Britain’s taste for cheap food is destroying Brazil’s ‘other wilderness’

By Martin Hickman
11 April 2011 An “upside-down forest” of small trees with deep roots, Brazil’s wildlife-rich outback is home to a 20th of the world’s species, including the spectacular blue and yellow macaw and giant armadillos. Yet this vast wilderness – as big the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain put together – is being rapidly lost to feed the heavily carnivorous appetites of Britons and others. What was, only a generation ago, an almost unbroken two million square kilometre mass of trees and bushes in central Brazil is now covered with fields of soy beans, waiting to be fed to pigs and chickens in Europe and China. Such has been the pace of conversion to agriculture that more than 50 per cent of the Cerrado has already been lost, threatening the future of some of the region’s most charismatic animals. WWF, the wildlife group, now hopes that shoppers in Britain and elsewhere will urge retailers to preserve the Cerrado as robustly as the Amazon rainforest, Brazil’s most famous region, where deforestation has dramatically slowed as a result of international pressure. So far only half of Britain’s supermarkets have joined a responsible trading scheme which has been launched to halt the loss of land, wildlife and the region’s role as a carbon sink. Britain’s Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman, who visited Brazil last week, now wants them to help by sourcing soy responsibly. Unless farmers and retailers around the world start putting tougher limits on the growth of soy farming, there appears to be little hope for Brazil’s semi-humid interior. Little known outside Latin America, the Cerrado stretches from central Brazil westwards and northwards to the edge of the Amazon, covering 23 per cent of the country. Agronomists discovered 30 years ago that its poor orange soil could be transformed into cash crops. After decades of conversion to cattle farming and agriculture, overwhelmingly soy, but also corn and coffee, only 20 per cent of pristine Cerrado remains, much fragmented between farmland. … Among the trees are 5 per cent of the world’s animal species and more than 30 per cent of Brazil’s, including the giant anteater and armadillo, the maned wolf, pampas-deer and the endangered tapir. Wildlife groups fear that soy production to meet rising global demand for meat has shifted from the Amazon rainforest to Brazil’s lesser known interior. Overall, annual deforestation of the Amazon has slowed to 0.18 per cent. The vast majority of the rainforest is still standing, 83 per per cent, and 25 per cent is officially protected. The position in the Cerrado is almost the opposite – only 20 per cent of pristine land is intact and only 8 per cent is officially protected (less than 3 per cent on government or state government land). “Demand for soy is rising globally due to the fact that the soy is used as feed to the meat production industry, mainly in China but also in Europe,” Mr Becker said. “There has been a shift in the production. The Amazon is much more protected but the demand for soy is still rising, so the demand has been going to other parts of Brazil. The Cerrado is very suitable for production and therefore the expansion has occurred there.” …

Britain’s taste for cheap food that’s killing Brazil’s ‘other wilderness’