ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF BRAZILIAN MONOCULTURES ON THE AMAZON REGION

by Henrique Oliveira

One of the reasons green advocates like the idea of using ethanol in lieu of fossil fuels is that burning ethanol produces far less greenhouse gases. However, many are already examining the possible environmental impacts that an expanded sugar cane monoculture in Brazil, essential to the development of a sizable market in industrialized nations, will entail.

They specifically fear that pristine lands in Brazil's Cerrado (grasslands) and Amazon basin, today covered largely by forests and native bush, will be cleared to make room for new plantations. Some advocates of expanding Brazil's planted area say that such fears are unwarranted - expanded monocultures will simply optimize the use of land that today yields less than what modern farming methods, and associated elevated productivity, could produce.

A study by Brazil's Applied Economics Research Institute (IPEA), released in January 2005, used soy - Brazil's largest crop after corn - to assess environmental effects. The study pointed out that the northward expansion (i.e., into the Amazon region) in the amount of land occupied by soy monoculture - a 13.5% increase between 2001 and 2004 - occurred on previously degraded areas or pastures. In other words, it simply used land that had already been cleared, in many cases several decades before.

The study, however, was harshly criticized by environmentalists in Brazil and abroad. It is true that soy now occupies much of the land that was used for grazing - but the study fails to acknowledge that cattle raisers, deprived of cheap land due to rising costs brought on by increased competition from soy, were themselves clearing forest lands to use as pastures.

Daniel Cohenca, who works for the Brazilian government's environmental conservation agency (IBAMA) decided to study the issue in depth. He wrote a monograph, presented at one of Brazil's leading universities in agricultural research, in which he presented several interesting conclusions. Using satellite images of northern Brazil, where the bulk of the Amazon forest is located, he calculated that over 80,000 hectares of forest had been cleared between 1999 and 2004 - almost all of it illegally.

When he correlated the areas with the reason for which they were cleared, he confirmed that soy was, indeed, responsible for a substantial part of the damage. In 1999-2000, only three cleared patches were converted to mechanized agricultural production. Over the following two years, however, the ratio began to change. In late 2004, only one of the ten largest clearings in the forest was marked for cattle - all the other nine were used for monocultures.

Bottom line: any foreign corporation seeking to expand Brazil's monocultures, whether sugar cane, soy, or corn, should consider environmental impacts well beyond the immediate areas they occupy - or face an outcry from stakeholders, in Brazil and abroad, who are increasingly environmentally conscious.

Hear it from the horse's mouth - follow what's happening in the Brazilian ethanol market on Ethablog, the only blog in English dedicated to Brazilian ethanol.