DTN and The Guardian/Greenpeace Report on Brazil Deforestation
By Kieran Gartlan (DTN): The transformation began last year when a controversial study was published in Science Magazine by environmentalist Tim Searchinger. It introduced the innocuous four-letter acronym ILUC, or Indirect Land Use Change. According to ILUC theory, corn used for ethanol production cuts into American grain exports and thus provide a bigger market for competitors such as Brazil. This in turn leads to deforestation as Brazil expands its grain production to feed larger exports.
… As well as being extremely difficult to measure, the theory behind ILUC has not been backed up by the facts. For example, U.S. corn exports have not been impacted by ethanol production and have remained between 1.5 billion and 2.5 billion bushels for the past ten years while soybean exports reached record levels last year. In Brazil, soybean area has actually shrunk over the past five years from 58 million acres in 2004 to 53 million acres this season, while corn acres have remained unchanged. Furthermore Amazon deforestation has fallen for the past five years, from 10,588 square miles in 2004 to 4,620 square miles last year, according to figures from Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research (INPE).
David Adam (The Guardian): … Espirito Santo and thousands of farms like it raise cattle on Amazonian pasture that was once rainforest. The farms are huge, and so is their impact. The cattle business is expanding rapidly in the Amazon, and now poses the biggest threat to the 80% of the original forest that still stands. Where loggers have made inroads to the edge of the forest in the states of Para and Mato Grosso, farmers have followed.
A report from Greenpeace details a three-year investigation into these cattle farms and the global trade in their products, many of which end up on sale in Britain and Europe. READ MORE
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- Federal Interagency Biomass Research and Development Board Releases Biofuel Feedstocks Report
