Increase in Amazonian agriculture proposed

Deforestation rates may triple following new policies set out for the Amazon.

Concern for the future of the Amazon, the world’s single largest rainforest, has intensified among conservationists, following the election of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro as president.

Bolsonaro says he will increase conversion of Amazonian forest to agriculture. Specific policies include merging the agriculture and environment ministries and opening up the region to hydropower projects.

Some scientists have said deforestation rates could triple to more than 25,000km² a year, more than five times what they were in 2005.

One of the world’s leading Amazon scientists, Dr Philip Fearnside of the National Institute for Research in Amazonia, has said increased deforestation rates – which have been rising since 2012 anyway – could reduce rainfall within the region to critically low levels, changing the ecology.

He warns that Amazon deforestation isn’t just Brazil’s problem. “Demand for Brazil’s beef from Western nations, and increasingly from China, has created an enormous temptation to cut the forest to turn a quick profit,” he wrote in The New York Times. It was up to importing nations and traders “to live up to their pledges that they will not buy products” originating from cleared forest.

Ed Atkins, of the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, says Bolsonaro is receiving increasing support within the country’s Congress – its legislative body – from three distinct groupings: agriculture, the military and evangelical Christians, the so-called ‘beef, bullets and Bible’ caucus. “At the last election, this coalition returned even more powerful than before,” Atkins says.

The soya bean lobby is also very influential, and has been calling for an increase in infrastructure to transport its produce from the Amazon to the Atlantic.

But one of Brazil’s largest soy barons has pointed out that eliminating environmental controls may result in other countries imposing restrictions on imports. Fearnside says, “The key question now is whether the agricultural sector, and Brazil as a whole, will wake up in time to avoid ‘ Apocalypse Now’ in the Amazon”. JF

Will the election of Jair Bolsonaro see more mining and hydropower projects in the Amazon? Below: the white-cheeked spider monkey is just one species that could be affected.