The Brazilian Rainforest and Excessive Cattle Ranching

The Brazilian Rainforest and Excessive Cattle Ranching

Although Brazil is commonly known for their national soccer team as well as being the next host for the upcoming Olympic games there are many features to the country that are not as well known. Brazil is the largest country in the continent of South America, encompassing about half of the continent's land area and population. Its borders also contain the majority of the Amazon rainforest, representing more than half of the world’s rainforests and is a large contributor of oxygen. However, Brazil’s largest natural asset is slowly but steadily declining due to deforestation. Since 1970 over 600,000 square kilometres (Malhi, 2008); about the size of Ukraine, of the amazon rainforest has been destroyed due to cattle ranching, mining, farming and logging caused by several factors on the international and national scale. The most costly of these activities is cattle ranching with 91% of deforestation in the Amazon since 1970 being attributed to raising cattle (Marglis, 2004).

Cattle ranching or ranching is the raising of cattle with the intent of being sold and slaughtered for goods like meat and leather. This practice requires large sections of land to allow cattle to graze and therefore ranchers in Brazil clear mass portions of the rainforest. With cattle being one of Brazil’s largest exports, the constant clearing of land to allow for ranching is destroying the rainforest at an alarming rate. The outdated methods of making land suitable for ranching and the increasing demand for cattle means that carbon emissions are rising. The purpose of this essay is to evaluate and analyze the increasing concern about cattle ranching and the depletion of the Amazonian rainforest in Brazil and to attempt to find a realistic solution to the growing problem. In order to fully understand the factors leading to the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, one must first look at Brazil’s economy, its government’s policies and international factors.

Brazil has the 7th largest economy in the world and as a member of BRICS is also one of the fastest developing countries as well. It’s GDP in 1970-2013 grew from 2208.7 billion USD to 2243.9 billion USD with an average annual growth rate of 145.9% which means that Brazil will be one of the most developed countries within the next 30 years (Blankfeld, 2010). Since the Latin America debt crisis in the 1980’s, government policy implementations to the incentive of growth in the primary sector such as privatization, integration of the world market and the deregulation of economic activities has emphasized the importance of agriculture in Brazil’s GDP. As a result, agriculture rose to 11% of GDP in 1990 while accounting for about 40% of its GNP and since 2005, Brazil’s total exports have more than doubled from 58 billion USD in 2001 to 118 billion USD (MIT, 2006). However, Brazil also has an increasingly