The Root of the Problem – Drivers of Deforestation

This report, published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, looks at the multitude of drivers which cause deforestation, and as such it includes chapters on soy, palm oil and cattle ranching.

The one on soy is actually very upbeat: The case of soy shows how quickly a new source of economic pressure for deforestation can arise and how this pressure can be reduced to very low levels. Some parts of the success story are unique to soy: for example, the overwhelming importance of one country, Brazil (and indeed, of one state within Brazil, Mato Grosso). Once an effective moratorium was in place in a limited region of the globe, the role of soy expansion as a driver of tropical deforestation was greatly diminished. Also, the concentration of the industry in Brazil, with strong control over exports by just a few companies and associations, made it possible for things to change rapidly once these actors decided to move.

What remains in doubt is whether the industry will stop expanding in all areas where it would damage biodiversity. Soy has had a major impact on the cerrado, both directly and by placing cattle pasture from that region northward into the Amazon. Brazil has committed to reducing deforestation by 40 percent in the cerrado as well as 80 percent in the Amazon, but much of the cerrado is already cleared. Nonetheless, soy shows how a rapidly expanding agricultural export industry can continue growing without deforestation. Through a combination of yield increases and use of other lands, the ―need‖ for deforested land can be eliminated. The case is also instructive because it shows how industry can be influenced by societal pressure to commit to zero deforestation and set up an effective technology-based system to enforce it. While the moratorium is not yet permanent, with every year that it continues it reinforces the message that development without deforestation is possible, desirable, and even profitable.

Ditto the chapter on beef: "even in the short term the encouraging initial results of the beef moratorium in Brazil suggest that deforestation due to pasture expansion can be stopped without waiting for major changes in diets or production systems. Deforestation has dropped to record low levels in Brazil despite major spikes in world food prices and continued steady growth of both the country's cattle herd and its beef exports" (Boucher 2011). Combined with the example of nations in the Old World in which large cattle herds are not driving deforestation, this suggests that although pasture expansion has been a major driver of deforestation in the past, it does not have to be in the future. The chapter on palm oil is much less positive.

This report should be read in the light of new research by INPE, the Brazilian space research institute (reported by the BBC) that deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest has increased almost six-fold between 2010-2011. See here for BBC coverage and here for INPE‘s press release.