Concerns over deforestation may drive new approach to cattle ranching in the Amazon.

The picture you see is the sharp contrast between forest and pasture in Mato Grosso.
Shocking!


Excerpts:

"As the world's biggest cattle producer, Brazil braces for change:
While you're browsing the mall for running shoes, the Amazon rainforest is probably the farthest thing from your mind. Perhaps it shouldn't be.

The globalization of commodity supply chains has created links between consumer products and distant ecosystems like the Amazon. Shoes sold in downtown Manhattan may have been assembled in Vietnam using leather supplied from a Brazilian processor that subcontracted to a rancher in the Amazon. But while demand for these products is currently driving environmental degradation, this connection may also hold the key to slowing the destruction of Earth's largest rainforest."

"Cattle ranching is overwhelmingly the biggest driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: the fate of nearly 80 percent of cleared rainforest land is to serve as forage for livestock. Since 2006 more than 38,600 square miles has been cleared for pasture, bringing the total area occupied by cattle ranches in the Brazilian Amazon to 214,000 square miles, an open space larger than France."

"The green group issued Slaughtering the Amazon, a report that linked some of the world's most prominent brands to illegal destruction of the Amazon rainforest. The fallout was immediate and substantial.


Days after the report was released, Brazil's biggest domestic beef buyers, supermarket chains Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and Pão de Açúcar, announced they would suspend contracts with suppliers found to be involved in Amazon deforestation.

Bertin, the world's second largest beef exporter, saw its $90 million loan from the World Bank's International Finance Corporation withdrawn..."
More at the link.

Last passage:

"To some, these issues may suggest that curbing beef consumption is the ultimate solution to deforestation in the Amazon as well as other environmental problems, but in the meantime it is clear that industry will play a critical part if the tide in the Amazon is to be turned.

'The whole Amazon will be torn down if we don't come up with a sensible and effective system," said Carter. "The time to act is now.' "






I think the whole world has to rethink the consumption of meat as it causes deforestation, hunger, poverty, desertification, water contamination, water scarcity, species extinction and the death of the indigenous people.



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