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16259 |
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Date: July 03, 2019 at 14:19:00
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: We must not barter the Amazon rainforest for burgers and steaks |
URL: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2019/jul/02/barter-amazon-rainforest-burgers-steaks-brazil#comment-130673022 |
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I found this article via Akira's recent post with link thank you Akira.
rampant deforestation of Amazon driven by
global greed for meat
We must not barter the Amazon rainforest for burgers and steaks
Jonathan Watts
The EU-Mercosur trade deal is good news for Brazil’s huge beef industry but devastating for the rainforest and environment
European leaders have thrown the Amazon rainforest under a Volkswagen bus in a massive cows-for-cars trade deal with
Brazil and three other South American nations.
The EU-Mercosur agreement – the largest in Europe’s history, according to officials – will make it cheaper for Brazilian farmers
to export agricultural products, particularly beef, despite growing evidence that cattle ranching is the primary driver of
deforestation.
In return, European businesses get greater access to the markets of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, which will
benefit producers of vehicles, chemicals, machinery, wine and cheese.
Negotiations took almost two decades, which may explain why the outcome signed last week reflects the pro-industry values
of the past rather than the environmental concerns of the present.
Europeans know the risks. Many more people here are adopting a vegetarian diet as it becomes clear that consumption of
beef – particularly from Brazil – is a cause of forest clearance, which is destabilising the climate.
The clearest proof yet is contained in a new investigation by the Stockholm-based NGO Trase, which tracks supply chains and
the impact of the beef on our plates, in our burgers and on our barbecues.
Even before the new trade deal, the country-by-country breakdown by Trase – reported exclusively by the Guardian – reveals
that meat consumers in Britain were indirectly responsible for up to 500 football pitches of land clearance in Brazil last year.
Italy – the biggest Brazilian beef buyer in the EU – chewed through about four times as much. With the agreed reduction in
tariffs, the volume in all European countries is likely to increase.
The trade deal was celebrated by the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has put agriculture and mining at the vanguard
of a strategy to open up the Amazon, the Cerrado and other forests. His government has neutered the environment ministry
and pushed proposals to remove the protected status for indigenous territory and nature reserves.
Last month, a record surge of deforestation prompted concerns that Bolsonaro is giving a free pass to illegal logging, farming
and mining. Last year saw a 13% increase to the highest level in a decade.
Not coincidentally, this comes at a time of record beef exports. Brazil is now the world’s slaughterhouse. Last year, 1.64m
tonnes of steak and other cuts were sent overseas, beating the previous record in 2007, which followed the peak of forest
clearance. The Trase study shows 5,800 sq km – 100 times the area of Manhattan – was cut down last year to create pastures.
European leaders have downplayed the environmental impact of the deal. Despite the cheaper tariffs, they claim beef imports
are unlikely to rise significantly and insist the deal locks Brazil into the Paris climate agreement. The European Commission
president, Jean-Claude Juncker, told reporters the historic deal highlighted a commitment to “rules-based trade”.
Yet there are countless reports of rule-breaking by Brazilian meat companies. An investigation published this week by the
Guardian, in conjunction with Repórter Brasil and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, shows how the global market leader
JBS is still selling meat from companies that have been fined for deforestation. This follows similar revelations two years ago,
connected to a senior member of the Brazilian cabinet. The farmers involved denied the claims.
Many European politicians and environmentalists are furious about the trade deal and sceptical that it will increase leverage
over Bolsonaro. They see the agreement as a form of appeasement at the behest of corporate interests.
Behind this are bigger geo-strategic concerns. In recent years, China (particularly Hong Kong) has become Brazil’s biggest
customer by far for beef and soy, which is used to feed livestock. According to Trase, China is responsible for 75 times more
deforestation than the UK. Without support from Beijing, efforts to promote greater supply-chain transparency and
sustainability in the Amazon and Cerrado will come to nothing.
The US is also expected to announce that it will resume imports of fresh beef from Brazil for the first time since July 2017,
which will add to pressure on the forests and give Bolsonaro further cause to abandon the battle against deforestation.
Business and politics as usual cannot fix this. The world’s greatest rainforest is a globally essential source of oxygen, carbon
sequestration and biodiversity, but as long as these benefits are omitted from trade balance sheets, it will continue to lose out
to steakhouses and burger joints. The Amazon needs to be at the centre of a change of values, not a peripheral concern that
can be bartered away for a consignment of auto parts and delicatessen fillers.
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Responses:
[16260] [16261] |
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16260 |
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Date: July 04, 2019 at 06:27:11
From: Alan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Amazon Rainforest Was Actually Shaped By Humans |
URL: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untouched-amazonian-rainforest-was-actually-shaped-humans-180962378/ |
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Over thousands of years, native people played a strong role in molding
the ecology of this vast wilderness
"Perhaps [...] the very biodiversity we want to preserve is not only
due to thousands of years of natural evolution but also the result of the
human footprint on them," Iriarte says. "The more we learn, the more the
evidence point to the latter."
The way some describe it, you’d think the Amazon was a tangle of wilds,
virtually untouched by human hand. “The First Eden, a pristine natural
kingdom,” is how Stanwyn Shetler, a Smithsonian botanist, described this
region of the world in a 1991 book marking the 500th anniversary of
Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the New World. “The native people
were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the
ecosphere. Their world … was a world of barely perceptible human
disturbance.”
But was it really? In less-rhapsodical verse, scholars in the past quarter
century have shown that this mythical image of untouched nature is just
that—a myth. Like humans everywhere, Native Americans shaped their
environments to suit them, through burning, pruning, tilling and other
practices. And the Amazon is no different: Look closer, and you can see
the deep impressions that humans have made on the world's largest
tropical rainforest, scientists reported yesterday in the journal Science.
Despite its vastness—the Amazon stretches more than 2 million square
miles, and has an estimated 390 billion trees—this rainforest is hardly
the untamable, unstoppable force of nature that the Romantics opined
about, says José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter. In
fact, humans have inhabited the Amazon for roughly 13,000 years, and
have been domesticating plants for at least 8,000 years.
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Responses:
[16261] |
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16261 |
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Date: July 04, 2019 at 21:43:56
From: Mitra, [DNS_Address]
Subject: make ecocide an international crime |
URL: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/28/destruction-earth-crime-polly-higgins-ecocide-george-monbiot |
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... the research group InfluenceMap reported that the
world’s five biggest publicly listed oil and gas
companies, led by BP and Shell, are spending nearly $200m
a year on lobbying to delay efforts to prevent climate
breakdown. According to Greenpeace UK, BP has
successfully pressed the Trump government to overturn
laws passed by the Obama administration preventing
companies from releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse
gas, into the atmosphere. The result – the equivalent of
another 50m tonnes of CO2 over the next five years – is
to push us faster towards a hothouse Earth.
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None |
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