Brazil's Ancient Savannahs Finally Succumb
5/16/99
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE
Brazil's cerrados, stretching over a quarter of Brazil's continental
territory, it is home to an estimated 5 percent of the world's fauna.
Just 1.5 percent of the region is officially protected, compared with
12 percent of the Amazon jungle. Despite the fact that some one half
of these massive savannahs have been lost to grain farming and
pasture, environmentalists have been slow to push for conservation
efforts in this biodiversity hotspot.
g.b.
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Title: Brazil's ancient savannahs finally succumb
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: May 14, 1999
Byline: William Schomberg
BRASILIA (Reuters) - The dry season is upon Brazil's massive central
savannahs, when the thundering rainstorms from the Amazon to the
north evaporate into blue prairie skies and the open grasslands hum
with life.
Millions of migratory birds will soon be flocking to the Western
Europe-sized highlands to feast on fruit from stunted, 200-year-old
trees that burst into blossom year after year.
In the gallery forests that hug highland rivers, rare jaguars stalk
deer. And on the scrub-covered hillsides, long-limbed mane wolves
wait for the cover of night to hunt.
This is the ``cerrado,'' one of the world's oldest but most
threatened wildernesses. Scientists say it has changed little in the
70 million years since South America and Africa split apart, and its
rolling hills, studded with termite hills, certainly resemble the
safari lands of Kenya.
BRAZIL'S BEST KEPT ECO-SECRET
Stretching over a quarter of Brazil's continental territory, it is
home to an estimated 5 percent of the world's fauna.
But the cerrado remains barely known even to most Brazilians and has
been largely ignored by the international environmental groups
campaigning to save the Amazon rainforest.
Now, with almost half its original 770,000 square miles (2 million
square km) already razed for grain farming and pasture, scientists
from around the world are rushing to document the region's estimated
160,000 animal, fungus and plant species while they still can.
A handful of policy-makers is also trying to persuade the government
to spare diversity ``hotpots'' from the cerrado's official future as
the planet's biggest grains centre.
``The cerrado has always been seen as nothing more than land for
clearing when in fact it offers a wealth of species unmatched in any
of the world's other savannahs,'' said Braulio Dias, the Environment
Ministry's director of biodiversity.
While most conservation efforts in Brazil now focus on the Amazon,
environmentalists say the cerrado runs a far graver risk of outright
devastation.
Just 1.5 percent of the region is officially protected, compared with
12 percent of the Amazon jungle.
And unlike the towering Amazon, which through its sheer density is
difficult and expensive to clear, two tractors with a chain tied
between them are enough to carve up the low scrub.
GRAINS BOOM SET TO GROW FURTHER
Now, with an extensive web of new riverways, railroads and highways
near completion, the already frenetic agricultural development in the
cerrado is expected to pick up pace.
Of a total 548 million acres (200 million hectares), some 222 million
acres (90 million hectares) have already been cleared, most of it in
just the last 20 years as Brazil rushed to conquer its vast, empty
interior.
A similar area -- three times the size of Italy -- is still up for
grabs, according to official calculations.
``We have only just begun. The potential for agriculture in this
region is enormous,'' said Carlos Nayro Coelho, a spokesman for the
Agriculture Ministry. ``This is the world's biggest agricultural
frontier.''
Farming has brought sudden wealth to Brazil's forgotten hinterland.
In Unai, a soybean town littered with junked tractors near Brasilia,
a shiny Benetton store sells fashion to burly farmers with bulging
wallets.
But critics of the grain rush say the money mostly ends up in the
hands of a few powerful landowners who have needed billions of
dollars in subsidies to conquer the acidic soil but employ only small
numbers of workers in their mechanized farms.
Around 20 percent of the cleared cerrado lies idle, much of it
already barren waste thanks to poor farming techniques, according to
independent estimates.
Environmentalists are also concerned about the impact of pesticides
and overuse of water sources on the thousands of rivers that pour
from the cerrado to feed three of the biggest fluvial systems of
South America: the Amazon, the Plate and the Sao Francisco that
slices through northeastern Brazil.
In the Xingu Indian Park, a Belgium-sized reservation of low forest
where the cerrado merges into the Amazon jungle, indigenous leaders
say the river water is making their children sick, and they blame the
new farms upstream.
``This land used to be our world, now we are an island, surrounded by
destruction,'' said Tupa Waura of the Waura tribe.
SIGNS OF HOPE FOR CONSERVATIONISTS
Cerrado experts are pinning their hopes on signs that Brazil's
government may be waking up to the cerrado's value as a source of
species wealth.
The Environment Ministry has identified a series of diversity
hotspots which could be turned into new conservation areas, although
funds are likely to be tight as Brazil tries to ride out a latest
financial crisis.
Ecotourism will save other, small areas. In the Chapada dos Veadeiros
highlands near Brasilia, remote communities who once hacked crystals
from rocky pits now cater to Brazilian and foreign visitors to the
area's waterfalls and mountains.
But the chances of large areas of the cerrado surviving much into the
next century may rest, ironically, with the pollution belched by the
faraway first world.
Under a United Nations plan, ecosystems like the Amazon and the
cerrado could one day be prized for their ability to absorb carbon
dioxide, the gas believed to cause global warming.
Already several leading power companies have snapped up tracts of
Latin American rainforest, hoping they may be turned into credits in
a future emissions trading system.
The Environment Ministry is calculating how much carbon dioxide the
deep root systems of the cerrado vegetation can absorb and store, a
first step before possibly promoting the region as an emissions
investment opportunity for big business.
For now, conservationists are concerned that the last, untouched
corners of the cerrado may soon be ploughed up. Much of the virgin
land lies near the mighty Araguaia and Tocantins rivers, tributaries
to the Amazon and part of a proposed new waterway system that will
open the region to farming.
``This is a terrible trade-in. Swapping biodiversity for grain
production is clearly a bad deal for Brazil,'' said Mauricio Galinken
of independent group CEBRAC which has helped indigenous groups
contest the waterway plan. ``My fear is that we will only see what we
have lost when it is too late.''