Soy Production Spreads, Threatens Amazon
9/10/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Environment-Brazil: Soy Production Spreads, Threatens Amazon
Source: InterPress Service
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: September 10, 1999
RIO DE JANEIRO, (Sep. 10) IPS - The expansion of soy cultivation to
northern Brazil poses a new threat to the forests and biodiversity of
the Amazon region, warned a network of 430 non-governmental
organizations today.
The alert, released by the Amazon Work Group (GTA), refers to a new
surge in soy production by a private group called Maggi in the
southeastern part of Amazonas state. The project could mean the
deforestation of one million hectares, according to GTA.
The issue also worries the Brazilian Environmental Institute, the
government environmental authority, which has already verified the
deforestation of nearly 50,000 hectares by Maggi.
Amazonas is Brazil's largest state with an area of 158 million
hectares in the heart of the Amazon region. It is also the state with
the least destruction of its forests by human activities like farming
and logging.
The fear of the GTA is based on their studies showing that "soy is
not sustainable in the Amazon," because the soil there is fragile,
and quickly loses its fertility.
Isa dos Santos, GTA secretary general, told a Rio de Janeiro press
conference that the soy crop, which requires the intensive use of
pesticides, would need even more chemicals to grow in the Amazon.
Most of Brazil's soy is produced in the south, but it is increasingly
being planted in the country's north and west. More than 20 percent
of the soy planted in 1997-1998 was in the Amazon, according to data
from the agricultural ministry.
The Maggi group, which is leading the soy campaign in Amazonas state,
is Brazil's largest soy exporter, shipping its own production as well
as that of other farmers. The Amazon waterways are the hub of the
group's business strategy.
The Maggi group built a port in Humaite, where the Madeira River
waterway begins, and another in Itacoatiara on the Amazon river,
where soy and other local products are loaded for export.
The ports are key for the new soy cultivation center, which would
extend from Humaite to Apui, along 400 km of the Trans-Amazon
highway, said Dos Santos, who observed that the use of waterways
reduces the cost of transport to external markets by 30 percent.
It is the low transportation costs that makes soy production in the
Amazon competitive, explained Blairo Maggi, head of the family
business and also a substitute senator.
This decade's governmental policies, which led to the appearance of
"export brokers," have promoted the expansion of soy cultivation in
the Amazon, stated Dos Santos, a sociologist who worked many years
with the region's local traditional communities.
A four-year investment program announced by president Fernando
Henrique Cardoso last week would create several waterways and
highways that would move agriculture beyond its current borders in
the Amazon.
The project is the opposite of what the GTA recommends as a
development strategy for the region, which is based on the
sustainable extraction of fruits, wood and other forest and river
products.
Soy cultivation employs just 1.7 workers per hectare compared to 30
per hectare on a family farm, said Dos Santos. Rubber extractions
employs 1.5 million Amazon families, while the port of Itacoatiara,
with its advanced technological equipment, has just 17 employees, she
added.
Soy has already arrived in Maranhao state, on the eastern border of
Amazonia, benefiting from the Brazilian Enterprise for Agricultural
Research that developed soy varieties adapted to the nation's
different soils and climates.
Soy is "the cheapest source of protein," and the source with highest
productivity given that 100 percent of the grain's derivatives become
food for human or animal consumption, stated Flavio Francia Junior,
an agricultural market analyst.
The spread of soy cultivation throughout Brazil will be limited over
the next three years by weak international prices resulting from the
subsidized soy production in the United States. But it will pick up
afterwards, predicts Francia.