Brazil once had the highest deforestation rate in the world, and recent data still shows high rates of deforestation. Between 2001 and 2023, Brazil lost 68.9 Mha of tree cover (13% of its total tree cover lost since 2000), and in 2022, Brazilian forest loss accounted for 43% of global deforestation. In 2005, Brazil still had the largest area of forest removed annually. Since 1970, over of the Amazon rainforest have been destroyed. In 2001, the Amazon was approximately , which is only 87% of the Amazon's original size. According to official data, about 729,000 km² have already been deforested in the Amazon biome, which corresponds to 17% of the total. 300,000 km² have been deforested in the last 20 years.
Rainforests have decreased in size primarily due to deforestation. Between May 2000 and August 2006, Brazil lost nearly of forest, an area larger than Greece. According to the Living Planet Report 2010, deforestation continues at an alarming rate. At the Convention on Biological Diversity's 9th Conference, 67 ministers signed up to help achieve zero net deforestation by 2020. Due to deforestation the Amazon was a net emitter of greenhouse gas in the 2010s.
The effects include "severe financial losses, social setbacks, and biodiversity loss". Economic losses due to deforestation in Brazil could reach around 317 billion dollars per year, approximately 7 times higher in comparison to the cost of all commodities produced through deforestation. In 2023 the World Bank, published a report named: "A Balancing Act for Brazil's Amazonian States: An Economic Memorandum" proposing non-deforestation based economic program in the region of the Amazon rainforest.
History
The deforestation of the Atlantic forest, or Mata Atlântica, dates back to Portuguese colonization and the subsequent rapid development of urban centers. Before human-modification, the forest covered around 17% of Brazil's area. Unlike the Amazon, which has only faced extreme deforestation in recent years, the Atlantic Forest has been a long-lasting target for land development, speculation, and agricultural endeavors. Starting during the sixteenth century, the forest began facing pressure due to the unsustainable development of coffee, sugarcane, brazilwood, and cattle in the region.
In the 1940s Brazil began a program of national development in the Amazon Basin. President Getúlio Vargas declared emphatically that:
Before the 1960s, much of the forest remained intact due to restrictions on access to the Amazon beyond partial clearing along the river banks. The poor soil made plantation-based agriculture unprofitable. The key point in deforestation of the Amazon came when colonists established farms in the forest in the 1960s. They farmed based on crop cultivation and used the slash and burn method. The colonists were unable to successfully manage their fields and the crops due to weed invasion and loss of soil fertility.Watkins and Griffiths, J. (2000). Forest Destruction and Sustainable Agriculture in the Brazilian Amazon: a Literature Review (Doctoral dissertation, The University of Reading, 2000). Dissertation Abstracts International, 15-17 Soils in the Amazon are productive for only a very short period of time after the land is cleared, so farmers there must constantly move and clear more and more land.
Amazonian colonization was dominated by cattle raising, not only because grass did grow in the poor soil, but also because ranching required little labor, generated decent profit, and awarded social status. However, farming led to extensive deforestation and environmental damage.Williams, M. (2006). Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
An estimated 30% of deforestation is due to small farmers; the rate of deforestation in areas they inhabit is greater than in areas occupied by medium and large ranchers, who own 89% of the Legal Amazon's private land. This underlines the importance of using previously cleared land for agriculture, rather than the usual, politically easier path of distributing still-forested areas. The number of small farmers versus large landholders fluctuates with economic and demographic pressures.
Causes
Deforestation in Brazil has been linked with an extractive economic growth model that relies on factor accumulation (labor, capital, land) rather than total factor productivity, where Brazil's frontier expansion in the "arc of deforestation" is a manifestation of land accumulation. Under this model, with a strong focus on commodities exports, deforestation is an economic choice, often linked to cattle ranching, mining, soybean production or logging, and influenced by factors raising the external competitiveness of Amazonian farmers, ranging from infrastructure development (especially roads) to a depreciating real exchange rate. Land grabbing in the Amazon is associated with the rational expectation that this growth model will continue to raise rural land prices, creating incentives to grab public lands.
Cattle ranching and infrastructure Livestock and agriculture have never been very strong in the Amazon: the area has a bad soil and climate for planting, and cattle, although they reach the margins of the forest, are actually spread throughout the country, being the areas that have less cattle throughout Brazil, coastal regions and the Amazon. States like Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul and Minas Gerais have a lot of cattle. The annual rate of deforestation in the Amazon region continued to increase from 1990 to 2003 because of factors at local, national, and international levels. Seventy per cent of formerly forested land in the Amazon, and 91% of land deforested since 1970, is used for livestock pasture.Sergio Margolis. "Causes of Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon." World Bank Working Paper No. 22. The World Bank. 2004. The Brazilian government initially attributed 38% of all forest loss between 1966 and 1975 to large-scale cattle ranching. According to the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), "between 1990 and 2001 the percentage of Europe's processed meat imports that came from Brazil rose from 40 to 74 percent" and by 2003 "for the first time ever, the growth in Brazilian cattle production, 80 percent of which was in the Amazon[,] was largely export driven."
Forest removal to make way for cattle ranching was the leading cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon from the mid-1960s on. In addition to Vargas's earlier goal of commercial development, the devaluation of the Brazilian real against the dollar had the result of doubling the price of beef in reals; this gave ranchers a widespread incentive to increase the size of their cattle ranches and areas under pasture for mass beef production, resulting in large areas of forest removal."Deforestation in the Amazon." mongabay.com.
Removal of forest cover for cattle farming in Brazil was also seen by developers as an economic investment during periods of high inflation, when appreciation of cattle prices provided a way to outpace the interest earned on money left in the bank. Brazilian beef was more competitive on the world market at a time when extensive improvements in the road network in the Amazonas (such as the introduction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway in the early 1970s) gave potential developers access to vast areas of previously inaccessible forest. This coincided with lower transportation costs due to cheaper fuels such as ethanol, which lowered the costs of shipping the beef and further incentivized the development of remote forested areas.
Cattle ranching is not an environmentally friendly investment because cattle emit large amounts of methane. These emissions play a major role in climate change because methane's ability to trap heat is 20 times greater than that of carbon dioxide in a time horizon of 100 years and exponentially higher in shorter time horizons. One cow can emit up to 130 gallons of methane a day, just by belching.
The Brazilian government granted land to approximately 150,000 families in the Amazon between 1995 and 1998. Poor farmers were also encouraged by the government through programmes such as the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform in Brazil (INCRA) to farm unclaimed forest land and after a five-year period were given a title and the right to sell the land. The productivity of the soil following forest removal for farming lasts only a year or two before the fields become infertile and farmers must clear new areas of forest to maintain their income. In 1995, nearly half (48%) of the deforestation in Brazil was attributed to poorer farmers clearing lots under in size.
Mining Mining has also increased deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, particularly since the 1980s, with miners often clearing forest to open the mines or to provide building material, collecting wood for fuel and subsistence agriculture. In February 2017, the Brazilian government provided a reservation with a surface of for deforestation, to attract foreign mining investors. In September 2017, the government withdrew this permission.
Soybean production
Brazil is currently the second-largest global producer of soybeans after the United States, mostly for livestock feed. As stated in the Constitution of Brazil, clearing land for crops or fields is considered an "effective use" of land and is the first step toward land ownership. Cleared property is also valued 5–10 times more than forested land, and for that reason is valuable to the owner whose ultimate objective is resale. The soy industry is an important exporter for Brazil; therefore, the needs of soy farmers have been used to validate many of the controversial transportation projects being developed in the Amazon.
However, the Amazonian soil is of very low quality for plantations: it has few nutrients and the soil is sterile after two or three years of planting. In 2020, only 5% of the country's agricultural production came from the Northern Region. Most of the soy plantation in the country is practiced in the region of Cerrado, a savanna with little vegetation that was barren and where agriculture was impractical until a few years ago. Thanks to EMBRAPA, Brazil adapted plants for cultivation in this region, since Brazil has many terrible biomes for the practice of agriculture and livestock, such as the Semi-Arid Region of the Northeast, the Amazon Forest itself or the mountainous plateaus in the Southeast.Deforestation of the Amazon Rainforests and CO2. University of Michigan, n.d. Web. 14 Feb. 2015. .
Cargill, a multinational company which controls the majority of the soya bean trade in Brazil, has been criticized, along with fast food chains like McDonald's, by Greenpeace for accelerating the deforestation of the Amazon. Cargill is the main supplier of soya beans to large fast food companies such as McDonald's which use the soy products to feed their cattle and chickens. As fast-food chains expand, the chains must increase the quantity of their livestock in order to produce more products. In order to meet the resulting demand for soya, Cargill has expanded its soy production by clear-cutting parts of the Amazon.Greenpeace. 2006. We're trashin' it: how McDonald's is eating up the Amazon. Amsterdam: Greenpeace.
A report by Greenpeace mentions that European supermarket giant Tesco told Greenpeace that 99% of its soya footprint is made up of animal feed. This is responsible for more than 500,000 tonnes of soya imports into the UK each year, making up more than a sixth of the total.