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  • From: William Genest <genest@pivot.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Soy, China, & Brazil
  • Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2005 09:47:41 -0500

Man, that is depressing.

I don't see how it can be stopped. Any of it. In my province of Quebec, 99% of the territiory is slated for clear cut forestry. I think permaculture has more to do with training up as many people as possible to be ready to rebuild once the inevitable consequences of a cancer consuming its host come home to roost.

William


On Nov 11, 2005, at 6:43 AM, Jerome Rigot wrote:

I thought this might be of interest to people on this list.

No question that this is depressing news.
However, it brings up questions that might be
important to address, such as how permaculture
can counter-balance such large-scale
deforestation (and any other people-mediated
ecological disasters), on a short-term and long-term basis.
What can be done by people with a different
vision of what a sustainable/regenerative future
could be, to mitigate such large-scale, greed-based development?

Many more questions come to mind. Jerome


Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 14:00:18 -0500
From: Sarah Garlington <sarahbgarlington@hotmail.com>
Subject: [COMFOOD:] Soy, China, & Brazil

Thought this might be of interest.

Jonathan Watts in Santarem, the Amazon
Thursday November 10, 2005
The Guardian

The new China

--------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------
A hunger eating up the world

China's insatiable demand for proteins as well
as oil is turning Brazil into the takeaway for
the workforce of the world. In the second part
of our series, we reveal how the soya trade is
creating a gold rush which is deforesting the Amazon

A smoky haze blurs the frontier between the
world's mightiest forest and its biggest threat:
the humble soya bean. The four-month burning
season in the Amazon is when the giant trees
felled to make space for crops are slowly
reduced to ashes. Even after being slashed and
burned, the trunks of the tauari and maçaranduba
are so huge that their embers glow on and off
for more than two years. Some are left to burn
where they stand, creating giant pillars of
charcoal stretching 30 metres into the sky.


You cannot see the wood for the beans in an
ever-widening expanse of the Amazon, and it is
increasingly thanks to China. Brazil's boom crop
and China's growing appetite are clearing more
forest than logging, cattle farming and mining.
It is one of the more remarkable developments of
a globalised world in which Brazil is rapidly
becoming the takeaway for the workforce of the world.
Travelling from Beijing to a farm in the heart
of the Amazon showed how far China's reach has
extended. It took five flights and nearly three
days to reach Santarem, followed by a two-hour drive.

The farmers had also come a long way and at
great risk to be here. The Bonettis are from
Italian stock. Just as their forebears gave up
everything to move from Europe to the new world,
they too quit their jobs two years ago and sold
their land in the south of Brazil so that they
could join the soya gold rush thousands of miles
north. They now live in an Amazonian wilderness,
where the father, a former computer programmer,
hunts wild boar for supper while his wife keeps
their child from roaming into a jungle of
tarantulas and jaguars. Legally their position
is tenuous, as the government has granted no
approval for clearance of land in this area.

But for the pioneers it is a risk worth taking.
Amazonian land is cheap. An area the size of a
football pitch costs £200. But how could they be
sure the soya boom would continue? "Because of
China," said Mr Bonetti, whose name has been
changed to protect him. "All over Asia, and
especially in China, the market is expanding."

The confidence of the families who are moving to
newly cleared land near Santarem reflects a
giant shift that is taking place in the global
food trade as Brazil becomes a leading supplier
of protein for China. From space you can see
why. Since 1995 satellite images show the Amazon
has shrunk by 1.7m hectares (4.2m acres) a year
- equivalent to a forest almost the size of
Israel being turned into farmland every 12
months. During the same period China has lost
more than 6m hectares of arable land to cities,
factories, roads and deserts. Self-sufficient in
most food and energy commodities 15 years ago,
China must now import millions of kilocalories
to fuel its workers just as it needs lakes of
international oil to keep its production lines
running. Most of the protein comes in the form
of soya beans from Brazil, which are used to
fatten pigs, poultry and fish that end up on the
dinner tables of the world's most populous country.

Even by China's standards, the growth has been
phenomenal. Since 1995, soya bean imports from
Brazil have increased 10,685%. The pulses are
now by far the most important item on the
bilateral balance sheet, last year worth $2bn
(£1.15bn), or more than a third of Brazil's sales volume to Beijing.

According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy
Institute, this could herald the formation of an
axis that will dominate the world food market.
For years, he said, the most important trade
route for food was between the US - the world's
biggest exporter of grain, soya and meat - and
Japan, the main importer. But last year for the
first time Brazil became the top exporter and China the top importer of soya.

Along with rising demand for the beans in Europe
and a poor crop in the US, this contributed last
year to the second biggest deforestation of the
Amazon in history. Loggers and farmers have
already cleared 600,000 hectares and tens of
thousands more are added every month.

Ecological madness
Greenpeace and other critics say it is
ecological madness to cut down rainforests that
are home to more than 100,000 species. Soya
advocates say the dangers are overblown.

"Foreign environmental activists worry too much
about a few trees, a few species and a few
tribes. They don't want us to develop. All we
want is health and money," Jomar Nascimento
Neves, an economics professor at the local
university, told a recent conference sponsored
by several big agricultural firms.

According to Ibama, the Brazilian state
environmental agency, only 2% of the
deforestation is authorised. But with only six
inspectors to cover an area three times bigger
than the UK, there is little they can do. "There
is no such thing as sustainable management of
forests. It is all predatory," said Nielson
Vieira at Ibama's Santarem office. "All we can do is minimise the damage."

As in China, the losers of modernisation are
local farmers, who are priced or pushed off
their land. Maria dos Santos, of the
smallholders union in Santarem, said 500
families had been relocated, a fifth of them by
force. Benoir Jean of a French NGO, Groupe de
Recherche et d'Echanges Technologiques, said
people were being shot and homes burned in the
drive to secure land for soya. "It has created a
climate of fear in which people are afraid to talk."

In an attempt to minimise the social and
environmental impact of soya, the Nature
Conservancy, a US-based NGO, has joined with
local officials, producers and traders such as
US agribusiness Cargill to establish a system
that endorses plantations which follow best environmental practices.

However, Wang Huijun, deputy director of China's
department for American and Caribbean Affairs,
said: "Since 2003 China has pursued a policy of
sustainable development. But how Brazil protects
its environment is up to them."

All over Amazonia, China's footprint is getting
bigger. Near the northern port of Belemon, an
alumina plant is being built to process raw
materials for China's producers. Inland, Chinese
merchants are negotiating timber deals in
Manaus. To the east, forests are being chopped
down to provide the charcoal needed for pig-iron
exports. The world's biggest iron ore producer,
Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, has signed a $1.5bn
deal with Baosteel of Shanghai to build a mill
with a capacity of 8m tonnes of steel sheet a
year. Brazil's state oil firm Petrobras is
building a pipeline with a $1bn investment from
China's Sinopec. The government also wants
Beijing to upgrade its transport system to speed
raw materials from the interior to ports.

"We are looking at a possible Chinese investment
in the north-south railway. This passes through
an area that has great potential for soya
exploitation," said Luciano Desira, commercial
counsellor of the Brazilian embassy, which is
about to almost double the number of diplomats it stations in Beijing.

The two countries are discussing what could be
an even more significant deal - the transfer of
biofuel technology, which uses sugarcane, soya
and other crops to produce petrol substitutes
such as ethanol. Brazil is the world leader in
this field, which is increasingly attractive to China as crude prices surge.

Exports growing
Largely thanks to soya, South American exports
to China have grown 570% since 1999. In the
process China has overtaken Argentina, Japan and
Britain to become the second most important
destination, after the US, for Brazilian goods.

With economic clout has come political
influence. Brazil's left-leaning president, Luiz
Inacio Lula da Silva, has courted Beijing to
offset US influence. Last year he headed a
450-member trade mission to China, where he said
the two countries could form a relationship
unhindered by colonial animosities. "We are two
giants without historical, political or economic
divergences, free to think only about the future."

The story is the same throughout Latin America.
Argentina has benefited from a 122% surge in
trade. Peru has received cash for its energy and
food sectors. Chile, the world's biggest copper
producer, reports that China overtook the US
last year as the main copper buyer. Most
contentious has been Beijing's courtship of
Venezuela, which has the biggest oil reserves
outside the Middle East. Castigated by the US as
"authoritarian", President Hugo Chavez has been
more than willing to accept the embrace. Last
year he signed a deal that is expected to double
bilateral trade in 2005 thanks largely to energy
exports. The first tanker of Venezuelan oil arrived in China this summer.

Such developments have not gone unnoticed in
Washington. "I believe we should be cautious and
view the rise of Chinese power as something to
be counterbalanced, contained and perhaps go so
far as to consider China's actions in Latin
America as the movement of a hegemonic power
into our hemisphere," Dan Burton, the Republican
representative for Indiana, told a house foreign relations subcommittee.

The soya barons are so convinced that demand
will continue to grow that they are planning to
clear millions more hectares. "We don't trust
China as a partner," said Pio Stefanello, a
plantation owner and Brazil's leading
distributor of soya seeds. "But it is a huge
contributor to growth. They are big consumers for everything."




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Best Regards,

William Genest

- Founder Green Mountain Permaculture Institute of Vermont
Solutions, Sustenance, Sustainability
www.greenmountainpermaculture.com

- Creator "Regeneration - The Art of Sustainable Living"
From "Something-Must-be-Done" to Something we can do !
www.regenerationshow.com

- Ecological Coordinator
Club St.Paul Ecological Golf Course

- Vice-President Green Party of Quebec "pour nous et nos enfants"
www.pvq.qc.ca

- National Spokesperson Green Party of Canada
"The Future is Now ! "
www.greenparty.ca







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