EoE Home
Page

Support the EoE

S
E A R C H

B R O W S E     AUTHOR A-Z TOPIC

About |
Community of Scholars | FAQs | Contribute to the EoE | Support the EoE | Contact | RSS

Deforestation in Amazonia

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 History

3 Current rates and
causes

4 Future
paths

5 Impacts

6 Alternatives

7 Further
Reading

Lead Author: Philip M.
Fearnside (other
articles)

Article Topics: Forestry and Land-use
and land-cover change

This article has been reviewed
and approved by the following Topic Editor: Mryka Hall-Beyer
(other
articles)

Last Updated: March 29,
2007

Introduction

Transamazon Highway. (Source:
Philip M. Fearnside)

Tropical forests in Amazonia are being cleared rapidly, representing an
important contribution to land-use
and land-cover change. While some processes are common to forests throughout
the world, others are not. Amazonian clearing is dominated by large cattle
ranchers, with an increasing role being played by soybeans. Small farmers and
estate crops such as oil palm have less relative importance here than elsewhere.
Deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia has a significant contribution from
“ulterior” motives such as land speculation, money laundering and tax evasion.
Infrastructure projects, especially highway construction and improvement,
represent key governmental decisions unleashing chains of activity that escape
from government control. Deforestation sacrifices environmental services such as
maintenance of biodiversity, water
cycling and carbon stocks.
The substantial impact of this deforestation on loss of environmental services
has so far not entered into decision-making on infrastructure projects, making
strengthening of the environmental assessment and licensing system a high
priority for containing future loss of forest.

History

Names of Amazonian states. (Source: Philip
M. Fearnside)

Deforestation has been a feature of Amazonian landscape since long before the
arrival of Europeans in the 1500s. Indeed, no forest in the region can be
considered “virgin” in the sense of being unaffected by past human activities.
Prior to decimation of their populations by disease and violence from the
Europeans, indigenous peoples maintained extensive areas of agriculture and they
enriched the surrounding forest with useful species such as Brazil
nuts. These human influences would be merged with forest regrowth during the
lapse of three centuries before non-tribal populations reached levels sufficient
to begin exerting significant pressure on the forest. Contrary to the claims of
some, this history of past human disturbance in no way diminishes the rationale
for conserving Amazonian forests today. Likewise, the exuberant forests that now
stand on formerly cleared areas do not justify the myth of a future
recovery-that forests being cleared today may one day regrow to their former
stature. In practice, secondary forests are recleared for cattle pasture or
other uses long before they regain the biomass and diversity of “primary”
forests.

Ecoregions in Amazonia. (Source: Philip M.
Fearnside)

In Brazil, deforestation over the course of several centuries destroyed the
Atlantic
forest of the south-central part of the country (note: the names of Brazil’s
regions treat Rio de Janeiro as the “center” of the country). The pace of
clearing was especially dramatic in the case of state of Paraná, where the
forest was almost completely cleared in less than 30 years in the middle of the
20th century. At the beginning of this period prominent citizens frequently made
statements to the effect that Paraná’s forests were so vast that human efforts
would “never” put more than a dent in them. The similarity of these statements
to those sometimes made today with reference to the Amazon forest is evident, as
is the irony of their baselessness.

Deforestation in Amazonia has proceeded with a succession of different forces
in different periods. The Amazon rubber boom lasted from the invention of the
pneumatic tire in the 1880s to the beginning of commercial rubber production
from plantations in Southeast Asia in 1914. During this period “agricultural
colonies” such as those in the 35,000-square-kilometer (km2) Zona
Bragantina near Belém, in the state of Pará, supplied the rapidly growing urban
centers, and, to a certain extent, the population engaged full-time in
exploitation of the natural rubber trees in the Amazonian interior. Much of the
agricultural land was abandoned to secondary forest when the rubber boom
collapsed. More recent clearing surges occurred with the opening of the
Belém-Brasília Highway in the late 1950s, and especially the Transamazon Highway
in 1970 (the event often taken as the beginning of the “modern” period of
Amazonian clearing). The Transamazon Highway was settled by small farmers, many
of whom were brought from other parts of Brazil by the federal government and
settled in official colonization projects. This much-publicized initiative was
soon overshadowed in terms of its impact on deforestation by the large cattle
ranchers who received generous tax incentives and subsidized
financing from the government though the Superintendency for the Development of
Amazonia (SUDAM). Large and medium-sized ranchers continue to account for the
bulk of clearing in Brazilian Amazonia. The relative role of small versus large
actors is an important difference between different locations in Brazilian
Amazonia, between different historical periods, and between Brazil and other
countries.

Current rates and causes

Arc of Deforestation in the
region of Terra do Meio. (Source: Philip M. Fearnside)

Global generalizations about the role of “poverty” in tropical deforestation
generally do not apply to Brazil, where most clearing is done by the rich.
Cattle ranching is the use put to the great majority of land cleared, either
immediately upon clearing in the case of large ranchers, or after a harvest or
two of an annual crop in the case of small farmers. Although the government
incentives programs of the 1970s and 1980s have been either discontinued or have
diminished in importance, government infrastructure investment and agricultural
credit continue to encourage clearing. Logging has a key role in serving as a
source of funds for landholders to pay for deforestation. Logging also provides
initial access roads, which can then be used and improved by those who later
deforest the areas. Unlike the clear cutting that is done for timber harvesting
in temperate and boreal forests, logging in Amazonia is always selective because
only a few species have commercial value. The disturbed forest that remains
after logging is much more susceptible to fire than are unlogged forests.

Deforestation in Amazonia is often not “rational” from the normal financial
perspective of paying an attractive return on money invested, at least when only
legal money flows are considered. In practice, deforesters make their decisions
based on the combined total of all benefit streams, including those that may be
undeclared and/or illegal. Investment in Amazonian land can serve as a means of
laundering money from illegal sources such as drug trafficking, corruption, sale
of stolen goods and income from legitimate activities that is undeclared to tax
authorities. For money from these sources the sale of any beef or other products
produced in the Amazonian landholdings represents legal income, whereas the
investment needed to produce it is highly variable and easily underdeclared to
tax authorities.

Burning and deforestation of the
Amazon forest to make grazing lands. Source: (NASA
LBA-ECO Project)

“Ulterior” motives for clearing also include potential returns from land
speculation. The value of land in
Amazonia has generally climbed upward and invariably shoots to much higher
levels where a road is built or improved. Buying land or claims to land at low
prices and reselling it later at much higher prices can give greater returns to
a landholder than do the ranching and agriculture that are undertaken during his
tenure. Clearing a portion of the land is the only practical way to maintain
claim to the area and avoid it being invaded by landless peasants, taken over by
another large operator, or confiscated by the government for agrarian reform.
Prior to the 1994 “Plano Real” economic reform, Brazil’s rate of inflation was
much higher than it is today and land speculation represented a more powerful
force, as was shown by the drop by over 50% in the deforestation rate in 1996
and 1997 in parallel with falling land values resulting from the removal of
inflation as a driving force. Today, although there is no longer a need to
invest funds in real estate as an escape from inflation, profits can still be
made by individual landholders when infrastructure projects lead to increasing
land values.

A state of lawlessness prevails in substantial areas in Amazonia, leading to
distinctive “leaps” in the deforestation frontier. Most notorious is the “Terra
do Meio”, or “Middle Lands” to the west of the Xingu River encompassing the
Iriri River basin. This area, the size of Switzerland, has effectively been
outside of the control of the Brazilian government and is the realm of drug
traffickers, illegal loggers and grileiros, or large land thieves who
appropriate land through fraudulent (and sometimes violent) means. Declaration
of a series of reserves in the area in 2005, following the assassination of
Sister Dorothy Stang, is a hopeful sign that the lawless condition is subject to
change. The activities of grileiros continue in other locations, most recently
increasing in the southern part of the state of Amazonas.

A new and increasing force driving deforestation is export commodities such
as soybeans and beef. Soybeans have taken over much of the cerrado (central
Brazilian savanna) and are advancing in some rainforest areas such as Santarém,
Pará. Soybeans have a large indirect force on deforestation by providing
economic justification for highway construction projects that spur forest loss
through cattle ranching, logging and land speculation. Beef export has
traditionally not been a force behind deforestation in Brazil (in sharp contrast
to the “hamburger connection” of Central America) because the presence of
foot-and-mouth disease made major markets in Europe, Japan and
North America unwilling to import beef in frozen form. Since 1996 states in
Brazil have successively been certified as free of foot-and-mouth disease,
starting in the extreme south of the country and now including three of the nine
Amazonian states. The impact of beef export on deforestation already affects all
of Amazonia, even though most of the area is still uncertified and cannot export
beef directly. Instead, beef produced outside of Amazonia, for example in the
state of São Paulo, can be exported while the people in São Paulo eat beef
raised in Pará.

Over 80% of both the cumulative clearing and the current clearing activity is
concentrated in the “arc of deforestation,” which is a band along the eastern
and southern edges of the forest. Deforestation advances from this band towards
the center of the region. However, in addition to the expansion from existing
clearings in the arc of deforestation, smaller clearings that appear far from
the existing frontier have an importance that is much greater than their small
area would suggest. These new clearings can serve as the seeds for much greater
clearing activity in the future in the remaining blocks of undisturbed forest.
Decisions on building highways that open these areas to migration and to
investment are critical in speeding the deforestation process.

Future paths

Intact Amazon forest near
Manaus. (Source: Philip M. Fearnside)

The future path of deforestation depends on human decisions. It is not
foreordained that the Amazon forest will be destroyed, although this is
obviously the endpoint if present trends continue unchanged. Various modeling
efforts have projected clearing patterns in Amazonia and agree that vast areas
would be cleared if trends continue and planned infrastruture projects are
built. Attempts to model what might happen under hypothetical “governance”
scenarios are less convincing, since they rely on simple assumptions of
restraint and obedience to environmental regulations that are at variance with
observed behavior to date. Nevertheless, the potential to change deforestation
behavior is real, both through creation of protected areas and through command and
control measures to repress illegal clearing. An important historical
example is the deforestation licensing and control program that was carried out
by the state government in Mato Grosso over the 1999-2001 period, where clearing
patterns indicated that the program had a real effect on deforestation rates.
This is important as a demonstration that deforestation can be controlled if
government authorities are serious about doing so. The example is historical, as
the election of Brazil’s largest soybean entrepreneur as state governor in 2002
put an end to the program in practice.

So far the principal measures that have been used to limit deforestation are
creation of reserves and repression by fining those who clear without required
authorizations. These are the measures that agencies such as the Brazilian
Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) are
empowered to implement. However, the better-funded government agencies such as
the Ministry of Transportation continue to plan and build roads and other
infrastructure projects without regard for impact on deforestation. While the
environmental licensing process for infrastructure projects may lead to
compensatory actions, such as creation of reserves and funding of programs for
monitoring and
enforcement of regulations, the licensing has on many occasions shown itself to
be incapable of stopping damaging projects and either diverting development
efforts to less-damaging alternatives to achieve the same objectives or forcing
a rethinking of the wisdom of the objectives themselves. Environmental impact
studies (EIS) have only been required in Brazil since 1986 and the system is
still subject to continual challenges and (often successful) attempts to build
infrastructure with either no EIS (e.g., the proposed BR-319 Highway) or with an
inadequate EIS that is effectively replaced with a package of parallel
activities that escape from the legal requirement of serving as prerequisites
for the infrastructure (e.g., the proposed BR-163 Highway). Building and
improving highways is one of the principal ways that government decisions affect
the deforestation process; the consequences of these decisions are much more far
reaching than are the effects of any compensatory programs such as environmental
education, promotion of agroforestry and the
like. One of the most basic measures needed is strengthening the environmental
impact assessment and licensing system such that it serves its intended role
of informing major decisions before they are made, rather than as a formality to
legalize decisions that have already been made.

Indigenous lands and various categories of parks and reserves represent a
primary defense against deforestation. Indigenous peoples, whose officially
recognized lands represent approximately 20% of Brazilian Amazonia, actively
defend their territories against invasion. An essential complement to this is
the general understanding that invasion of indigenous land will not be rewarded
by a land title or by any sort of compensation. In many places in the arc of
deforestation the only forest that remains standing is what is in indigenous
areas.

Since the mid 1990s tremendous progress has been made in “demarcating”
indigenous areas, that is, marking the limits of these areas on the ground (as
opposed to merely drawing them on a map). At the same time, large
areas have been protected in newly created conservation units, both by federal
and state governments. These include an increasing number of “sustainable use”
reserves, although a number of new reserves have also been created in the
“integral protection” category. Conservation units now total roughly 10% of
Brazilian Amazonia. Decreeing a reserve, even if only on paper, can have a
significant effect in discouraging both small squatters and large grileiros from
clearing forest with the expectation of eventually receiving legal title to
their claims. In the longer term “paper parks” are not enough—the reserves must
be adequately guarded. Expansion of the reserve network must be done quickly
because the opportunity to create reserves is often lost once deforestation
advances into an area. Reserve creation is a critical step in guiding the
development of Amazonia towards a future that maintains substantial areas of
tropical forest.

Impacts

Roads throughout Amazonia. (Source: Philip
M. Fearnside)

Amazonian deforestation causes serious impacts that, if counted in decision
making, would often be seen to outweigh the benefits derived from clearing. Loss
of biodiversity is one such impact, which implies both loss of the value of the direct
uses to which the species lost might be put by humans and the loss of existence
values that are independent of such direct uses. Deforestation impacts are
magnified by the pattern of clearing that leaves the remaining forest divided
into fragments, which then degrade both biodiversity and carbon stocks.

BR-319 Highway. (Source: Philip M.
Fearnside)

Deforestation also affects water cycling, because conversion of forest to
cattle pasture results in the water running off into the rivers and flowing
directly to the ocean without
being recycled through the trees. A significant part of the rainfall in
Amazonia, especially in the dry season, depends on water that has been recycled
through the trees of the forest. This water is critical to preventing droughts
from exceeding the forest’s tolerance for water stress, leading to death of
trees and degradation of the forest through fire and further drought. Water from
Amazonia is also critical to maintaining rainfall in the heavily populated
regions in south-central Brazil, such as São Paulo, and in neighboring countries
such as Argentina.

Global warming
receives a substantial input of greenhouse gases from
Amazonian deforestation, although the majority of the gases released by humanity
as a whole come from burning fossil fuels such
as petroleum and coal rather
than from deforestation. However, over three-fourths of Brazil’s contribution to
this global problem is the result of Amazonian deforestation. Half of the dry
weight of the trees is carbon, and when forest is cut
this carbon is released to the atmosphere either as carbon dioxide or as methane, both from burning and
from decomposition of wood that fails to burn. The fact that most deforestation
is for cattle pastures that do little either for the national economy or for
providing employment to the population offers an opportunity to slow
deforestation as part of a program for mitigating global warming. The value of
the damage done by greenhouse-gas emissions from
deforestation far exceeds the value of the
timber, beef and other products that are sold as a result of the clearing.

Alternatives

Discussion of “alternatives to deforestation” often focuses on the extraction
of non-timber forest products such as rubber and Brazil
nuts, sustainable forest
management for timber, and increasing the production and sustainability of
land uses in already deforested areas, for example by encouraging agroforestry. These
“alternatives” all have their places, but they also have limitations and are
often misrepresented with respect to their role in slowing deforestation. The
economic logic that activities expand when they prove to be profitable applies
to those undertaken in deforested areas, and what may be intended as an
“alternative” can, if it proves highly successful, advance into the forest and
have the opposite effect on deforestation. Proposals for intensified pasture
production and for extensive production of biofuels are subject to these
reservations. The same applies to annual crops: the notion that farmers and
ranchers who reap greater per-hectare yields will be satisfied with their
harvests and refrain from further deforestation is unrealistic as a basis for
programs aimed at reducing deforestation. Unfortunately, people do not stop
clearing when their stomachs are full, but instead use their increased wealth to
expand their clearings.

Uses of standing forest such as sustainable (i.e., low intensity) harvesting
of both non-timber and timber products often produce low financial returns. This
is to be expected, but the rationale for promoting and subsidizing
these uses lies in their role in maintaining environmental services, not in
their efficiency as commodity sources. These activities are valuable as
transitional mechanisms for maintaining traditional populations who can serve as
forest guardians. The same activities can also serve as parts of future
mechanisms whereby environmental services of standing forest become the primary
means of generating income to support the rural population, and the basis of the
economy is shifted from its present reliance on forest destruction. Among the
environmental services of the forest, carbon
storage is the closest to becoming the basis of substantial financial flows
through international negotiations, but the equally valuable services of
maintaining biodiversity and water
cycling can eventually be expected to gain similar status.

Further Reading

Publications on Human Carrying Capacity, Agroecosystems, Deforestation,
and Development Planning in Brazilian Amazonia, National
Institute for Research in the Amazon (INPA.

Expanding Deforestation in Mato Grosso, Brazil, NASA
Earth Observatory

Deforestation in the Amazon, Rhett A Butler, Mongabay.com.

Citation

Fearnside, Philip (Lead Author); Mryka Hall-Beyer (Topic Editor). 2007.
"Deforestation in Amazonia." In: Encyclopedia of Earth. Eds. Cutler J. Cleveland
(Washington, D.C.: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for
Science and the Environment). [First published March 15, 2007; Last revised
March 29, 2007; Retrieved March 29, 2007]. <http://www.eoearth.org/article/Deforestation_in_Amazonia>

CITE

EMAIL

PRINT

Earth Portal Logo

Digital Universe Logo

All text is available under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike license. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Neutrality Policy | RSS
Supported by the Environmental Information Coalition
and the National Council for Science and the
Environment

All text is available under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike license.
Please see the Encyclopedia of Earth's
website for Terms of Use information.
Supported by the Environmental
Information Coalition and the National Council for Science and the
Environment