Saving The Amazon: Can Sustainable Development Really Work?

The Amazon rainforest, one of the world’s greatest natural treasures, has long drawn people’s attention toward Brazil. “Save the Amazon” has been a major rallying cry for international groups trying to stop deforestation and protect this uniquely diverse ecosystem. While the Amazon covers large swathes of territory in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname, 60% of the forest lies within Brazil. Brazilians think of the Amazon as their backyard, and as a result, tend to have a more nuanced view than their contemporaries in distant countries to the North.

A Brief History of Amazon Settlement

Like the United States, Brazil was colonized along the Atlantic Coast by European settlers and African slaves. As its economic development was determined by trade with partners to the East, the coast formed the lifeblood of the colony. Migration inland was at first limited to coffee farms in São Paulo state, which quickly eclipsed the sugarcane plantations of the Northeast as the country’s main economic engine. Later on, settlement of the Brazilian interior was driven by the Bandeirantes, groups of roaming outlaws who enslaved native populations and prospected for minerals across the Brazilian Highlands, primarily in the southeastern states of Paraná, Goiás, and Minas Gerais. Despite their brutality and lack of respect for the law, the Bandeirantes established de facto control for the Portuguese crown well beyond the Tordesillas Line demarcated by the Pope in 1494, enabling Brazil to become the large country that it is today. These trends continued through the 1850s, with settlement highly concentrated in Northeastern coastal cities and the interior of the Southeast while the Amazon continued to be a sparsely populated wilderness, home to a handful of indigenous tribes and intrepid adventurers.

With the rise of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States, the Amazon became a more attractive climate for settlement, as steamboats allowed for upstream travel and the car industry created a huge demand for rubber extracted from the rainforest trees. Manaus and Belém, the two largest cities in the Amazon, quickly grew from backwater towns into booming cities. The rubber boom was short-lived, however, as Atlantic trade was interrupted by the two world wars and the creation of synthetic rubber led to a sharp fall in demand. The bust was best exemplified by the catastrophic failure of Henry Ford’s “Fordlândia” project, an attempt to build an industrial city on the mouth of the Amazon to serve as a permanent source of rubber for the American automobile industry. With the collapse of the rubber industry, migration to the Amazon fell once again.

However, large-scale settlement began again in the 1950s, when the Brazilian government adopted its own version of manifest destiny to urge its citizens to “penetrate the interior” and increase the nation’s control over its immense territories. The government began to give away large tracts of land in both the Amazon and the neighboring cerrado ecosystem, encouraging settlers to farm their land and make it more productive. To promote this project of “national integration”, the government moved the capital inland, founding the city of Brasília in 1960 in the heart of the cerrado. Deforestation began in earnest during this period, as trees were cleared to make room for new agricultural settlements.

The trend accelerated through the second half of the 20^th century, as trees were chopped down at ever-increasing rates throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s. In 2004 alone, 2.8 million hectares were cleared, the highest rate on record. As a result of this rapid deforestation, Brazil recently became the fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, passing Japan, Germany and the U.K.

2004-2012: A Turning Point, or a Temporary Anomaly?

Recent news, however, has been more positive. Miraculously, the rate of deforestation has declined rapidly over the last eight years, falling to 623,800 hectares in 2011, a 78% reduction from 2004 levels. People began to speak more optimistically about the future of the Amazon, and some began to believe that deforestation could stop completely within a decade, permanently preserving roughly 80% of the original forest.

This success was caused not by any major policy changes, but rather by better enforcement. Brazil has had a very strict forest code on the books since 1965, but for decades  enforcing it has proved just about impossible. That has changed in the last few years. Giving more land rights to local indigenous groups has made a big difference, as their knowledge of local territories and desire to maintain the forest intact make them much more effective policemen than most government officials. Information technology has also been a game changer, as satellites have allowed the government to track deforestation from above, which is of course much easier than trekking on the ground through dense forest. Police are now able to spot illegal deforestation and respond quickly by flying in on helicopters. The government has also started to limit land plots in the Amazon, setting aside more areas as national parks where logging is declared illegal. These efforts have stemmed the tide, although the rate of deforestation remains uncomfortably high for the future of the forest.

In order to reinforce these efforts, the U.S., France, Britain, Japan, Australia and Norway pledged at the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit a total of $3.5 billion to create the “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation” program, known as REDD. While the program is not focused on Brazil exclusively, the country has certainly been a major beneficiary. REDD provides resources to support greater enforcement measures (both by indigenous groups and government police) and to provide financial incentives to maintain forest intact and reforest where possible.

The optimism regarding the Amazon may have finally peaked, however, as greater enforcement has led to major pushback within the Brazilian political system. Well-organized farmers and ranchers, known as the ruralistas, have fought for changes in the original forest code in order to blunt the impact of enforcement measures and the REDD program. As in the U.S., the agricultural lobby is well represented in the national Congress,and was able to muscle through aggressive changes to the law in April. The law led to an intense, polemical debate between ruralistas and environmentalists. President Rousseff used a line-item veto last week and returned the bill to Congress after striking the most extreme provisions regarding amnesty for illegal loggers and mandated reforestation along riverbanks.

The debate over the new law may die down during the next month as Brazil hosts the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, but is sure to resurface later in the year. Although the outcome is uncertain, there is little doubt that the new forest code will prove more amenable to the forest lobby, and thus represents a new threat to the Amazon. This has led to increased fear that deforestation may start to pick up again, washing away any optimism built in recent years.

(More information about the Forest Code revisions can be found here.)

Looking Forward: Long-term Threats

The Amazon debate represents a very complicated question that gets to the heart of the paradox that is sustainable development. As I have written about several times before, there is a very real trade-off that exists between our concepts of economic development and environmental sustainability. Combining the two ideas into a single phrase, “sustainable development”, does not resolve the inherent and difficult conflicts between them. Brazil is torn between its two visions for the Amazon: to protect the rainforest as a vibrant ecosystem on one hand, and to make the area fit for human habitation, reducing poverty among the region’s inhabitants and allowing the country to take advantage of its rich natural resources on the other. This is an issue that human society struggles with all over the world.

The first and most obvious development interest is to make the region fit for agriculture. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Brazil struggled to feed its growing population. Over time, however, due to rapid productivity gains, the country has emerged as an agricultural powerhouse. Brazil is now referred to as the breadbasket of the world, a country that has revolutionized the concept of agriculture in the tropics. This has major implications for human society, as Brazil could serve as a model for a much-needed green revolution in Africa (more on that in a later post). Agriculture is now a major motor for the national economy, especially in poorer areas of the country, and the ruralistas are quick to point out that environmentalists seek to undo this progress by limiting land that can be cleared for farming.

The argument, however, is more nuanced than that. Most of Brazil’s agricultural miracle has taken place far away from the dense Amazon forest, focusing instead on the cerrado savannah in the middle of the country. This is good news for the rainforest, but bad news for the savannah, which has seen a much more intense decline in forest cover and biodiversity over the last several decades. The cerrado has suffered the brunt of the damage so far, but farmers are steadily creeping into the rainforest in search of new lands, forming an “Arc of Deforestation” (courtesy of The Economist):

It is also important to remember that not all agriculture is the same. The most devastation by far has occurred as a result of cattle ranching. As opposed to highly-concentrated soy plantations in the cerrado or small family plots where crops are rotated, cattle ranchers do not exhibit the same care for the land they use. They use much larger quantities of land to produce less food and are notorious for using “slash-and-burn” techniques to clear vast tracts for grazing. The incentives for cattle-ranching are obvious: it requires much less work than traditional farming and guarantees a greater profit. To make matters worse, demand for beef is booming. Brazilians’ appetite for cow is legendary and all-you-can-eat steakhouses (known as churrascarias) are a popular part of local culture. The country is also the top beef exporter in the world, and JBS, a beef company, is one of Brazil’s most famous multinationals.

In theory, it should be possible to promote Brazilian agriculture while preventing deforestation, but this will require a concerted effort to limit cattle ranching and promote more “integrated farming” techniques. This, in turn, would necessitate a desire from Brazilians and international consumers to eschew beef in favor of diets heavier in fruits and vegetables, grains, and poultry. As a former vegetarian, I have to admit that I don’t count on that happening any time soon.

Agriculture is not the only threat to the Amazon, however. Many of the 15 million inhabitants of the region, especially those in major urban areas, work in other sectors and simply want the government to help them develop their local economies. Chief among their demands is the desire for better infrastructure, especially energy and roads. As Brazil has grown wealthier, electricity demand has skyrocketed and is projected to increase on a 5% annual basis over the next decade. Instead of relying more on oil and gas, coal, or nuclear energy, the country has instead turned to one of its greatest natural resources: water. Hydropower already makes up about 75% of Brazil’s electricity generation, and dams across the southeast have allowed the region to develop without dramatically increasing its carbon footprint. The government has hoped to replicate this success in the North and Northeast, commissioning a series of dams along the Amazon to provide a clean source of renewable energy across these more impoverished areas.

The largest of these dams, Belo Monte, has caused huge protests from environmentalists and indigenous groups who complain that the project will flood large parts of the rainforest. Ironically, they also criticize the dam for its limited expected generation capacity, the result of a design alteration intended to constrain flooding. Regardless, work on the dams has already begun and is scheduled to be completed within the next several years. The real question regarding the dams, however, is not about flooding, but rather about the long-term impact of greater electricity generation in the Amazon. More electricity will inevitably lead to an increased amount of economic activity in the Amazon, which will almost certainly have a negative impact on the local environment in terms of air pollution, water contamination and deforestation resulting from expansion of cities and towns.

The same question arises regarding future roads. Greater economic development will certainly require building a modern transport infrastructure between urban centers, but more roads inevitably lead to greater deforestation. In fact, 80% of deforestation in the Amazon takes place within 3 miles of a road, and the Trans-Amazon Highway has long been criticized as an infrastructure project that produced devastating environmental results. Road construction is a particularly complicated issue, because aside from helping to improve economic conditions for local residents, it is intended to serve as a conduit for regional trade, connecting Brazil to neighboring Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. The Amazon stands between Brazil and other South American countries, and building trade routes through the forest is thus crucial to promoting trade ties. But it is difficult to imagine how this would be possible without devastating the ecosystem.

The infrastructure questions thus underscore the fundamental dilemma Brazil faces regarding its Amazon policy. How can it protect and develop the forest at the same time? The only two obvious answers, to depopulate the region or to encourage inhabitants to return to the simpler subsistence lifestyle of the local indigenous populations, do not seem reasonable or necessarily desirable. Alternatives, however, are in short supply.

The Amazon thus goes to the heart of the sustainable development paradox. How can we develop modern, wealthy societies without having a negative impact on the fragile ecosystems around us? Too often, environmentalists embrace a simplistic, back-to-the-cave mindset that encourages us to return to a subsistence lifestyle and leave behind the gains of the last two centuries, while their opponents turn a blind eye to the massive ecological damage human technology has inflicted on the planet, complacently assuming that this will not have serious negative repercussions in the long run. I do not find either of these mentalities particularly appealing. We will have to continue moving forward, placing increased emphasis on developing environmentally-friendly technologies in order to create green economies that can evolve without further damaging the Earth. I am not sure if this will ultimately be possible, and my previous posts as well as this one point out the reasons why one should remain skeptical. Nevertheless, I don’t think we have much choice other than to try and turn sustainable development from an awkward contradiction into a viable reality.