- The agribusiness connection to Brazil's Amazon deforestation Archived Message
Posted by Ian M
on September 7, 2019, 6:33 pm
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Further to the discussion below https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/thread/1567667536.html I came across an illuminating passage in Paul Robert's book, 'The End Of Food' talking about the way Brazil's economy has been manipulated to turn it into a giant agricultural export market with direct and indirect effects on the Amazon (direct when it's cut and turned straight to soybean plantations; indirect when small scale farmers are driven out by mega-projects and cut out new patches for themselves). A review provides a brief summary of the argument: 'Roberts is at his best discussing the geopolitical consequences as the world’s most economically powerful nations scramble to respond to these challenges. He shows that the U.S. agricultural machine once dominated global food-crop production, acting as a kind of OPEC of grain. But now Brazil, spurred on by the need to repay debt to foreign lenders, is rapidly emerging as the globe’s food-export powerhouse. Brazil already leads the world in production of sugar, coffee, and beef, and will soon overtake the United States in soybean production. The country’s soy farms “are expanding at the rate of 4,000 square miles per year,” and its soy exports have more than tripled since 1998. China, flush with export earnings and pushed by an increasingly meat-hungry population, is sucking up a huge portion of that bounty and using it as livestock feed. Roberts senses the “emergence of a new global [food] trade axis, with Brazil and Argentina at one end and India and China at the other.” The main role the United States plays in this new order is through U.S.-based transnationals like Cargill, Monsanto, Tyson, and Mosaic — which have maintained their dominance of food production through these geopolitical shifts. The consequences aren’t pretty. On the China side, you get the rise of U.S.-style meat factories, and all of the environmental damage they imply; on the Brazil side, you get ever-increasing pressure on the Amazon rainforest, the globe’s greatest carbon sink, in an era of rapid climate change.' - https://grist.org/article/the-locavores-dilemma/ Or you can read the passage in the book online here: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aniW3gclsMUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA139#v=onepage&q&f=false It makes a mockery of western leaders (I'm looking at you Macron) complaining about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest when it's precisely because of the neoliberal reforms pushed through by their governments and international pro-corporate orgs like the IMF that Brazil and other countries in the global south have been 'restructured' into this kind of hugely damaging agri-export economy. Entirely legitimate environmental concerns could be getting hijacked as a means to stop these economies getting too big for their boots, but then the irony is that a large proportion of the money they make gets hoovered up by western countries in the form of debt repayments or syphoned off to corporate shareholders: 'For all that foreign-directed investment is said to benefit recipient countries, a large share of that money -- on average, twenty-seven cents of every dollar invested in Latin America, according to the World Bank -- goes back to the investor's home base -- usually the United States, Europe, Japan, or, increasingly, China.' - p.132 Western leaders shouldn't be allowed to point a finger at Evil Bolsonaro without it being pointed out that they're just as culpable for rigging the global order in such a way that practically guarantees free-market fundamentalist sociopaths will emerge in resource-rich countries like Brazil. cheers, I |