WORLD demand for Brazilian beef is soaring, as consumers see it as a cheap, disease-free alternative to mad cows and flu-ridden poultry. But supplying the global beef market is deforesting the Amazon far faster than the logging trade.
An international forestry research body reports this week that Brazilian cattle ranchers are felling the world鈥檚 largest rainforest with unprecedented speed to make way for pasture. 鈥淏razil鈥檚 deforestation rates are skyrocketing and beef production for export is to blame,鈥� says David Kaimowitz, director-general of the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research, an organisation backed by the World Bank.
Within the next few weeks, says the report, Brazil鈥檚 National Institute for Space Research will reveal satellite data showing that deforestation rates in the world鈥檚 largest rainforest have been higher over the past two years than in any preceding 24-month period. In 2003, some 25,000 square kilometres of Amazon rainforest was destroyed. This equals the figure for 2002, which was 40 per cent up on 2001 and almost double the rate in the mid-1990s (see Diagram).
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Over the same period, 鈥渃attle expansion in the Amazon has been phenomenal,鈥� says Kaimowitz. Roads into the rainforest are lined with new slaughterhouses and meat packing plants. The Amazon states of Rond么nia, Par谩 and Mato Grosso have seen both the biggest increases in cattle herd size and the fastest deforestation, the report shows.
Report author Benoit Martens says the Brazilian government is trying to get to grips with the problem by stopping ranchers from illegally taking government land. 鈥淏ut it is easy to illegally occupy government land without being prosecuted,鈥� Martens says.
However, Kaimowitz points out that native communities defend their land tenaciously, and have been very effective at limiting deforestation in their territories. Kaimowitz is calling for urgent international aid to be sent to Brazil so it can pay landowners to conserve forests and clamp down on those annexing government land.
The key to the surge in beef production in the Amazon is the globalisation of the world beef market. 鈥淯ntil 1991, the ranchers in the Amazon used to sell their beef only in that region; then it was only in Brazil; but now they have access to the entire world market,鈥� says Kaimowitz. Exports increased fivefold between 1997 and 2003, making Brazil the world鈥檚 biggest beef exporter. Four-fifths of this growth has come from within the Amazon. The European Union is the biggest importer, followed by Chile, Egypt, the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Exports have been helped by low land prices in the huge Amazon basin, and a devaluation of the Brazilian currency, the real. And last year a series of panics about mad cow disease and foot and mouth across the world gave Brazilian beef a further competitive advantage, since the country has recently banished foot and mouth disease from much of the Amazon basin. Meanwhile the avian flu epidemic in Asia pushed up global demand for beef at the expense of poultry.
The findings will come as a shock to environmental groups such as Greenpeace that have campaigned to save the Amazon forests by opposing logging and, most recently, clearance of forests for the booming soybean business. But clearances for cattle pasture are doing ten times more damage, says Kaimowitz. 鈥淣on-governmental organisations took their eye off the ball in not realising how rapidly things were changing in the livestock sector,鈥� he says.