Brazilian Deforestation Falls By Almost Half

The Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), Brazil’s remote-sensing agency, and the Brazilian Government have release a preliminary satellite survey that indicates deforestation in the Amazon forest declined by 47.5 per cent over the past year.

According to news reports, this is the largest decrease since data was first recorded in 1988.

Greg Asner, a forest expert from Stanford University (see our previous post on his work in Peruvian forests here) has stated that this is likely to be part of a strong trends – not just an outlying piece of data.

Asner and other scientists have put the drop down to global recession. There is some stock in this. Food oil prices have dropped from the stellar highs of 2008 but are on their way back up. Soybean exports from Brazil are forecast to drop in 2010, but global production is projected to increase by 22 per cent this year. Brazilian production alone is headed for a 13 per cent increase according to the FAO. Brazilian beef prices are also being buoyed by robust domestic consumption (historically the industry’s biggest market), and prices are set to rise after declines in 2008 and 2009. This contrasts with the US market, where prices have been flat for a number of years according to FAO data.

But if it is domestic Brazilian consumption that ultimately drives expansion of agriculture, and this is to feed a population that is growing in number and wealth, what will aggressive Western activists such as Greenpeace – who launched an ugly campaign against the cattle industry early this year – do about it?