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Amazon soy ban seems to be effective in reducing explicit deforestation mongabay.com April 3, 2008
The moratorium, which was signed by some of the largest soy crushers in the Amazon in response to a campaign by environmental group Greenpeace, went into effect in October 2006. While soy is believed to be having an indirect impact on deforestation by driving up land prices and competing with the dominant form of land use in the Amazon — cattle ranching — the news is a hopeful sign for conservationists. "Without a doubt the results show that soy moratorium is being respected and that is good news," Paulo Adario, coordinator of Greenpeace's Amazon campaign, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. The report found no new soybean plantations in any of the 193 areas that showed deforestation of 100 hectares (250 acres) or more between August 2006 and August 2007. Still Adario cautioned that high soy prices are continuing to put pressure on forest lands in the Brazilian Amazon.
Typically rainforest lands are cleared for low-intensity cattle ranching then sold to soy producers some two to three years later. With land prices appreciating and soy cultivation expanding in previously cleared areas and the neighboring cerrado grassland ecosystem, ranching is increasingly displaced to frontier areas, spurring deforestation. "Ranchers who sell their land to planters of soya or cane can purchase areas 10 times as large on the frontier, owing to the strong differential in land prices," wrote Dr. Donald Sawyer, an associate professor at the Center for Sustainable Development at the University of Brasilia, in a paper on the impact of biofuels on the Amazon published in March in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Scientists say that the soy industry's push for infrastructure improvements is also contributing to forest conversion. "The powerful Brazilian soy lobby has been a driving force behind initiatives to expand Amazonian highway networks, which greatly increase access to forests for ranchers, farmers, loggers, and land speculators," said Dr. William F. Laurance, a researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who has argued that there is an American "corn connection" to Amazon deforestation. Laurance says that corn ethanol subsidies are providing impetus for rainforest conversion for agricultural purposes. News index | RSS | Add to MyYahoo! Advertisements: Organic Apparel from Patagonia | Insect-repelling clothing |
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