Brazil's Ancient Savannahs Finally Succumb

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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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

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.''

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