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Soy threatens the Amazon, warn activists
By Mario Osava
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Oct. 18 (Tierramérica) —
Soybean production, which awakens the ire of environmentalists because
of the rapid expansion of transgenic varieties, is the target of yet
another criticism: increased pressure on Brazil’s Amazon forests.
Although soybean fields do not directly replace forested areas of the
Amazon, their expansion in the surrounding areas drive up land prices
and push other less profitable farming practices, like ranching, into
the forests, explains Roberto Smeraldi, coordinator of the non-governmental
organization Friends of the Earth-Brazil.
Furthermore, soy — now Brazil’s leading export — is advancing
in parallel to the creation of transportation infrastructure, which
also contributes to deforestation by improving access to the vast Amazon
Basin.
Each year the Amazon loses some 10,000 square miles of forest. Soybean
farming began in Brazil in the 1960s in Brazil’s southern pampas,
where the climate is closer to that of China, where soy originated.
Soy production then began expanding northward, and the Brazilian agricultural
research agency, EMBRAPA, developed varieties adapted to more tropical
climes. EMBRAPA, a network of 40 specialized research centers, has played
a key role in the country’s agricultural development over the past
three decades.
The environmental groups denounce the expansion of soybean cultivation
in the transition area between what is known as the Cerrado — a
savannah ecosystem — and the Amazon, where deforestation is taking
a serious toll on the climate and biodiversity of the two biomes.
There has been “explosive growth” of soy in some parts of
the Amazon, such as the Santarém region, in the western part
of the northern state of Pará, says Ane Alencar, a researcher
with the Amazonian Environmental Research Institute.
Santarém, surrounded by secondary forests, in some places logged
for the past three centuries, is near a soybean exporting port and is
a “pocket of drought,” with a topography ideal for industrial
farming, she said.
The cultivated area is still relatively small — around 75,000 acres
last year — but is expected to see the addition of another 50,000
this year, “advancing on the native forests... and we don’t
know what impact soybean monoculture will have on the ecosystem,”
Alencar said.
Friends of the Earth has indicated eight other areas of expansion within
the Amazon or along its boundaries, mostly in savannah areas, but which
also threaten the tropical forest.
Soybean exports have increased the value of land along the highway between
Cuiabá, capital of Mato Grosso, and Santarém, which has
spurred the illegal appropriation of public forested lands. The forests
are cleared to prove possession, and long-time residents have been pushed
out.
But Homero Pereira, president of the Agricultural Federation of the
central-western state of Mato Grosso, denies that soybean production
is causing harm.
And he goes even further, saying those who grow soybeans are “the
biggest environmentalists” and put “conservation into practice,”
because the crop grows in areas that were previously deforested or were
degraded pastures, and improves them by fixing nitrogen in the soil,
thus fertilizing the land.
Nearly all soybean farmer practice “direct planting,” without
plowing old plants under, a technique developed in Brazil to reduce
erosion and retain moisture in the soil. Soy “is not a monoculture”
because it is alternated with cotton, maize and rice, said Pereira.
Mato Grosso state, which has Amazon forests in the north, is today Brazil’s
leading soybean producer. This year 15 million tons were harvested —
30 percent of the national total. Ten years ago it produced just five
million tons.
Since the 1980s, soybean cultivation has also expanded rapidly in the
Cerrado, the savannah of low trees that covers a broad swath of central
Brazil, and some “islands” of land within the Amazon.
Because of its relatively infertile and acidic soil, it took longer
to be converted into a prosperous farming frontier.
Today it is a prized area, because its productive profile has changed
as a result of fertilisers. The Cerrado also has the advantage of “well-defined
periods of rain” and a geography that facilitates farm mechanization,
Paulo Roberto Galerani, an EMBRAPA expert in soy research, told Tierramérica.
The Cerrado ecosystem and favorable climate allow Mato Grosso farmers
to harvest “between 6,800 and 7,000 pounds of soybeans per hectare,”
a level of productivity surpassing the national average of 2,200 pounds
per acre, said Agricultural Federation president Pereira.
The crop currently is planted over twelve million acres, an area that
could double “simply by recuperating degraded pastureland,”
such that it would be unnecessary to advance into the Amazon, where
“soybeans do not prosper” due to the weak soil and excess
humidity, he said.
Geraldo Eugenio de França, superintendent of EMBRAPA research
and development, says the country could rationally use 150 million acres
of degraded areas, effectively doubling Brazil’s cultivated area.
It would be possible to double the production of food, fibers and other
agricultural products without destroying the forests of the Amazon,
he said.
EMBRAPA is “the arm of sustainable development,” he added,
and rejects both “unfettered agri-business and radical environmentalism.”
The secret dam: 100,000 Chinese, unique
tribes at risk
By Jasper Becker and Daniel Howden
Beijing, China, Oct. 16 — In the shadow of the Jade Dragon
Snow Peak, deep inside the Tiger Leaping Gorge, Chinese developers are
operating in secret to push through a massive dam project that will
wash away the section of the Yangtze river valley thought to have been
the real location for the fictional Shangri-La.
Local tribesmen have revealed that work is already under way on a massive
project that would flood a Unesco world heritage site, displace more
than 100,000 people and destroy the way of life of the unique Naxi people,
one of the world’s only surviving matriarchal societies. It would
also bring an abrupt end to the nascent tourism industry in the remote
southwestern Yunnan province.
The battle to save the gorge, one of the deepest in the world, has pitted
an alliance of green groups and local tribespeople against the Huaneng
Group, China’s biggest independent power producer, working with
the Yunnan provincial government. The company is run by Li Xiaopeng,
son of the hardline former prime minister Li Peng, who oversaw the massacre
at Tiananmen Square. Li was at the forefront of the controversial Three
Gorges Dam project that was pushed through despite strident opposition
from environmentalists and residents.
“The stakes are extremely high. Chinese environmentalists have
decided to make this their next major campaign,” says Ma Jun, a
consultant who was the first to produce a study on the dam’s implications.
“I’m optimistic they will succeed because this case is a touch-stone
of all the big talks on balancing environmental preservation with development.”
Opponents say the reservoir will devastate local cultures, robbing people
of their farms and livelihood, and leave tens of thousands of mostly
Tibetans, Miao, Yi, Bai, Lisu and Naxi minorities homeless. It would
also condemn ancient villages with distinctive architectural styles.
Concerns are mounting over the fate of the Naxi with their unusual matriarchal
tradition, which has drawn an increasing number of visitors to the area.
The formerly nomadic people thought to have originated in Tibet, passes
property to the youngest daughters and forces teenage boys to canvas
door-to-door for partners in a system of “walk-in marriages.”
They are also the last ethnic group to use a form of hieroglyphics,
a tradition which is passed down through tribal shaman, known as Dongbas.
Premier Wen Jiabao agreed this year to suspend plans for 13 dams on
the Salween river in response to protests from Burma and Thailand and
Chinese environmentalists. Construction was supposed to have been delayed
while an environmental assessment was undertaken but this was brushed
aside by the promise of a power facility capable of generating 30 percent
more electricity than the Three Gorges Dam.
Electricity shortages forced factories on the east coast to close down
this summer and economic pressure has seen China’s oil imports
grow by more than 30 percent this year. China already has more than
50,000 large and medium-sized dams and is running out of waterways to
stem.
Nine NGOs, including Green Earth Volunteers and Friends of Nature, have
petitioned Wen hoping to persuade him to save an area recognized by
Unesco. “We call on the authorities to fulfil the vision of science-based
development ... to balance the human interests against nature, in order
to leave our precious world heritage like Tiger Leaping Gorge, the first
bend of the Yangtze, to the world and to future generations,” the
petition said.
Backpackers had long ago discovered the joys of trekking through a gorge
which gets its name from the legend of the tiger, said to have leapt
across it at the narrowest point where only 100 feet divide the edges.
The province originally hoped to reserve the area around the historic
town of Lijiang for tourism, but the state has designs for eight major
dams along a 350-mile stretch of the upper Yangtze. Villagers, worried
that they would lose their farmland, staged a rally in Lijiang in July
to voice their objections. They are being supported by the state forestry
bureau, the seismological bureau and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The dam is being pushed by the Yunnan government as a way of dealing
with the consequences of earlier environmental disasters. Water from
the reservoir is to be diverted to dilute the heavily polluted lake
which supplies the provincial capital of Kunming.
The industrial center of the province is being strangled by water shortages
despite sitting next to one of the largest fresh-water lakes in Asia.
Decades of mismanagement have shrunk the lake and the remaining water
is too dirty to drink.
Yunnan’s forests have all been chopped down in the past 50 years
so not only has Dian Chi lake silted up but so have several reservoirs
constructed to solve Kunming’s water shortage. The danger posed
by silt to the Three Gorges Dam has already forced Yunnan to dam the
upper reaches of the Yangtze specifically designed to trap soil that
would otherwise wash into the Three Gorges reservoir.
Source: Independent (UK)
Global study finds one-third of amphibians
face extinction
By Steve Connor
Oct. 15 — They were the first animals with backbones
to walk on land. They witnessed the rise and fall of the dinosaurs
and were present at the birth of a bipedal ape who went on to become
the most destructive species the planet has ever known.
Amphibians -- frogs, toads, newts and salamanders -- are among the
longest surviving animals on earth, yet something dramatic now threatens
that longevity. And mankind is responsible.
A global study revealed Oct. 14 that almost a third of amphibians
face extinction -- and pollution is cited as the biggest cause. The
three-year survey, involving 500 scientists from more than 60 countries,
has found that a third of the 5,743 known species are threatened with
being wiped out and at least 427 are so critically endangered that
they could disappear tomorrow.
The animals are so sensitive to the man-made environment that scientists
have likened them to the canary in a coal mine -- songbirds that fell
silent, killed in the presence of odorless gas. The latest and most
comprehensive study of amphibians around the world has shown that
for many species of frogs and their nearest relatives the singing
has suddenly and inexplicably stopped -- and the same bipedal ape
is almost certainly responsible.
“This is a problem way outside what we know,” said Dr. Simon
Stuart of the World Conservation Union and leader of the study published
in the online version of the journal Science.
Stuart said: “This level of decline is ... extraordinary and
serious because amphibians represent a very important part of the
overall diversity of life. Since most amphibians feel the effects
of pollution before many other forms of life, their rapid decline
tells us that one of earth’s most critical life support systems
is breaking down.”
The figures in the survey are almost certainly underestimates because
more than 22 percent of the known amphibian species are too poorly
understood for the researchers to reach a reliable conclusion about
what is happening to them.
Populations of almost half of the known amphibian species are in decline.
While 32 percent of amphibians are threatened with extinction, only
12 percent of birds and 23 percent of mammals are in the same position.
The latest study estimates that up to 122 amphibian species have gone
extinct since 1980.
Stuart said that all animal groups undergo a natural “background”
rate of extinction but, in the case of amphibians, the actual loss
of species is equivalent to the total number of background extinctions
for many tens of thousands of years being squeezed into a single century.
“The bottom line is that there’s almost no evidence of recovery
and no known techniques for saving mysteriously declining species
in the wild. It leaves conservation biologists in a quandary,”
Stuart said.
Amphibians are considered uniquely sensitive to man-made changes in
the environment. Their moist, porous skins are vulnerable to water-borne
toxins and infections, and their reliance on two habitats -- freshwater
and land -- means they cannot survive properly without both.
Scientists have suggested many possible reasons for the decline. Pollution
of both water and the atmosphere, human exploitation for food and
medicine and habitat destruction all pose serious threats.
But it is clear that amphibians are also disappearing from what appear
to be pristine habitats. At one protected site in Costa Rica, for
instance, some 40 per cent of amphibians disappeared over a short
period in the late 1980s. Other losses occurred almost simultaneously
in Costa Rica, Ecuador and Venezuela.
It is this so-called “enigmatic decline” that poses the
biggest problem for conservationists simply because they have little
idea about what needs to be done to address the problem.
The authors of the report say: “Enigmatic decline species present
the greatest challenge for conservation because there are no known
techniques for ensuring their survival in the wild. Most enigmatic
declines have been recorded from the Americas south to Ecuador and
Brazil, Australia and New Zealand, but they are spreading, for instance
to Peru, Chile, Dominica, Spain and Tanzania.”
Many of these mysterious disappearances seem to take place in tropical
habitats involving amphibians living in mountain streams. Some studies
suggest they may be linked with the global spread of a fungus called
chytridiomycosis, which may be exacerbated by global warming. What
is most worrying is that the decline in amphibians is occurring across
the world.
Bruce Young, a zoologist who took part in the global amphibian assessment,
said: “We already knew amphibians were in trouble, but this assessment
removes any doubt about the scale of the problem.” Dr. Achim
Steiner, director general of the World Conservation Union, said, “The
fact that one third of amphibians are in a precipitous decline tells
us that we are rapidly moving towards a potentially epidemic number
of extinctions.”
Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, said:
“Amphibians are one of nature’s best indicators of overall
environmental health. Their catastrophic decline serves as a warning
that we are in a period of significant environmental degradation.”
Source: Independent (UK)
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