6 Comments

Excellent piece! Three brief comments: on the cattle-agriculture nexus, on cerrado v. Amazon, and a timelapse video of agriculture expansion.

1. Cattle-ranching and grains are hard to separate that neatly, in practice. The most common pattern of land use in Brazil, underpinned by flimsy land titles, is the following cycle: non-sustainable forestry (cutting down trees), slash-and-burn for pastures, cattle grazing, agriculture. Early stages bear the deforestation brunt and sell on ‘legal’ land titles for agricultural use, as prices (for deforested and ‘legally owned’ land) rise in a financialised process. This article explains it well (see esp. section 4): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104313.

2. The expansion of soybeans and maize has indeed been concentrated in the cerrado/savannah but already involves the Amazon. The northern section of the centre-west region is the Amazon biome.

3. This time-lapse video is centred on Sinop, in the north of the state of Mato Grosso (the fastest growing state in Brazil for the last decades, focussed on soybeans and maize and involving cerrado and Amazon). The steady transition from forest to soybeans is striking: https://earth.google.com/web/search/sinpo/@-11.2357524,-56.31880299,485.02016521a,724082.66978793d,35y,0h,0t,0r/data=CjoiJgokCQAAAAAAAAAAEQAAAAAAAAAAGQAAAAAAAAAAIQAAAAAAAAAAOhAIAREAAAAAAAAAQBjLDyABMikKJwolCiExU2JtTTRWMXhiM3A4Y2FQdUpEQk9nTXBobDZNeXFlTGsgAToDCgEx

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Many thanks for this. Food fo thought if you can forgive the pun.

The following piece is deeply pessimistic about climate change and the diminishing capacity of the rain forests to sequester carbon. The cause? Not deforestation, which is declining, but climate change itself. Thanks again

https://theconversation.com/we-tracked-300-000-trees-only-to-find-that-rainforests-are-losing-their-power-to-help-humanity-133122

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Land Sparing is a lie: Saving A Rainforest And Losing The World New book on issue https://yalebooks.co.uk/9780300272482/saving-a-rainforest-and-losing-the-world

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Excellent piece. I was puzzled by the 'land-saving' when the underlying raw land use was not explicitly stated.

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Please see the New Yorker of April 8th 2024, "letter from roriaima."

Seems necessary to talk about the impact of gold mining in the Amazon basin to speak about land use there

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Obrigado. Excelent. Can I add: https://camargo-pedro.medium.com/o-sucesso-do-agro-b103b36b7c40

Ilegal deforestation is still a major issue.

Best

Pedro

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