To Prevent Deforestation, Brazilian Supermarkets Ban Amazon Meat

Hugh Pickens writes writes "BBC reports that the Brazilian Association of Supermarkets, representing 2,800 members, says it will no longer sell meat from cattle raised in the rainforest, a step they hope will cut down on the illegal use of rainforest where huge swathes have been turned into land for pasture and soy plantations. Public Prosecutor Daniel Cesar Azeredo Avelino says consumers will benefit from the deal. 'The agreement foresees a series of specific actions to inform the consumer about the origin of the meat both through the internet and at the supermarkets,' says Azeredo. 'We hope that the big chains will quickly take action.' The supermarkets' pledge comes as part of an initiative by the Public Prosecutor's Office to deprive the meat producers of outlets and an internet campaign aimed at informing Brazilian consumers of the ethics of boycotting meat from Amazonian sources is also planned. Brazil's Greenpeace advocacy group says the growth of the cattle industry in the Amazon is the single biggest cause of deforestation. For decades now, Brazilian authorities have battled illegal logging and other activities that continue to reduce the rainforest and in January the Brazilian government announced it plans to prepare an inventory of the trees in the Amazon rainforest. The Forestry Ministry said the census would take four years to complete and would provide detailed data on tree species, soils and biodiversity in the world's largest rainforest. The last such exhaustive survey was conducted more than three decades ago but didn't help stop deforestation."

Comments

Closing the door a little too late?

[girlinatrainingbra]

Isn't this Closing the door a little too late? Kind of like shutting that barn door after those cows have already gotten out into that brazilian rainforest? There must be other ways to head off this deforestation. For ivory poaching in Africa, international sanctions and prohibitions on export and sale seems to work, so I guess if there were universal (United Nations?) agreement to restrict the export and sale of "amazon rainforest meat" at a governmental level then that might have some impact.
.
Otherwise, a brazilian supermarket chain eschewing the sale of "amazon meat" is as useful as a bunch of hippies saying they won't work for no defense contractor no sirreee or a large bunch of idiots around the earth turning off non-essential power-consumption for one hour as occurred during the last week or weekend. It's a strange vain showing off of one's ideals and beliefs that will have very little impact or result in the real world.
.
Why, yes, I am quite a cynic.

Re:Closing the door a little too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

The UN does nothing but sit there and pretend to play politics. If someone breaks the rule they do nothing about it and it's not too late, they can always regrow trees or whatever.

Re:Closing the door a little too late?

[symbolset]

Amazon sells meat? Excuse me, I gotta update my shopping list.

Re:Closing the door a little too late?

[drinkypoo]

Isn't this Closing the door a little too late?

Actually, it's not even that, it's purely symbolic. They need to stop McDonalds from selling Amazon meat if they want to make an impact.

It's a strange vain showing off of one's ideals and beliefs that will have very little impact or result in the real world.

You had me until "vain".

Re:Closing the door a little too late?

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

No, you are right. But there's a bigger, probably unsolvable issue that caused all this. By American standards (I'm American), Brazil has really weird property laws. In fact, I'd argue that a lot of Brazilian laws in general are weird based on my understanding of them. But specifically to this article, private property is really strange there. See, nobody owns those lands in the Amazon rain forest and the law prevents the government from owning them. Brazil also has some crazy laws that give squatters rights that I've just never heard of in any developed country. In the US, somebody owns all the land. It may be the US government, but somebody owns all American land. There is no American land that is not owned. If people just started clearcutting American national forests and putting cattle farms on them, they'd wind up in jail as soon as Uncle Sam found out about it. In Brazil, such things are just met with shrug from the government, a sigh and a "What can we do?" sort of response. The government doesn't own that land, so they are powerless to stop such things. Also, probably as an overreaction to abuses by dictatorial governments in the past, Brazilian law is really weak at punishing people. Someone could go to Brazil, kill a million people, go to jail for 29 years and then get out in time to do it all over again. Brazilian cops can legally shoot you down and kill you under circumstances that are completely illegal in the USA, but once you are in the system, you are safe. You can't get more than 29 years for any crime and Brazilian prisons are rather notorious for being run by the inmates. So the lack of effective punishment deterrents, a justice system that more often than not actually feels sorry for the perp rather than the victim (this is very common in countries that are strongly anti-death penalty), the lack of default government ownership of land and unusually strong squatter's rights laws have led to a situation where the only response is an indignant "We're not going to sell your meat" from the grocers. I suspect that the farms will continue to deplete the rainforest and they'll simply ship the meat to China.

Answer isn't less cattle, but more.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a recent TED talk where, counterintuitively, using more livestock instead of less is an actually proven way to fix desertification:

http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html

Re:Answer isn't less cattle, but more.

[necro81]

A better way to fix desertification is to not cut down the rain forests in the first place! The risk to the Amazon basin isn't coming from the presence of the cows per se, but from the fact that a well-established, thriving rainforest ecosystem was there one day, then destroyed for cropland the next.

Re:Answer isn't less cattle, but more.

[rewarp]

Pseudoscience alert! From KCET's Chris Clarke
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/east-ca/learn-how-to-hate-the-desert-with-ted.html

Savory's talk is full of red flags, and to document and rebut each one would take more time than is really wise to spend on the talk. But three stand out as especially egregious.

The notion that bare, unvegetated soil in the American desert is an evil to be avoided flies in the face of everything we know about desert soil science. Bare soil in the desert includes desert pavement, a self-regulating system that controls air pollution. It includes alkaline crusts and dry lake beds, both homes to unique assemblages of organisms. Seemingly bare soil may hold seed banks of diverse assemblages of annual plants, some of which are limited enough in extent that covering the soil with grassland -- even if you could do so -- would push them toward extinction. And sparsely vegetated soil is crucial for the survival of many animal species, including desert tortoises, fringe-toed and horned lizards, and other animals that actually belong in the desert far more than do cattle.

The idea that grasses must be eaten by livestock to perform a valuable ecological function is similarly absurd. Grasses provide food, shelter, and even construction material for hundreds of desert animals ranging from jackrabbits to tiny insects, each of which is eaten in turn by other animals. Send in a wave of cattle to crop those grasses and we've diverted that ecological productivity to our own ends, depriving the local wildlife of food and habitat. Bunchgrasses can live for centuries if untrampled, providing year after year of ecological benefit to hundreds of generations of wildlife. Savory, like many grazing advocates, seems to regard such ancient bunchgrasses as decadent: In Lynn Jacobs' 1991 book "Waste of The West," Jacobs says "Savory claims like most ranchers that old growth range plants are 'useless' and 'decadent.'" But, adds Jacobs, "like tree snags in forests, standing dead range plant material is itself an important, natural environmental component."

Lastly, Savory's contention that the "algal crust" he shows developing on arid land soil is "the cancer of desertification" is unscientific in the extreme. He makes the statement at 4:00 into the TED video, but it's one he's made for years. Lynn Jacobs wrote in 1991 that students of (what was then being called) HRM learned from Savory that "Cryptogams are a prime indicator of a deteriorating environment." (To underscore his postulation, commonly Savory scuffs apart the cryptogamic layer while walking on Rangeland.)

This is, of course, completely false. Cryptobiotic soil crusts are a crucial underpinning of old-growth desert habitats across North America, and indeed throughout much of the world.

Savory has been around for a very long time preaching the same fallacious grazing gospel, and his name raises curled lips among land management scientists the way Velikovsky's name raises the ire of astronomers. He's merely the latest practitioner of a tradition a couple centuries long of land management mythologies based on wishful thinking that don't turn out to work. A century ago land speculation boosters in the American West claimed that "rain follows the plow"; Savory has merely updated that to "grass follows the cow."

Re:Answer isn't less cattle, but more.

[rewarp]

It's the "deserts are evil" mentality that is at fault here with the Savory talk - and with much of the support behind it. Deserts have their own unique ecosystem supporting their own unique niche of animal life. "Repairing" an ecosystem that doesn't need repairing is one of the most destructive practices I have ever come across because of a misunderstanding that somehow desert ecosystems are a waste of land unless you can get cattle to graze on it, and remove much of the niches to substitute them for those more beneficial to ranching.

Deforestation for farmland aside.

[w0mprat]

Rainforests make 20% of our oxygen. And we let people cut that shit down?

Re:Deforestation for farmland aside.

[Andrio]

Not many people seem to know this, but most deforestation occurs so that there is grazing land for cattle, than for wood and paper.

And in a double whammy effect, the billions of cows we've bred around the world produce a "shit ton" (hah!) of methane; a greenhouse gas 20x more potent than CO2.

Re:Deforestation for farmland aside.

[Hentes]

Where did you get that bullshit from? Even if the rainforests have sequestrated all the CO2 in the atmosphere, that's just 0.04% compared to the 20% of oxygen in it. We could burn all the forests and carbon reserves without running out of oxygen. Also, forest don't produce oxygen actively, they only store carbon. Not to mention that you ignored the effect of marine life.

Re:Deforestation for farmland aside.

[bluefoxlucid]

Methane reacts with O2 to produce a lot of CO2 though. It doesn't linger very long.

The only thing possibly wrong with this proposal is that Greenpeace is historically stupid. "By far the biggest cause" could be "what we're most aware of" and turn out to be the smallest factor ever. Like when Greenpeace gave Apple the lowest score for "being good to the environment," while Apple was using less packaging, less toxic shit, and less energy to manufacture their products by far than everyone else in the industry. "But they use a type of plastic we don't like for a small piece in the iPod!" while Apple used less mercury, lead, and overall plastic in general than anyone else.

Profit from exploitation

[meteormarc]

Amazon, sounds like:
Customers who purchased this meat also purchased:
- cheap clothes from Vietnam where factories pollute their environment
- this nice device from Chine where laborers health is affected by bad working circumstances
- fish caught against over-fishing rules

Re:Free market

[shentino]

You're probably being sarcastic, but it's easy to make a profit fucking over the environment if you don't have to eat the consequences.

Tragedy of the commons is instructive on why sometimes government intervention is a wise course of action.