-called terra preta (black earth), that stayed stable for thousands of years.
However, it is easy to see that sustainable agriculture in a challenging environment such as the Amazon Basin requires knowledge, investment of time, work and money, and long-term dedication. How much easier and cheaper is it to apply the Rape & Run strategy: slash, burn, exploit, and move on.
Sources
https://www.dw.com/en/the-amazon-nutrient-rich-rainforests-on-useless-soils/a-50139632
Gomes de Moura, E. et al. (2016): Improving Farming Practices for Sustainable Soil Use in the Humid Tropics and Rainforest Ecosystem Health
Sustainability 2016, 8(9), 841; https://doi.org/10.3390/su8090841
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
Cornell University (2006): Amazonian Terra Preta Can Transform Poor Soil Into Fertile, 01.03.2006
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060301090431.htm
Chapter 5
Land speculation
There are different ways of legally clearing natural lands under federal or state jurisdiction. Most requests for legal removal of vegetation fall under the jurisdiction of state environmental agencies (OEMAs). States are authorized to license clearing of native vegetation on private properties and in state public forests and protected areas, as well for projects environmentally licensed by the state government.
The federal government, through the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), has the mandate to authorize removal of native vegetation in public forests and federal conservation areas, except those forested areas already fully protected. The federal government can allow removal of native forest in projects environmentally licensed for infrastructure development such as dams or roads, or for land reform projects implemented by the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA, more in chapter 6).
However, legal deforestation is not a very Brazilian thing. Antônio Carlos Hummel, head of Brazil's Forest Service remarked:
"In reality, only a small percentage of forest clearing is assumed to be within legal limits, thus the largest part of deforestation is not in accordance with the regulations." (Hummel, 2016)
The first step of land conversion is usually the extraction of valuable hardwood. In the Amazon basin, only a few species contain valuable timber, much less than in most forested areas of the world. Excessive logging has almost extinguished the national tree of Brazil, Pau Brasil (Paubrasilia echinata), in the Atlantic rainforest, and made Mahagony (Swietenia macrophylla) a threatened species in the Amazon. Currently, the most sought after species is Ipe (Handroanathus sp.), that is why illegal loggers are also called the "Ipe mafia".
The government is giving out logging concessions, usually for 40 years. Very often, in the paperwork of these concessions, there is a strong overestimation bias of high-value timber species volumes. Fraud for the most valuable species generates a “surplus” of licensed timber that can be used to legalize the timber coming from illegal logging.
Another illegal-to-legal transformation is known in Brazil as "heating" wood. To legally harvest wood on the land, a landowner must make an inventory of the species of timber on his or her land and apply to the government for authorisation. Provided the plan respects the legal limits for timber extraction, and contains a commitment to reforest the cleared area, it will be authorised. In cases of "heating", loggers bribe and bully landowners, big and small, to draw up the documentation, which they then buy, often under duress and for a negligible sum. The loggers then use the plans to give a legal cover story for timber they have logged illegally from a different area. (Branford, 2012)
Other loggers don't bother with such legal tricks, they just move into forested land and start cutting. When the valuable timber is extracted, the remaining vegetation is removed, often by using bulldozers.
When the torn-down vegetation is dry enough, the second step of land conversion is to burn the remains to enrich the soil. Most Amazonian soils are extremely poor, all nutrients are in the vegetation layer. The ashes give enough nutrients to plant grass or crops for two or three years.
The prefered prey for land grabs are undesignated public forestlands and not yet homologized Indigenous territories, but it can be also land that other loggers or settlers have already claimed. Multiple land claims are common in rural Brazil. Unclear property rights, a government system where competing state agencies work on land regularisation and local corruption fuel conflicts between different stakeholders that can easily turn violent.
So-called "posseiros", mostly poor people, enter the forest along new roads. They and cut and burn the native vegetation, first along the major roads and then along sideroads, causing the typical fishgrate pattern of settlement.
The big land grabbers are called “grileiros” – a Brazilian term for businessmen fraudulently obtaining or selling properties by bribing local land registry workers, employing lawyers to falsify documents to claim ownership over grabbed land or sending in pistoleiros (gunmen) to enforce land claims on the ground.
The victims are very often indigenous peoples. A large number of indigenous territories is invaded every year. In some Amazonian states, farmers' groups have formed private militias that have been perpetrating violent evictions of indigenous communities. Violent conflicts have resulted in over 1500 deaths, many of them indigenous people, between 1985 and 2020.
The third step of land conversion is usually to sow grass into the cold ashes of the burned-down forests. As soon as the grass is high enough, the land grabbers put zebu cattle on their claimed land. This is by far the most common succession. Only a fifth of the new cropland in Brazil came as a result of direct conversion of native vegetation.
It is relatively cheap to manage extensive cattle pasture. This is important because the fourth step is to try to legalize the land and this might take some years. By using bribery and fraud, land can be legalized. Corruption in government agencies, including INCRA, is a major driver of land scams, as property owners can bribe officials to hand them swaths of state land. (Arsenault, C. 2017).
However, even lands demarcated and distributed by government officials from INCRA and Terra Legal must be registered at private cartorios to be fully legal. Inherited from the Portuguese colonial administration, the cartorio system serves to maintain property records and transfer deeds in specific regions. There is no single, centralised system for checking who owns what nationwide. The result is a confusing system of unclear or disputing property claims that leaves ample options for abuse by wealthy land owners who can grab land and displace competitors, e.g. small farmers.
However, the jackpot for legalising grilagem are the so-called land grabbers laws that are issued at federal level (e.g. in 2009, 2017 and 2020) or state level (in Pará in 2019). Land grabbers laws are amnesties for illegal land occupation and forest destruction. The land grabbers don't have to pay fines for their illegal activities. To the contrary, they are allowed to buy the illegally occupied land from the state at prices that are much lower than the market price.
After legalization, the fifth step of conversion is to sell the now legal land to agriculturalists, usually large soy farmers. The price that can be realized can be six to eight times higher than the price paid to the government. A brilliant business that cries to be repeated again and again.
Land grabbers laws are a convenient way for politicians of paying supporters, both the rich elites (grileiros) and the rural poor (posseiros). And this can be done without cost, just with the stroke of a pen under a new law.
“Paying supporters, not good governance or representing the general will, is the essence of ruling."
Bruce Bruno de Mezquita
Forest clearing and conversion in Brazil is mostly driven by land speculation that is furthered by government policies (Mongabay 2019/03). Not surprisingly, across Brazil’s vast Amazon states, posseiros and grileiros try to illegally occupy undesignated public and unsecured Indigenous lands in the realistic hope of receiving future land titles.
It is only after this land speculation process, that most large soy farmers buy their land. The soybeans are then grown on newly legalized land. This makes it much harder to build up pressure down the supply chains of European and North American multinational companies than it would be in the case of a direct conversion of forest to soybean fields (more in chapter 9).
Sources
Branford, S. (2012): How illegal logging in Brazil's Amazon turns 'legal', BBC 29.11.2012
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-20408238
Arsenault, C. (2017): Rural Amazon violence rises amid bureaucratic mess over land titles
https://www.reuters.com/article/brazil-environment-landrights/rural-amazon-violence-rises-amid-bureaucratic-mess-over-land-titles-idUKL8N1J45G6
Federal land grabbers laws, 2009, 2017, 2020
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/05/brazils-land-grabbers-law-threatens-amazonia-commentary/
Carrero, G.C. et al. (2020): Deforestation Trajectories on a Development Frontier in the Brazilian Amazon: 35 Years of Settlement Colonization, Policy and Economic Shifts, and Land Accumulation,
Environmental Management, Volume 66, pages 966–984(2020)
Pará State, land grabbers law, 2019
Hummel, A.C. (2016): Deforestation in the Amazon: What is illegal and what is not? Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene (2016) 4: 000141
https://doi.org/10.12952/journal.elementa.000141
https://www.reuters.com/article/brazil-landrights-politics-idUSL8N1HW4VP
https://news.mongabay.com/2019/10/violence-against-indigenous-peoples-explodes-in-brazil/
https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/12523
Chapter 6
Agricultural commodities boom
Brazilian agriculture has been relatively archaic and backward for most of the 20th century, still following colonial production modes. The foundation of the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation) EMBRAPA in 1973, and the knowledge transfers from countries already embracing the Green Revolution enabled Brazilian farmers to modernize the agricultural sector. (Moretti C.L.,2019)
Among the changes were improvements in soil management, such as liming and no-till agriculture, breeding of more productive pasture grasses, genetically modifying soybean strains to adapt them to tropical climates, the increased use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, or large-scale mechanization and automation.
In the 1970s, Brazil was still a net importer of food. Since then, Brazilian agricultural output has grown six-fold.The fastest transformation happened from 1990s to the 2010s, when Brazil achieved the highest growth of total factor productivity in agriculture among all countries in the world (Gasques 2012). The modernization came at the right time, in the early 21st century, the world experienced a Commodities Super Cycle. Between 1996 and 2006, the total value of Brazil's crops rose by 365% (The Economist, 26.08.10).
Brazil is now called the breadbasket and the slaughterhouse of the world. The country is the world's largest exporter of soybeans, sugar cane - in the form of sugar and crop-based ethanol used as biofuel, coffee, oranges, chicken meat and beef. It places second or third in the world in the production of corn, beans, pineapple or tobacco.
Land tenure and production systems are extremely unequal. Brazilian agro-industrialists own 800,000 farms which occupy 75.7 percent of the nation’s agricultural land and produce 62 percent of total agricultural output. In contrast, there are 4.4 million family farms in Brazil, making up 85 percent of all agricultural operations in the country. The family farm sector produces 70 percent of food consumed in the country, but does so using under 25 percent of Brazil’s agricultural land.(Mongabay, 2019/01)
A sharp contrast also shows up as to what is grown. Soy, corn, coffee, sugar, beef, pork and chicken are at the heart of Brazil’s industrial agribusiness supply chains. Over half of the soy, coffee and sugar produced in Brazil is exported to Europe, China and the U.S. along with other nations. Family farming, on the other hand, produces 87 percent of cassava, 70 percent of beans, 34 percent of rice, and 21 percent of wheat consumed in Brazil. It also accounts for 60 percent of milk, 59 percent of cow herds and 50 percent of poultry.
There is also a major funding inequity. In 2017, the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture announced a US$8 billion investment in family farming by 2020, as part of its Family Agriculture Safra Plan. In the same year, US$49 billion was released to support large-scale farmers. Simply put, the government invested 6 times more public funds in industrial agribusiness than it did in family farming. (Mongabay, 2019/01).
A lot of money is made in the Brazilian agricultural and food processing sector. Brazil with its 211 million inhabitants has a large domestic market. The Brazilian food and beverage industry generates a turnover of US$ 170 billion per year. Agricultural exports amount to about US-$100 billion.
It is important to keep these dimensions in mind when talking about international off-set payments (REDD+ and others) for not destroying natural lands.
Brazil has experienced many economic difficulties in the past, with a most severe downturn starting in 2014 (see chapter 9). But the modern agricultural sector has usually done well, even in times of economic turmoil. Brazil’s “Agricultural Miracle” credits industrial agribusiness with pulling the nation out of the recent economic tailspin, which greatly contributes to the strength of the agribusiness lobby and its demands for further conversions of natural land.
Agricultural commodity production for national and international markets has a strong impact on the environment. In terms of natural land conversion and greenhouse gas output, agriculture produces the heaviest ecological footprint in Brazil. By far the strongest driver of deforestation and largest emitter of greenhouse gases is the beef industry that converts rich rainforests into poor extensive pasture (Mongabay 2019/10). Anachronistic state policies, perverse subsidies and corruption greatly contribute to the often illegal, inefficient and wasteful resource use.
With a growing world population and consumer preferences in developing nations shifting from plant-based food to animal products, the demand for agricultural goods from South America is projected to rise massively in the future. This will further increase the pressures on natural land.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Brazil
Moretti, C.L. (2019): Four decades of agricultural innovation, EMBRAPA, power point presentation download and videos under
https://brazilcham.com/event/agricultural-investing/
Gasques, J.G. et al.2012: Produtividade da agricultura brasileira e os efeitos de algumas políticas
https://seer.sede.embrapa.br/index.php/RPA/article/view/248
Gasques, J.G. et al. Total factor productivity in Brazilian agriculture, in K. Fuglie, S.W. Wang, V.E. Ball (Eds.), Productivity growth in agriculture: An international perspective, CABI (2012), pp. 145-161
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2010/08/26/the-miracle-of-the-cerrado
https://www.s-ge.com/en/article/global-opportunities/20192-c6-brazil-food-industry
https://www.statista.com/topics/5838/agriculture-in-brazil/
https://www.statista.com/topics/5116/food-industry-in-brazil/
https://commodity.com/data/brazil/
https://tradingeconomics.com/brazil/gdp
https://www.bizvibe.com/blog/food-beverages/top-beef-producing-countries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_commodities_boom
Moretti, C.L. (2019): Four decades of agricultural innovation, EMBRAPA, power point presentation download and videos under
https://brazilcham.com/event/agricultural-investing/
https://news.mongabay.com/2019/01/as-brazilian-agribusiness-booms-family-farms-feed-the-nation/
https://borgenproject.org/agricultural-development-is-vital-brazils-success-story/
Chapter 7
Land reform settlements
Extreme social inequality and the resulting struggle for land has led to many internal conflicts in Latin American countries, including peasant revolts, civil wars, large-scale displacements of people and severe human rights violations.
Brazil’s history is full of fights over land and of false promises of agrarian reform. Landless farmers organisations such as the communist Peasant Leagues or the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission have tried in vain to achieve a substantial restribution of land. From the 1930s until the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, starting in 1995, successive governments of different ideological persuasions have promised land reform, but have never delivered substantial results. The powerful landholding elite has consistently succeeded to block real reforms.
The most prominent landless workers movement, the MST or Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement), was founded in 1984 during the last months of Brazil's military dictatorship. The MST is a rural movement of hundreds of thousands of landless peasants striving for land reform in Brazil. It is ideologically eclectic, inspired by Christian liberation theology, Marxism, the Cuban Revolution, Libertarian Socialism or Anarchism. The MST often tries to achieve its goals by occupating idle lands of large landowners, which has led to many violent conflicts in the past.
For governments, even left-leaning ones who want more equality, supporting occupations or other measures to redistribute land owned or claimed by powerful large landowners is very risky. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor sounds tempting but is likely to incur high political costs.
An easy way out of this dilemma is to let nature pay the bill for defusing social tension and settle landless peasants in "economically idle" forest areas. The Brazilian state owns vast, uninhabited swaths of the forests, the undesignated public forestlands. Brazilian governments have long provided incentives for farmers to move into, burn and "develop" those areas. In an effort to settle the Amazon in the 1970s, lawmakers approved legislation that allows squatters who can establish economic activity on a parcel for five years to buy the title at a discount, under market value.
The taxpayer-sponsored agrarian reforms of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, also focussed on the public forestlands.
Really substantial agrarian reform programs were implemented under the presidents Cardoso and Lula da Silva from 1995 to 2010. Under president Cardoso, the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária, INCRA (National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform) used 20 million hectares of land to settle over half a million of landless peasant families. He also created a total of 4,310 agrarian reform settlements. President Lula da Silva launched his own plan for agrarian reform, which set the goals of settling 400,000 landless rural workers, granting land titles to 500,000 posseiros (illegal squatters).
Taking all agrarian reforms together, Brazil implemented one of the most comprehensive frontier colonization program on Earth, in which about 1.2 million settlers have been translocated by successive governments. Reform settlements were founded mostly on public lands in the forested hinterlands of Brazilian Amazonia.
These agrarian reform settlements have the highest deforestation rates in the Amazon - despite a ban on clear cuts. These settlements encompass 5.3% of the 5 million km2 Amazonina region, but have contributed with 13.5% of all land conversion into agropastoral land uses (CA Peres and M Schneider 2015).
Nature paid a high price - often for nothing. Many agrarian land reform settlements failed. The political debate has centered almost exclusively round a single and imperfect metric of whether land reform was successful: the number of families settled by the government. All efforts were focused on obtaining land and transferring it to beneficiaries and to skimp on efforts such as building necessary infrastructure or providing rural extension services and rural credit to make sure the settlers were able to become independent and productive.
Allocation of land to poor but agriculturally inept beneficiaries was not accompanied by policies that improved the viability of family farming. Many receivers of the land didn't have any knowledge about how to cultivate land in the tropics. Most soils in the Amazon are extremely nutrient-poor. After using up the nutrients delivered by burning the forest, they quickly degrade, if they are not carefully managed. Many of the new landowners failed as farmers and eventually sold or abandoned their degraded plots and then moved on to occupy new forestland.
Agrarian reform measures also have often been marred by corruption, benefiting those close to the people in power rather than those most in need.
Disagreement among different federal agencies is at the root of many current deforestation trends across Amazonia. In the past, IBAMA, the Brazilian Environmental Agency, has repeatedly fined INCRA for environmental violations in the reform settlements.
Agrarian reform programs in Brazil have been both very expensive for the tax payer and very detrimental for the environment without resolving the problem of unequal land ownership. Distribution and control over land is now even more heavily concentrated than it was before the implementation of redistributive policies. Badly planned land reform stays a driver of forest loss.
"... the national treasury continues to pour millions of dollars in subsidizing deforestation, rather than in truly sustainable development options...
In fact, from a strictly macroeconomic and environmental perspective, it would probably be cheaper and safer to subsidize landless peasants not to migrate to new settlements in pristine forestlands." (Quotes CA Peres and M Schneider 2012, 2015)
Sources
Robles, Wilder: Revisiting Agrarian Reform in Brazil, 1985–2016
January 24, 2018, Journal of Developing Societies,
https://doi.org/10.1177/0169796X17749658
Gaspar, Lúcia. Agrarian reform in Brazil. Pesquisa Escolar On-Line, Joaquim Nabuco Foundation, Recife. Available at:
http://basilio.fundaj.gov.br/pesquisaescolar/
Robles, W. (2000). Beyond the politics of protest: The landless rural workers movement in Brazil. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 21(3), 657–691
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landless_Workers'_Movement
Peres, Carlos A., Schneider, Mauricio: Subsidized agricultural resettlements as drivers of tropical deforestation. Biol Conserv. 2012; 151: 65–68
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134016
Peres, Carlos A., Schneider, Mauricio: Environmental Costs of Government-Sponsored Agrarian Settlements in Brazilian Amazonia, PLOS ONE, August 6, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0134016
Hummel, A.C.: Deforestation in the Amazon: What is illegal and what is not?
Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene (2016) 4: 000141.
https://doi.org/10.12952/journal.elementa.000141
Chapter 8
Conservation as "fine-weather-only" activity
Under president Bolsonaro, Brazil has again become one of the world's environmental evildoers, maybe only ranking behind Indonesia. This is especially sad, because the country already had seemed to get the war against nature under control.
In fact, Brazil has produced both impressive documents safeguarding its natural heritage and, for some time, implemented efficient measures of nature protection.
Brazil's 1988 Constitution was built from scratch taking up many popular initiatives in its content. It is innovative and progressive, guaranteeing Indigenous rights to "their social organization, customs, languages, beliefs and traditions, and their original rights over the lands that they have traditionally occupied, it being the duty of the federal government to demarcate these lands, protect them and ensure that all their properties and assets are respected.”
Brazilian Constitution, Chapter VIII, Of the Indigenous Peoples
In chapter VI, Environment, the Constitution declares the need to protect fauna and flora, preserve and restore the essential ecological processes and preserve the diversity and integrity of the genetic patrimony of the country.
The Brazilian Forest Code was passed in 1965 in the days of military rule under President Humberto Branco. It included the legal requirement for landowners in the Brazilian Amazon to maintain 50% of forests as legal reserves. In 1996, under President Fernando Cardoso (Brazilian Social Democracy Party), the percentage of legal reserves on private land in the Amazon was raised to 80%! The law has been lauded for its stringent conservation of Amazon forests. As a legal mechanism, it is considered the largest single protector of private property forests required by any nation on the planet.
It looks absolutely beautiful on paper.
Unfortunately, violations of the legal reserve requirements have never been prosecuted in the 20th century. This had been expected to change with harsher criminal penalties to be introduced in 2009. But then, President Lula da Silva delayed the politically sensitive change until the post election period in 2011.
Under the new president Dilma Rousseff, the Brazilian Forest Code was adapted to the wishes of the "bancada ruralista", the agrilobby in the Brazilian congress, in 2012.
During the early 2000s, Brazil led the world in establishing new protected areas. Between 2000 and 2014, the size of the protected areas doubled. The National System of Conservation Units (SNUC) created a formal, unified system for federal, state and municipal parks in 2000. The SNUC law is very progressive, it goes beyond the old "fortress park" philosophy and defines nature protection at the landscape level with three elements,
a) the Protected Area Mosaic as a collection of protected areas of the same or different categories that are near to each other, adjoining each other or overlapping, and that should be managed as a whole,
b) the Ecological Corridor Project conserving corridors as portions of natural or semi-natural ecosystems linking protected areas that allow gene flow and movement of biota, recolonization of degraded areas and maintenance of viable populations larger than would be possible with individual units and
c) the inclusion of Indigenous Territories and Quilombos (community land of former black slaves) into the conservation network. Where indigenous peoples have full land rights and are protected against land grabbers by government agencies, their territories tend to have very low deforestation rates and serve as an obstacle to commercial logging, mining and large-scale agriculture.
As of early 2015, 1940 protected areas covered a surface of more than 1.5 million km2, almost three times the size of France, or 17.2% of Brazil’s terrestrial and inland water areas and 1.5% of coastal and marine areas, including the exclusive economic zone. Therefore, Brazil achieved the 2020 Aichi target of protecting at least 17% of terrestrial and inland water areas well ahead of time.
As of 2016 there were 700 Indigenous Territories in Brazil, covering about 13.8%% of the country's land area. Most of them were in the Amazon Legal. Including these Indigenous Territories, nearly half of Brazil's Amazon is under some kind of legal protection.
In 2010, the Brazilian government launched the Plano de Agricultura de Baixa Emissão de Carbono (ABC), the Brazilian Plan for Low Carbon Agriculture, one of the sectorial plans devised under the National Policy on Climate Change. The objective was to integrate crops into pasture areas as a cost-effective strategy and climate-friendly way of restoring degraded lands.The plan set a target for expanding integrated systems by four million hectares, expecting to avoid the emission of 8–22 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020.
In 2015, as part of the Paris Agreement, Brazil pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 37 percent by 2025 as compared to 2005 levels.
At the 13th Conference of the Parties on Biological Diversity (COP13) in Cancún, in 2016, Brazil’s Ministries of Agriculture and the Environment announced their intent to restore and promote sustainable agriculture across 22 million hectares of degraded land, the largest restoration commitment ever made by a single nation.
There was a period of great hope when deforestation in the Amazon slowed significantly after a peak of almost 28 000 km² in 2004 to less than 5000 km² in 2012. Deforestation of the Cerrado came down from 29 000 km² to 9000 km² in the same period. This success story happened under the presidency of Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva (Worker's Party) who applied mostly classical command-and-control-policies.
The Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm), launched in 2004, resulted in increased enforcement of environmental laws; improved forest monitoring by satellite, which enabled law enforcement to take action; new incentives for utilizing already deforested lands instead of exploitation of primary forest; and expanded protected areas and Indigenous reserves.
Furthermore, new regulations by the National Environmental Council (Conselho Nacional do Meio Ambiente—CONAMA) have nominally prohibited agrarian reform settlements in any forest area requiring clear-cuts.
Regarding just those documents and commitments, Brazil was (and on paper still is) one of the planet's most progressive, most responsible and most caring countries with regards to both the protection of the environment and the treatment of Indigenous peoples.
In the early 2000s, Brazil was indeed a world leader in actions directed at the protection of rainforests. And not only that. At the same time, during the first term in the administration of president Lula da Silva, poverty in Brazil fell 27.7%, mainly thank to the Bolsa Família program, the largest conditional cash transfer program in the world. And, during the same era, also the rich got richer. Everybody was happy.
What had happened?
Following the Great Commodities Depression of the 1980s and 1990s, the economy of the early 21st century experienced a Commodities Super Cycle, comparable to the post-World War II. economic expansion. The commodities boom was largely due to the rising demand from emerging markets, and particularly from China, during the period from 1992 to 2013. The Brazilian economy was going at full speed and the state's treasure chest was filled.
Two benign factors came together, the economy was doing exceptionally well, and the left-wing Workers' Party government under Lula da Silva had the political will to spend some of the money for the fights against poverty and nature destruction.
However, these good times didn't last. The priority list of governments and much of the population looks something like this
the economy
the economy
the economy
the military and the police
helping the poor
.
.
.
mitigating climate change
conservation of nature
Only, under the best of economic and political circumstances, in "fine weather only", there is money and political will left for nature conservation or mitigation of climate change.
Politicians want to come to power and to stay in power. They succeed by first promising to pay off supporters and then to deliver on their promises by providing public goods to their coalition of followers.
The consequences of biodiversity loss and climate change will only be felt in the future and the costs will be born by all of humanity. These future threats are easily discounted.
Preserving biodiversity or mitigating climate change are political non-essentials. They are like a nice hobby that one can follow or abandon, or like decorative pot plants that one can put on the balcony or not.
This will only change, when there is a breakdown of ecosystem services that really cuts economic profits or directly hurts political supporters.
These conditions are by no means a Brazilian exclusive. In the financial crisis of 2008, governments all over the world immediately shelled out billions of dollars to save the Banks (hallowed be Their names). During the Corona pandemic in 2020/2021, even more billions were spent to save the lockdown-stricken economy.
The threats to the environment never cause this kind of urgency. For governments it is enough to make sweet promises and sign nice pledges that something will be done until 2030, or 2050, or 2060...
And when climate or conservation goals are not reached, as usual, it is said: "lessons learned, more efforts needed, we will sign cute new pledges for the next decade".
Words are cheap,
Paper is patient, but
Money makes the world go round.
The next chapter will show how the good luck of Brazil's forests and savannas changed to the worse, when the economic boom turned to bust.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Brazil
(with links to full text in Portuguese and English)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Forest_Code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_areas_of_Brazil
OECD, 2015: Environmental Performance Reviews: Brazil 2015
https://rainforests.mongabay.com/brazil/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-environment-landrights-idUSKBN13U2B0
https://news.mongabay.com/2017/11/as-negotiators-meet-in-bonn-brazils-carbon-emissions-rise/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_commodities_boom
The years between 2003 and 2014 marked a transformational decade in Brazil’s history. This period was Brazil’s economic boom time. It was also the decade of the Workers' Party government of Lula da Silva who had the political will to tackle social and environmental issues. About 30 million people were lifted out of poverty, the gap in social inequality was reduced. Clearing of natural lands declined substantially, and there were great hopes the menace of Amazonian rainforest destruction would be soon over.
But then, things went awfully wrong. 2014 saw a sharp turnaround for the worse as the economy started to fall into a recession. The commodities boom had ended in the aftermath of the international financial crisis, demand for Brazilian products was falling. The reelection of President Dilma Rousseff from the leftist Workers' Party in 2014 was a great disappointment for businessmen and financial markets, who had hoped for a victory of the centre-right candidate Aécio Neves, and led to deinvestments.
In the same year, Brazil entered an enormous political crisis, with the explosion of the “Lava Jato" (Car Wash) corruption scandal which implicated hundreds of businessmen and much of the political elite. The Lava Jato scandal began in March 2014 as an investigation into black‐market money laundering at a petrol station (hence the nickname), but quickly morphed into Brazil's largest ever anti‐corruption investigation.
President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers' Party was not indicted in the Lava Jato scandal. But Rousseff was accused of manipulating the government’s accounts, leading to her impeachment in 2016 after just two years in office. These unsettling political events played a big role in deepening and extending the downturn. The economic crisis became the deepest and longest the country has experienced since the Great Depression. A great number of popular protests across the country reflected the economic recession and the corruption scandals.
By 2017, many leading Brazilian politicians were embroiled in court proceedings of the Lava Jato scandal. Even for South American standards the scandal reached truly gigantic proportions, encompassing wider corruption at the scale of tens of billions of US-$, not only in Brazil but in at least eleven other countries, even beyond Latin America (Panama papers). Three former Brazilian presidents, Collor de Mello, Lula da Silva and Michel Temer, and also ex-presidents in Peru, El Salvador and Panama were indicted and jailed as a result of the investigations.
This economic, political and social instability created a detrimental drop in international investor confidence. Capital flight worsened the economic downturn and reduced government revenues, making Keynesian policies, that might have mitigated the crisis, impossible.
Since the start of the multiple crisis, it was all downhill again for social and environmental matters. By 2015, the reduction rate of poverty and inequality had stagnated. Land redistribution didn't go forward and the demarcation of traditional Indigenous lands remained unresolved.
The expansion of protected areas levelled off. And the already protected areas were increasingly subjected to Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing, and Degazettement (PADDD), ranging in the tens of thousands of square kilometres.
Funds for IBAMA (environmental affairs) and FUNAI (Indigenous affairs) were cut. Deforestation went up again under the Dilma Rousseff and later the Michel Temer governments.
The motto of the bad years was "the economy first!" And the part of the economy that worked well was industrial agriculture. The large agriculturalists rose in esteem as the brave saviors of the nation. Only logical, that clearing forests and converting land into pastures and fields were seen as necessary crisis palliatives.
In 2017, Brazil’s “bancada ruralista” that represents the interests of the mighty agro-industrial sector in the National Congress of Brazil, had successfully pressured lawmakers to expand the law to allow for the privatization of large patches of government land, mostly undesignated public forestland. In 2018, the Brazilian government issued 90,000 such land titles throughout the country.
The court investigation of Lava Jato Operation resulted in over a thousand warrants. However, what looked like a wonderful victory of an independent judiciary over entrenched political corruption, turned sour when it became clear that the leading prosecutor Sérgio Moro was using his power to prevent the still popular former president Lula da Silva from running again as presidential candidate in the 2018 elections. Lula was kept in jail until the end of 2019 and the right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro won the elections with a pro-deforestation and anti-indigenous agenda. Prosecutor Moro was rewarded with the post of Minister of Justice in the new government.
The "bancada ruralista", the agrilobby, had endorsed the far right Jair Bolsonaro as presidential candidate, because he promised a great roll-back of the existing measures favouring forest conservation and indigenous rights. And Bolsonaro delivered.
After Jair Bolsonaro, also called Captain Chainsaw or the Trump of the Tropics, had assumed office as president of Brazil, all dykes against logging, forest fires and attacks on indigenous lands broke.
Sources
https://www.barrons.com/articles/what-triggered-brazils-crisis-1542792600?mod=article_signInButton
https://www.theemergingmarketsinvestor.com/what-caused-brazils-great-recession/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/opinion/what-the-hell-happened-to-brazil-wonkish.html
https://www.principles.com/big-debt-crises/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Car_Wash
https://time.com/4792665/brazil-michael-temer-corruption-scandal-lava-jato/
Mészáros, George: Caught in an Authoritarian Trap of Its Own Making? Brazil's ‘Lava Jato’ Anti‐Corruption Investigation and the Politics of Prosecutorial Overreach, Journal of Law and Society, 20.09.2020,
https.//doi.org/10.1111/jols.12245
Chapter 9
Environmental destruction as crisis palliative
by Sylvia Izquie
Heading 6
"The trees are the lungs of the Earth", activists in Brasilia. By Sylvia Izquierdo
Chapter 10
How to influence a rogue president
Reports of huge fires in the Amazon made global headlines in 2019. Brazilian farmers always take advantage during periods of lax government oversight to deforest more land. But after Bolsonaro's takeover, there was a veritable euphoria amongst land grabbers. Land speculators anticipated policy changes under his new administration that would allow natural land conversion with impunity. Most infamously, more than 70 farmers and loggers used a WhatsApp group to organize the Day of Fire on 10th of August 2019 (O Globo 2019).
Since Bolsonaro came to power in January 2019, his government has systematically gutted the main government agencies charged with protecting the Amazon and its native inhabitants, purged civil servants who were taking their jobs seriously and filled key posts with his own followers, often from the military.
When Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) reported that through July 2019, deforestation was up 40 percent, compared with the same period last year, Bolsonaro claimed that the INPE figures are a “lie” and were released to harm Brazil’s reputation. He fired the respected and trusted INPE director Ricardo Osorio Galvao (newscientist 2019). It won't help Bolsonaro, because, fortunately, international free satellite services now allow forest monitoring for everybody (see Box "Satellite monitoring").
Satellite monitoring of deforestation
Thanks to Norway’s Ministry of Climate and Environment and the satellite monitoring group Planet, anyone with an internet connection can now view monthly updates of high-resolution satellite imagery of tropical forests for free.
Another very important source of satellite imagery is The Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory at the University of Maryland that investigates methods, causes and impacts of global land surface change.
https://news.mongabay.com/2021/01/monitoring-tropical-deforestation-is-now-free-and-easy/
Global Forest Watch - forest monitoring
https://www.globalforestwatch.org/
Planet satellite services
Forest alerts, University of Maryland
https://glad.umd.edu/dataset/glad-forest-alerts
Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project
Agents from environmental bodies like Brazil’s environmental agency (IBAMA) and the Chico Mendes Institute (ICMBio), which protects the nation’s federal conservation units, have faced routine sacking and intimidation.
The Brazilian governmental protection agency for indigenous interests and their culture (FUNAI) also came under attack by Bolsonaro. For some time, an evangelist priest was head of the FUNAI, a situation called "making the fox responsible for the safety of the chicken pen" (NYT, 05.02.2020)
The public health sector fared no better. The Health Ministry was stocked by Bolsonaro with active-duty and retired military men with little public health experience - bad for the Brazilian people, when the Corona pandemic struck. The lack of a coordinated federal response to COVID-19 was a hallmark of the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro throughout the pandemic. Radical populists such as Bolsonaro or Trump live in their own information bubble. In this sphere of "alternative facts", all rational arguments fail. Despite many warnings of virologists and although both presidents contracted the virus themselves, they continued to negate its dangers and the necessity for strict control measures. Bolsonaro actively downplayed the threat of Covid-19, ridiculed mask-wearing, opposed social distancing and lockdowns and called the pandemic a "gripinha", a little flu. When Manaus health system collapsed a second time after a virus mutant hit the city, Bolsonaro called the idea of a second wave a lie. In November 2020, he told his people to essentially accept the virus and not fear the virus "like a country of fags." Because of the neglect of President Bolsonaro, the effects of the Corona pandemic were worse in Brazil than in other countries. Brazil's handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been ranked the world's worst by the Australian think tank Lowey (msn, 28.01.21).
It is no surprise that a president who doesn't care about his own population cares even less about the environment. It is very hard to influence such a politician, even at the government level. When Norway and Germany blocked their funding for the Amazon Fund because of the surge in forest fires, Bolsonaro only ridiculed the move: "Isn't Norway the one that kills whales up there in the North Pole? That also does oil exploration there? Take the money and go help Angela Merkel to reforest Germany." (Deutsche Welle, DW, 2019). Norway has provided some $1.2 billion to the fund that fights deforestation in the Amazon, making it the largest contributing nation.
But even such sums are peanuts compared to the profits that can be generated by destroying the rainforest.
For Bolsonaro, his land grabbing supporters are politically much more important than European do-gooders.
“Paying supporters, not good governance or representing the general will, is the essence of ruling." Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, 2011
Some of Bolsonaro's staunchest supporters are organized in the Rural Democratic Union (UDR), a radical group of mostly cattle ranchers in the bancada ruralista. Their leader Luiz Antonio Nabhan Garcia refers to the Paris Agreement as "toilet paper" and stated that “the world wants to take over the Brazilian Amazon,” threatening Brazil’s sovereignty (mongabay, 2018/11).
If Bolsonaro stands up against foreign governments, he becomes a hero for his followers in the process. That is why Bolsonaro likes to use the eco-imperialism argument himself:
“We understand the importance of the Amazon for the world – but the Amazon is ours. ... No country in the world has the moral right to talk about the Amazon. You destroyed your own ecosystems.” (The Guardian 19.07.2019)
[The eco-imperialism argument would go on like this:...and now we have ALL right to destroy our ecosystems as well to get as rich as you are.]
How can such a president be stopped?
First answer: "Send the army in!"
"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" (Mao Zedong, 1938)
At the height of the forest destruction in 2019, distinguished Havard-professor Steven M. Walt published a "mind-game" article in Foreign Policy that involved the threat of a "naval blockade of Brazilian ports and airstrikes against critical Brazilian infrastructure" by the USA, if the Brazilian government would not stop the environmental catastrophy. Of course, the effects of climate change are still much too mild to make such a scenario plausible, but when one day the life support systems of the planet will start deteriorating so much that they will threaten economic profits, military action will become an option (Foreign Policy, 05.08.2019).
Second answer: "Cut the profits of his supporters"
Money makes the world go round (Fred Ebb, Musical Cabaret, 1966)
If Bolsonaro can pay off his supporters and maintain his power base at home, he has quite a strong position and can withstand blame by NGOs and political pressure from foreign governments.
However, Brazil is not a self-sufficient island, its economy is linked to the globalized trade and finance flows, and those could be influenced.
Hypothetically, the European Union could refuse to sign the EU-Mercosur-Free-Trade-Deal, that would allow Mercosur farmer to export products such as beef, chicken or sugar at a preferential tariff rate to the EU. The majority of the European public rejects the signing of the trade deal unless the Amazon is protected (mongaby 2021/02). It remains to be seen if EU politicians will risk hurting powerful business interests just to save some Amazon forest.
Economic sanctions are another hypothetical option. But sanctions rarely work, they usually just redirect the trade flows. Already now, by far the most important buyer of Brazilian commodities is China. Other good customers are Iran, the Arabian states and Russia. Even if Europe e.g. would block imports of Brazilian soy, it is unlikely that the other importers, not exactly shining beacons of environmental protection, would follow its example.
More promising than intervention at the state level is the direct involvement of the business world. Modern capitalists are certainly not choir boys who play according to moral rules, but they are now bound into international supply chains. The big producers in Brazil sell their commodities to even bigger multinational companies that in turn sell some of their products in countries with democratic governments, a free press, and a lot of customers with increasing environmental awareness.
The threat of consumer boycott, i.e. of diminishing economic gains, is a sharp weapon in the conservation armory. The fear of a drop in profits is why multinational companies don't want burning rainforests and massacred native people in their supply chain anymore.
Before the forest burning season 2020 (usually starting in August), 38 transnational companies in the agricultural, industrial, mining and service sectors, along with four major business associations, sent a letter to Brazil's Vice-President Hamilton Mourão, asking him to address “environmental irregularities and crime in the Amazon and other Brazilian biomes".
An even sharper instrument to change government behavior is to involve Divine Power.
Bolsonaro loves to say:
“I am fulfilling a mission from God.” (The Guardian, 19.07.19)
Well, on planet Earth, Corporate Finance is GOD (Glattfelder 2011). Even the most hard-nosed president has to listen to his Divine Master's voice.
In summer 2020, 32 international financial institutions that manage US$4.5 trillion in assets warned the Bolsonaro government, that if it did not contain rapidly escalating deforestation they would stop investing in the country.
The Bolsonaro administration — long resistant to all efforts to redirect its Amazon development and environmental policies — responded to joint primary sector company and investor pressure by announcing a decree for a 120-day ban on fires in the Amazon. The Army has also been deployed to the region to guard against a replay of the 2019 wildfires.
This enlightening succession of events is very relevant for environmental activists too. By monitoring supply chains and finance flows and exposing deforestation risks, multinational companies in the primary industries and corporate finance could be motivated/nudged/pressured to influence rogue leaders.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Amazon_rainforest_wildfires
O Globo 2019
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/19/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-amazon-rainforest-deforestation
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/world/americas/Brazil-indigenous-missionary.html
https://news.yahoo.com/raging-virus-few-shots-brazil-110210447.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/27/americas/manaus-brazil-covid-19-new-variant-intl/index.html
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/second-wave-of-covid-19-hits-manaus-region-hard/vi-BB1dnQgf
https://www.dw.com/en/jair-bolsonaro-to-merkel-reforest-germany-not-amazon/a-50032213
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/19/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-amazon-rainforest-deforestation
Bueno de Mesquita, B. (2011): The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, Random House, 2011, ISBN 9781610390446
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/05/who-will-invade-brazil-to-save-the-amazon/
https://www.dw.com/en/eu-mercosur-free-trade-deal-what-you-need-to-know/a-49414103
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/07/international-investors-urge-brazil-to-take-real-action-to-stop-deforestation/
https://www.ceres.org/resources/reports/out-on-a-limb
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vax3Idbbn5rYOddVEbp2f2nnFjNbjDCy/view
Conclusions
Brazil is an incredibly rich country. It still has the largest rainforest in the world, and many other species-rich biomes. These natural landscapes constitute one of the best carbon-sinksand host the richest stocks of biodiversity on the planet. The rainforests create their own climate by bringing rain from the Atlantic all the way to the Andes and are home to the last indigenous peoples.
In Brazil, there are 170 million hectares of mostly extensive pastures and 60 million hectares for crops. These agricultural areas alone are larger than half the area of the European Union. Plenty of land to let Brazil's agricultural miracle continue.
Despite being a predominantly Catholic country, the birthrate per woman in Brazil is down to 1.7, comparable to European countries. Brazilians have escaped the Malthusian trap and population pressure is not increasing anymore.
Innocent idealistic minds could now think that it would be easy to create a win-win-situation.
Destruction of natural landscapes, especially the great Amazonian rainforests, could be stopped.
Protected areas and indigenous reserves could be secured.
The lung of the Earth and the largest terrestrial carbon sink could be saved.
Brazil could easily figure out how to promote rural development that does not depend on the endless destructive expansion of the forest frontier.
Highly productive agriculture could replace low productive pasture lands. When combined with sustainable intensification of cattle ranching, repurposing the extensive pastureland could potentially accommodate all of the future expected demand for agricultural land without any further conversion of natural habitat. Brazil could be an agricultural powerhouse without constant deforestation.
Chemical-input intensive industrial agriculture could give way to integrated crop-livestock-tree farming systems to constitute new sustainable agroecological landscapes.
The landless rural poor could be settled on degraded or under-utilized land and be supported to create productive farms.
Brazil is not an underdeveloped backwater with just a handful of educated people. The government has competent civil servants which could sort out the mess with competing or undefined land rights. It could implement clear and stringent environmental policies. It could abolish the catastrophic practice of land grabbers' amnesties that are fueling land speculation. It could take the constitution seriously and protect the lands of the indigenous peoples. It could fulfill its international pledges on climate and biodiversity protection. Maybe, it even could curb the rampant corruption in the country.
Respect life on Earth. Stop fighting over land. Live in balance with nature. Share the planet's wealth with everybody. Clean the atmosphere. Feed the hungry sustainably. Empower the downtrodden. Preserve Earth's riches for future generations. Liberté, fraternité, égalité. And so forth, very cute.
Enter reality.
The problem is,
“Politics have no relation to morals,” (Niccolò Macchiavelli, 1513)
and
"Bad behavior is almost always good politics." (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, 2011)
By leaving land rights undefined, by issueing land grabbers laws, by being complacent in logging and burning activities, governments can pay off supporters in the agribusiness sector and in parts of the rural population.
From a farmer’s perspective, deforestation is a logical consequence of market conditions: a combination of the cost of land, how its acquisition is financed, the fact that the Brazilian Forest Code allows farmers to convert a large portion of the natural habitat that they already own, particularly in the Cerrado, or that the government is likely to pass another land grabbers law to legalize irregular land acquisitions. Forest clearing is brilliant business.
By sending poor people into the jungle to "develop idle land", the government's settlement programs can diffuse social tensions.
By providing cheap food, especially cheap beef, for the population, politicians can please their urban supporters. 87% of Brazilians live in cities.
No matter what crisis is hitting the country, economic, social, political or in the health sector, destroying more nature to get quick and free profits is a wonderful palliative.
Wild non-human species are useless: they don't serve humanity like domestic species, they can't vote, they are not consumers, they have no purpose in the human production system. They have value only when they can be harvested and sold in the market.
The indigenous peoples only number about 900,000 in Brazil, many of them living self-reliantly far from civilization. For politicians and businessmen, most of them are just as useless as voters and consumers as wild animals.
Future generations are useless (this one is especially for Fridays for Future):
"...money spent on people ... who are years away from contributing to the economy is money wasted. Resources should instead be focused on those who help the ruler stay in power now, not those who might be valuable in the distant future.”
(Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, 2011)
For many political leaders, the entire idea of a win-win-situation is utter nonsense. They see the world as a zero-sum game. There will always be both, winners and losers, because the strongest don't share, the winners take all. The "pie" is absolutely huge in Brazil, but this doesn't mean that it will be shared.
The world has enough for everyone's need,
but not enough for everyone's greed.
Mahatma Gandhi (The Guardian 28.01.13)
Seen with the same logic, climate change, deterioration of life support systems or reaching the tipping-point of the Amazon forest will only affect the losers. First, these developments will happen somewhen in the undefined future and the consequences might be first felt in far away countries. Second, the rich and powerful have always been able to insulate themselves from unpleasant consequences of natural events.
Most governments are keen on having a good reputation or, at least, maintain a facade of good appearance. They want to stay open for supporters from different sectors of society, and make business with different international partners. In the case of populists such as Bolsonaro or Trump, this is different. They cater almost exclusively to their core supporters and try to expand their power base from this relatively monolithic and very loyal block (e.g. bancada BBB - Bullet, Bible and Bull).
Bolsonaro is relatively immune to outside pressure. Even economic sanctions from Europe couldn't hurt him much, because he has good business relationships with autocratic regimes such as China, Russia, Iran or the Arabian monarchies.
Discounting military action, the only way to influence Brazilian environmental and indigenous policies in the current power constellation is building up downstream pressure in international supply chains and on the allocation of investment capital. The attachments 1 - 3 give examples of international and Brazilian zero-deforestation commitments and supply chain monitoring.
Multinational companies and corporate finance standing united with conservation NGOs and climate activists against proponents of environmental destruction? For many activists, it will take time to get used to these new brothers in arms. Some have called the alliances with multinationals "dancing with the devils", or, in the case of corporate finance, "dancing with the mother of all devils" (e.g. Goodman 2010).
However, there are not many choices. Time is running out quickly and anything that promises to help to preserve nature, defend indigenous peoples' rights and avoid climate chaos should be tried.
Sources
Niccolò Macchiavelli, 1513
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, 2011
The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics. Random House. 2011. ISBN 9781610390446
Goodman, P. (2010): Dancing with the Devil: Fair Trade’s Expansion as a Regulatory Standard-Setter, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1549915
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Attachment 1
Zero Deforestation Commitments (ZDCs)
Zero-deforestation commitments are a type of voluntary sustainability initiative that companies or banks adopt to signal their intention to reduce or eliminate deforestation associated with commodities that they produce, trade, sell or finance.
Efficient zero deforestation commitments should include:
zero-gross targets with immediate deadlines (instead of zero-net targets and offset measures that only become effective in the far future),
clear sanction-based implementation mechanisms (instead of mere blame & shame games), and
traceability to indirect suppliers, particularly within cattle supply chains (to avoid cattle laundering).
This attachment shows
a) examples of notable initiatives of companies and banks to reduce deforestation in supply chains, and
b) examples of organisations working to increase supply chain transparency.
The most important zero-deforestation agreements in Brazil are presented in more detail in
attachment 2 - soybean industry, ASM
attachment 3 - cattle industry, G4 and TAC
a) Initiatives of companies and banks to reduce deforestation in supply chains
CGF
The Consumer Goods Forum is a global, parity-based industry network of over 400 retailers, manufacturers, service providers and other stakeholders across 70 countries
https://www.theconsumergoodsforum.com/
SCC
In support of the Consumer Goods Forum's 2010 resolution on zero net deforestation, banks in the Soft Commodities Compact (SCC) set out to reduce deforestation in the supply chains of their client base in four soft commodity supply chains: palm oil, timber products, soy and beef.
https://www.cisl.cam.ac.uk/centres/centre-for-sustainable-finance/soft-commodities
https://www.banktrack.org/article
/six_years_of_the_soft_commodities_compact_failed_to_slow_bank_finance_for_deforestation
The initiative “Zero Deforestation Commitments from Commodity Producers and Traders” aims to eliminate deforestation from the production of agricultural commodities such as palm oil, soy, paper and beef products by no later than 2020, thereby contributing to the goal of ending natural forest loss by 2030.
Lead Organization World Economic Forum
https://newsroom.unfccc.int/news/lima-challenge-bridging-the-emissions-gap-by-forest-intervention
BEI
The Banking Environment Initiative (BEI) was initiated in 2010 with the support of The Prince of Wales to identify new ways in which banks can collectively stimulate the direction of capital towards environmental sustainable economic growth.
https://www.cisl.cam.ac.uk/business-action/sustainable-finance/banking-environment-initiative
http://climateinitiativesplatform.org/index.php/Banking_Environment_Initiative_(BEI)
GFTN
The WWF-led Global Forest & Trade Network (GFTN) connects more than 300 companies from the logging and paper industries, communities, NGOs and entrepreneurs from more than 30 countries worldwide as part of an effort to create a new market for environmentally responsible forest products.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/initiatives/global-forest-trade-network
b) Organisations working to increase supply chain transparency
The complexity and opacity of global supply chains and finance are major obstacles to action by companies and financial institutions. These organisations are working to increase supply chain transparency.
Transparency for Sustainable Economies (trase)
Trase is mapping the trade and financing of commodities linked to deforestation; it combines self-disclosed data from companies with customs, shipping, tax, logistics and other data to map the supply chains linking consumer countries, and traders, with places of production, as well as the patterns of ownership and investment in trading companies.
Trase is a partnership between Global Canopy and the Stockholm Environment Institute
https://globalcanopy.org/what-we-do/supply-chain-transparency/
Ceres Tag is one of the world’s most comprehensive animal monitoring platforms, using direct to satellite ear tags.
https://www.cerestag.com/about/
AFi
The Accountability Framework initiative (AFi) helps companies to benchmark their commitments to protecting forests, natural ecosystems, and human rights. Companies can see how their policies match up to the Framework and see what they need to improve.
https://accountability-framework.org/
Rainforest Action Network: Exposing Brands and Banks Driving Deforestation
https://www.ran.org/publications/keepforestsstanding/
Sources:
Garrett, R.D. et al. (2019): Criteria for effective zero-deforestation commitments, Global Environmental Change, Vol. 54, January 2019, pages 135-147
Attachment 2
Zero-deforestation commitments in the Brazilian soy industry
Brazil’s Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM or SoyM) was the first voluntary zero-deforestation agreement implemented in the tropics and set the stage for supply-chain governance of other commodities, such as beef and palm oil.
Between 2001 and 2006, soybean fields in the Brazilian Amazon expanded by 1 million hectares, contributing to record deforestation rates. In 2006, following a report from Greenpeace and under pressure from consumers, large companies like McDonald’s, TESCO and Wal-Mart decided to stop using soy grown on cleared forestland in the Brazilian Amazon. This put pressure on leading commodity traders, such as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Bunge, who agreed to no longer purchase soy from farmers who cleared Amazonian rainforest to expand soy fields after July 2006.
A private sector agreement, a type of supply chain governance, called the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM or SoyM), was set up that accounted for about 90% of all soy purchases in the region. If farmers wanted to sell their soy, they would have to abide by the policies set out by the ASM. Before the moratorium, 30 percent of soy expansion occurred through deforestation, and after the moratorium, only about 1 percent of the new soy expansion came at the expense of forest. Deforestation between 2006 and 2016 was 35% lower than it would have been without the moratorium, likely keeping some 18,000 square kilometers of the Amazon standing (Heilmayr, R. 2020). In the same period, soy fields expanded by another 1.3 million hectares and soy production increased by about 400%. Farmers were planting on already cleared land. There were still negative consequences of the soy boom such as increased road building and a soy-fed land-speculation frenzy.
Nevertheless, the ASM is mostly seen as a success for the environment. The involvement of environmental organizations like Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund boosted confidence that the agreement isn’t merely a form of greenwashing. Government investments in satellite monitoring systems and local property registries provided the backbone for monitoring and enforcing the moratorium.
Unfortunately, government support is now quickly eroding under the Bolsonaro administration, and many soy farmers are fighting for the abolishment of the ASM.
Bartolomeu Braz Pereira, president of Brazilian soy producer association Aprosoja Brasil, wants to overturn the ASM on the grounds that it unfairly hurts Brazilian farmers complying with domestic laws (Reuters 05.11.19).
Braz Pereira is supported by Brazil's minister of agriculture, Teresa Cristina Dias, who called the ASM absurd: “The soy moratorium is a private affair between private parties. I think it is absurd, we have ... means to show where our soy is produced and if it can be produced there.”
The argument brought forward is that there is no need for the Soy Moratorium because the Brazilian Forest Code is already enough to protect the Amazonian rainforest.
The catch is, the ASM only allows to buy soy from areas already deforested before July 2006. Compliance with the ASM has been good because of the enormous market power of the major soy trading companies.
The Brazilian Forest Code requires to maintain 80% of land in Amazonia as legal forest reserve. This means, 20% of the land can be legally deforested and turned into soy plantations. The government just has to privatize more public land or give land grabbers another amnesty, and the soy fields can be legally expanded. In reality, the 80% requirement has almost never been enforced and few farmers have so much forest reserve. Farmers are five times more likely to violate the governmental policy of maintaining forest reserves than they are to violate the private sector agreement of no new deforestation (Gibbs 2015).
The soy crushing group Abiove, which represents global grains traders in Brazil, warned that abolishing the ASM could hurt farmers, creating backlash against Brazilian goods in European markets, where consumers demand more environmentally sustainable farming (Reuters 05.11.19).
There is hope that the private sector will keep up the Amazon Soy Moratorium despite the pressures by government and soy farmers.
Sadly, all efforts by NGOs to expand the Soy Moratorium to the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna biome, have so far failed. The Amazon region accounts for only about 10% of Brazilian soy production whereas the Cerrado produces about 50% of the soy. Soy expansion accounted for 22% of Cerrado conversion during 2003–14. Only 20% of the Cerrado's original vegetation remains intact; less than 3% of the area is currently protected by law. The Soy Moratorium expansion to the Cerrado would prevent the direct conversion of 3.6 million ha of native vegetation to soybeans by 2050 (Soterroni, A.C. 2019). At present, the beans from different farms are often mixed together, and buying carefully segregated sustainable product is costly and rare, so retailers can only rely on problematic certification schemes that promise to offset their environmental damage (Heal, A. 2020).
Sources
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/success-of-the-2006-amazon-soy-moratorium/
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/victories/amazon-rainforest-deforestation-soy-moratorium-success/
Heilmayr, R., Rausch, L.L., Munger, J. et al. Brazil’s Amazon Soy Moratorium reduced deforestation. Nat Food 1, 801–810 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-020-00194-5
Gibbs, H. et al. (2015): Brazil’s Soy Moratorium. Science 23.01.15. Vol. 347 Issue 6220
Reuters 05.11.19
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-soybeans-moratorium-idUSKBN1XF2J6
Reuters 13.11.19
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-soy-moratorium-idUSKBN1XN2LM
https://news.mongabay.com/2015/01/brazils-soy-moratorium-dramatically-reduced-amazon-deforestation/
Van Dam, J. et al. (2019): An analysis of existing laws on forest protection in the main soy producing countries in Latin America, IUCN
Rausch, L.L. et al. (2018): Soy expansion in Brazil’s Cerrado, Conservation Letters, 16.07.19, DOI: 10.1111/conl.12671
Soterroni, A.C. et al. (2019): Expanding the Soy Moratorium to Brazil’s Cerrado, Science Advances, 17 Jul 2019: Vol. 5, no. 7, eaav7336, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav7336
Heal, A. et al. 2020, British chicken driving deforestation in Brazil
International soybean trade 2017. Source: Rabobank 2018
Attachment 3
Zero-deforestation commitments in the Brazilian cattle industry
The establishment of pastures is recognized as the main vector for expanding the agricultural frontier and clear native forest. Between 2005 and 2013, state interventions helped bring about an unprecedented 70% drop in Amazon deforestation making Brazil a world leader in the reduction of harm to rainforests. Two agreements, G4 and TAC, aimed to reduce the impacts of beef production on deforestation and pressing the meat packing industry to place greater control on their suppliers, were considered two of the main tools to curb deforestation in the Amazon.
G4 (ISUU/Greenpeace International 2017)
Greenpeace Brazil’s investigations into the industry’s involvement in deforestation, published in 2009 in the Greenpeace International report Slaughtering the Amazon, led to the signing of the G4 Cattle Agreement later that year by the country’s four largest beef processors: Bertin (subsequently bought by JBS), JBS, Marfrig and Minerva. Based on the demands made in the report, this agreement was intended to ensure both compliance with fundamental environmental and human rights standards and transparent reporting on that compliance, making these key meat processors themselves the agents of transformation.
It involved a range of commitments concerning their sourcing from farms within the Amazon biome, requiring them to ensure, at a minimum:
• Proof of zero deforestation: The beef processors were required to prove that they were not buying animals from farms that had engaged in any deforestation after the date on which they signed the agreement. Industry’s obligations included the control of indirect suppliers, e.g. the large number of breeders selling calves to fattening ranches that in turn have direct contractual links with slaughterhouses.
• Proof of freedom from land invasion: The companies were required to prove that they were not sourcing cattle from farms that had been accused of invading Indigenous lands or fined for invading protected areas. They also pledged to avoid sourcing cattle from farms that had been embargoed by IBAMA, or from any suppliers – direct or indirect – accused of land grabbing or convicted of involvement in land conflicts.
• Proof of freedom from slave labour: The companies were required to avoid buying from farms using slave labour (backed by a requirement to sign and fully comply with Brazil’s National Pact for the Eradication of Slave Labour) and to be able to prove that their supply chains were free from slavery.
• Proof by suppliers of legal land title: They also pledged not to source cattle from farms – initially direct suppliers, but to be extended to include indirect suppliers within two years – that could not provide maps showing their property boundaries and areas of use and non-use or (after grace periods of six months, two years and five years, respectively) that were not registered, lacked an environmental permit or did not have legal land title.
• Credible tracking systems: Suppliers were to be required to formally commit to adopting a reliable and internationally acceptable tracking system enabling monitoring, verification and reporting of the origins of all cattle products and by-products, and an independent auditing system was to be established to ensure the signatory companies’ compliance with the terms of the agreement.
Greenpeace's agreement with the four largest meatpackers is a voluntary private-sector commitment.
TAC
In 2009, the Federal Prosecution Service (MPF) and more than a hundred meatpacking companies – including the largest companies JBS, Marfrig and Frigol – signed an agreement that prohibits the slaughter of cattle raised on indigenous lands, environmental reserves, and farms deforested without environmental licenses, or those caught using slave labour. Other than the voluntary G4, this so-called “Meat TAC” (TAC stands for Conduct Adjustment Agreement in Portuguese) is legally binding and therefore comes with legal consequences.
The agreements are important instruments to diminish illegal forest clearing, but there are loopholes and tricks to circumvent restrictions. The meatpackers who have signed the agreements are meant to only accept cattle from registered suppliers, who have agreed not to deforest any more rainforest. However, in a process called "cattle laundering", cattle reared on illegally deforested land is being moved to legal, registered ranches prior to their sale. Just by taking cattle from "dirty" properties over to "clean" properties make it compliant with the rules.
Also, property titles may be so undefined or unclear, that they elude monitoring by meatpacking companies.
Another trick is to lease rural properties to third parties in order to elude control by meat industry.
The official system for recording cattle movement, the Animal Transit Guides (GTAs) is inadequate and lacks transparency. The Ministry of Agriculture refuses to make the GTAs readily publicly available.
The failure to deliver the required monitoring of indirect suppliers and cattle movements allowed deforestation by indirect suppliers to continue unchallenged, as well as the laundering of cattle associated with such breaches. More than half the Brazilian beef on the market is processed by smaller companies that are not parties to the G4 Cattle Agreement, and a substantial proportion of these have not signed TACs. These loopholes have the consequence that 85–90% of deforestation in the supply chains of large meatpackers is being missed.
Unfortunately, the beef processors failed to deliver on their commitments to carry out transparent and comprehensive monitoring of their supply chains and of cattle movements.
In 2017, Greenpeace Brazil suspended all engagement with JBS, and later with the other G4 signatories, concerning implementation of the agreement, in light of their failure to deliver on their commitments and of the continued corruption scandals within the wider Brazilian livestock sector. In an anti-deforestation action in the Amazon, IBAMA (Brazilian Environmental Protection Agency) embargoed two JBS meatpacking plants and 13 other companies accused of purchasing cattle coming from areas of illegal deforestation. An international meat scandal exposed wide-spread corruption and breaches in sanitary control of Brazilian meat exports.
Thee beef industry in Brazil is still far from achieving its zero deforestation goals. Greenpeace Brasil, Reporter Brasil, Imazon, Amnesty International, Chain Reaction Research, or Global Witness have repeatedly questioned the extent to which JBS, Marfrig, Minerva and other meatpackers are willing to go to fully abide by their commitments.
The Amazon Soy Moratorium has been relatively successful, because the main soy traders are US-American companies such as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Bunge which sell many of their products in countries where the public opinion is against deforestation. It is much harder to pressure the powerful Brazilian meatpackers because they either cater for the large domestic market or export meat to autocratic states such as China, Iran, the Persian Gulf states or Russia.
The election of President Jair Bolsonaro has made the situation worse, with the safeguards and agencies that protect the Amazon coming under ferocious attack.
In this hostile environment, few options are left to pressure meatpacking companies to comply with the regulations.
The European Union could refuse to sign the EU-Mercosur-trade-agreement that forsees to reduce to zero from 20% a levy on beef imports into the EU under the so-called Hilton quota. That quota would allow Brazil to export up to 10,000 tonnes of beef, and 29,500 tonnes of prime beef cuts, to the EU per year.
A second option is deinvestment. The investment arm of northern Europe’s largest financial services group, Nordea Asset Management, which controls a €230bn fund has dropped JBS, the world's biggest meat processor, from its portfolio in June 2020. The decision was taken over the meat giant’s links to farms involved in Amazon deforestation, its response to the Covid-19 outbreak and past corruption scandals.
Sources
https://issuu.com/greenpeaceinternational/docs/greenpeace_stillslaughtering_pages__1_/s/10831843
Pacheco, P. et al. (2017): Beyond zero deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Progress and remaining challenges to sustainable cattle intensification
CIFOR Info Brief, DOI: 10.17528/cifor/006394
http://www.zerodeforestationcattle.org/
https://chainreactionresearch.com/report/cattle-driven-deforestation-a-major-risk-to-brazilian-retailers/
Alix-Garcia, J. and H. Gibbs (2017): Forest conservation effects of Brazil's zero deforestation cattle agreements undermined by leakage, Global Environmental Change, 47:201-207, Nov. 2017
Carvalho, W.D. et al. (2019): Deforestation control in the Brazilian Amazon: A conservation struggle being lost as agreements and regulations are subverted and bypassed, Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation, Volume 17, Issue 3, July–September 2019, Pages 122-130
https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/forests/beef-banks-and-brazilian-amazon/
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/greenpeace-brazil-suspends-negotiations-cattle-giant-jbs/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/world/americas/brazil-meat-industry-scandal-exports.html?_r=1
https://issuu.com/greenpeaceinternational/docs/greenpeace_stillslaughtering_pages__1_
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/28/investors-drop-brazil-meat-giant-jbs
