Farmers are now planting and harvesting two crops – mostly soybean and corn – each year, rather than just one.īrazilian environmental regulations helped Amazonian ranchers, too. The increased production has been pushed by federal policies meant to discourage land clearing, such as hefty fines for deforestation and low-interest loans for investing in sustainable agricultural practices. “Food production in the Amazon has substantially increased since 2004,” Garrett says. There’s no evidence to support Bolsonaro’s view, Garrett says. Arguing that federal conservation zones and hefty fines for cutting down trees hinder economic growth, Bolsonaro has slashed Brazil’s strict environmental regulations. Twelve percent of what was once Amazonian forest – about 93 million acres – is now farmland.ĭeforestation in the Amazon has spiked since the election last year of the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Since farmers need “a massive amount of land for grazing,” Garrett says, they are driven to “continuously clear forest – illegally – to expand pastureland.” “Deforestation is largely due to land clearing for agricultural purposes, particularly cattle ranching but also soybean production,” writes Rachel Garrett, a professor at Boston University who studies land use in Brazil. Here, environmental researchers explain how farming, big infrastructure projects and roads drive the deforestation that’s slowly killing the Amazon. While climate change endangers the Amazon, bringing hotter weather and longer droughts, development may be the greatest threat facing the rainforest. Despite the increasingly strict environmental protections of recent decades, about a quarter of this massive rainforest is already gone – an area the size of Texas. Feeding off very dry conditions, some of those fires have spread out of control.īrazil has long struggled to preserve the Amazon, sometimes called the “lungs of the world” because it produces 20% of the world’s oxygen. These Amazonian wildfires are a human-made disaster, set by loggers and cattle ranchers who use a “slash and burn” method to clear land. Nearly 40,000 fires are incinerating Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, the latest outbreak in an overactive fire season that has charred 1,330 square miles of the rainforest this year.ĭon’t blame dry weather for the swift destruction of the world’s largest tropical forest, say, environmentalists.
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