EDITOR'S COMMENT
OILS & FATS INTERNATIONAL
VOL 35 NO 7 SEPTEMBER/ OCTOBER 2019
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Amazon on fire
The thousands of fires ripping across the Amazon in Brazil have focused attention, once again, on deforestation. The 7.4Mkm2 Amazon basin – which spans Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela – includes 5.5Mkm2 or just over half of the world’s rainforest.
Brazil accounts for 60% of the Amazon rainforest and an unprecedented 87,000 fires have occurred so far in the country this year – half of them in the Amazon. Forest fires are common in the Amazon during the dry season from July to October but many believe this year’s fires have been started by farmers and loggers clearing land for crops or grazing, encouraged by President Jair Bolsonar’s pledges to open up the region to more development. However, while Brazil has had 76% more fires this year than in 2018, the country had more fire activity in the 2000s; 2005 was the worst year with more than 142,000 fires recorded in its first eight months. The following year in 2006, public outrage over Amazon deforestation from soya production prompted multinationals such as Bunge, Cargill and Brazil’s Amaggi to sign the voluntary Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM). In the pact, 90% of companies in the Brazilian soya market agreed not to buy soya grown on land deforested after 2006 within the Amazon biome. The ASM was made permanent in 2016 and can be described as a success. A 2014 study found that in the two years before the agreement, nearly 30% of soya expansion in the Amazon biome occurred through deforestation. After the moratorium, direct deforestation from soya fell to only 1%. Critics would say that there was already so much deforested land in the Amazon in 2006 that there was plenty of room for soya expansion without cutting forest and that the success of the ASM has come at the cost of Cerrado region, which I discussed in our previous issue’s Comment (see OFI, July/August 2019). Unlike the Amazon, where almost half of the area is under some sort of conservation protection, only 13% of the Cerrado is protected. And under Brazil’s Forest Code, 80% of the native vegetation on private lands in the Amazon biome must be conserved, compared with 20% in the Cerrado. That is why a Cerrado Manifesto was created in 2017. While more than 70 companies have signed it, including large food companies and supermarkets such as Kellogg’s, Mars, McDonald’s, Nestlé, Unilever and Walmart, experts say the initiative is unlikely to be successful without large commodities firms like ADM, Bunge and Cargill. However, in June, Cargill published an open letter to its Brazilian soya producers stating that it did not “support a Cerrado moratorium that simply cuts off farmers for exercising their legal land rights. We do support working alongside our industry to consider short term actions that would support farmers ... as the wider industry considers how to provide longer term solutions”. The Amazon fires are a crisis. But more than that, it focuses attention on what is happening in other forests and ecosystems, such as the Cerrado, and across the world. “The risk is that we are moving towards the tipping points that scientists talk about that could produce cascading collapses of natural systems,” says Cristiana Pasca Palmer, the executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Money is not enough to address the issue. “Even if the amount involved in extinguishing fires in rainforests was a billion dollars, we won’t see an improvement unless more profound structural changes take place,” she says. “This is not just about biodiversity conservation. It’s about finance and trade and changing the model of development. We need a transformation in the way we consume and produce.” Serena Lim – serenalim@quartzltd.com
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