Some Causes of Slowing Deforestation

Soy moratorium

a private sector agreement referred to as the Soy Moratorium has helped drastically reduce the deforestation linked to soy production in the region. In 2006, a number of major commodity trading companies such asCargill agreed to not purchase soybeans produced in the Brazilian Amazon on recently deforested areas. Before the moratorium, 30 percent of soy field expansion had occurred through deforestation, contributing to record deforestation rates. After eight years of the moratorium, a 2015 study found that although soy production area had expanded another 1.3 million hectares, only about 1 percent of the new soy expansion had come at the expense of forest. In response to the moratorium, farmers were choosing to plant on already cleared land.^[21]

The Brazilian Forest Code was established in 1965, creating a legal framework for forest governance in Brazil. Although far from perfect, the Brazilian Forest Code remains one of the most comprehensive pieces of legislation governing forests on private lands in the world.

Among the most important components of the Forest Code is the designation of Legal Reserves (LRs), which establish the minimum area (as a percentage of the property) that must be retained as primary forest vegetation. While some exclusions and exemptions do exist, in general, the Legal Reserve designates a set aside that occupies 80% of the property in the Amazon biome, 35% in the Cerrado biome (if located in the Legal Amazon, otherwise 20%), and 20% in all other areas of the country. Therefore, the Legal Reserve represents the area of the property in which deforestation is prohibited.

In addition, the Forest Code also designates environmentally sensitive areas as Areas of Permanent Preservation (APPs), aiming to conserve water resources and prevent soil erosion. APPs include both Riparian Preservation Areas (RPAs) that protect riverside forest buffers as well as Hilltop Preservation Areas (HPAs) for high elevation and steep slopes. The newly amended Forest Code also includes mechanisms to address fire management, forest carbon stocks, and payments for ecosystem services.

One of these new mechanisms is the Environmental Reserve Quota (Portuguese acronym, CRA), a tradable legal title to land areas with intact or regenerating native vegetation exceeding the requirements of the Legal Reserves (LR). The CRA (surplus) on one property may be used to offset a Legal Reserve debt (i.e. a property with less than the minimum requirement of forest cover) on another property within the same biome and, preferably, within the same municipality or state. Full implementation of the CRA could create a viable trading market for forested lands, incentivizing forest conservation. The CRA market could abate up to 56% of the LR debt.⁴⁹Exchange of CRAs could become a cost-effective way to facilitate compliance, while protecting forest surpluses that might otherwise be legally deforested.

Rural Environmental Registry System (CAR)

In 2010, the Brazilian government made it mandatory that all rural properties be mapped and registered in a database, known as the CAR (Cadastro Ambiental Rural). The CAR database holds geospatial data on property boundaries as well as environmental information on rural agricultural production. This database is intended to be a strategic tool for controlling, monitoring, and reducing deforestation in Brazil. Registration in the CAR is also used by financial institutions as a criterion in the consideration of credit worthiness for both public and private agricultural loans.

From a supply chain perspective, the CAR represents an effective tool to increase transparency of ranch-level practices. This will allow an unprecedented level of understanding of deforestation patterns and land-use dynamics in beef, leather, and tallow supply chains. While this progress will greatly support companies actively committed to responsible sourcing, it will expose those companies that have not acted appropriately to exclude ranchers involved with deforestation and illegal activities from their supply chains.

While the CAR represents a significant step forward for Brazilian agriculture, it is important to recognize its limitations - the CAR, in of itself, cannot prevent deforestation, it only allows it to be detected. Also, the CAR does not grant land title. It only registers an individual with a property claim, and therefore must be used in conjunction with other legal documentation to verify the claim.

To ensure the most effective application of the CAR, efforts should be made to link it to public-private initiatives that encourage verified zero deforestation supply chains.

Saving the Amazon; A few civil servants and an old satellite have given Brazil a (small) success story:

No one expected change to come from Mato Grosso. With its year- round growing season and pockets of rich red soils, this sprawling 90,000-square-kilometer territory had become the front line of Brazil's agricultural expansion, sown thick with soybeans, cotton and other crops. No wonder Mato Grosso alone once accounted for half the forest cutting in all of Amazonia. In the Amazon, where soils are notoriously weak (life-giving nutrients come from trees and plants, not from underground) farmers and herders had to cut and burn ever deeper into the forest just to get by. Yet even by Amazonian standards, the pillage was getting out of hand. "It was chaos," says Paulo Leite, head of forestry resources for Mato Grosso's environmental authority, FEMA.

Policing the rain forest by satellite sounds expensive, but it's not. Mato Grosso's entire forest-defense program, paid for by the World Bank, the G7 nations and Brasilia, runs to about $1 million a year. Leite reckons that Brazil could monitor the entire Amazon every year for just $3 million, a fraction of the potential take in fines. Philip Fearnside, a respected tropical-forest ecologist, estimates that Mato Grosso has saved about 319,000 hectares of forest per year since 2000. Despite the recent fires, burnings are down from a decade ago while deforestation in Mato Grosso has plunged 32 percent from 1998 to 2001, when it was rising everywhere else in Amazonia.

      The people of the Amazon basin live by a cruel calendar. Each year starting in January, farmers, ranchers and loggers topple a swath of forest the size of Hawaii. In July, when the rains stop, they set the remaining debris on fire. But this July morning, deep in the frontier state of Mato Grosso, the sky is as blue as a robin's egg, the chain saws are silent and not a bulldozer is in sight. Beneath the wings of a twin-engine Cessna, the steamy wilderness scrolls by as boundless and unblemished as Brazil itself must have looked when the Portuguese arrived half a millennium ago.

After years of nothing but dire news about the destruction of Amazonia, the world's greatest tropical rain forest, it seems at last that something is being done to reverse the trend. Don't get too excited--the Amazon is hardly out of danger. Slashing and burning are habits as old as Brazil. Last August, wildfires had bucket brigades hustling over an area the size of Europe, including some stretches of Mato Grosso. But illegal burnings don't occur nearly as often as they did a few years ago. The reason: a few honest civil servants, using an existing technology (satellite imaging) and some straightforward gumshoe work, have begun to accomplish what countless United Nations meetings have failed to do: come up with an enforcement method that works.

There's no doubt that the pressure of bad publicity had something to do with Brazil's latest success story. During the 1980s, lumbermen, herders and small farmers swept into the rain forest with chain saws and bulldozers in perhaps the greatest frontier push of the 20th century. The tide began to turn in 1988 when a rancher murdered Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and defender of the rain forest, turning him into an ecomartyr. The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 sent Brazilian authorities scrambling to clear the country's name.

No one expected change to come from Mato Grosso. With its year- round growing season and pockets of rich red soils, this sprawling 90,000-square-kilometer territory had become the front line of Brazil's agricultural expansion, sown thick with soybeans, cotton and other crops. No wonder Mato Grosso alone once accounted for half the forest cutting in all of Amazonia. In the Amazon, where soils are notoriously weak (life-giving nutrients come from trees and plants, not from underground) farmers and herders had to cut and burn ever deeper into the forest just to get by. Yet even by Amazonian standards, the pillage was getting out of hand. "It was chaos," says Paulo Leite, head of forestry resources for Mato Grosso's environmental authority, FEMA.

For years, officials seemed unable or unwilling to do anything about the plunder. The low-tech federal environmental authority would deploy task forces to the backlands hoping to catch delinquent ranchers and farmers in the act. But figuring out where the forest was being cut, and by how much, was guesswork, which made it all too easy for corrupt inspectors to turn the other cheek for a price. The turning point came without fancy legislation, meetings or miracles-- only some old technology. Images from Landsat, the U.S. remote- sensing satellite, had been available for years, but few officials knew how to use them. One day in 1999, some officials decided to superimpose the satellite images on a statewide property grid. The combination produced a powerful tool for curbing deforestation. At the click of a mouse, inspectors could tell not only how much forest had been cut and burned, but who did the felling and where. Field teams struck out in pickup trucks, brandishing handheld Global Positioning Systems and printouts of satellite maps--the smoking guns of the digital age. Fines were mailed to the violators, along with numbered bank receipts, a virtually fraudproof system. So far this year, Mato Grosso has collected about $24 million for illegal deforestation and burning. Vigorous prosecution and stiff fines discourage welshers.

Policing the rain forest by satellite sounds expensive, but it's not. Mato Grosso's entire forest-defense program, paid for by the World Bank, the G7 nations and Brasilia, runs to about $1 million a year. Leite reckons that Brazil could monitor the entire Amazon every year for just $3 million, a fraction of the potential take in fines. Philip Fearnside, a respected tropical-forest ecologist, estimates that Mato Grosso has saved about 319,000 hectares of forest per year since 2000. Despite the recent fires, burnings are down from a decade ago while deforestation in Mato Grosso has plunged 32 percent from 1998 to 2001, when it was rising everywhere else in Amazonia.

Brazil is now preparing to export the program throughout the Amazon, and is even talking it up abroad. "We have people calling all the time," says Leite. Next stop is Johannesburg, where the program will be featured at the 10th anniversary of the Earth Summit. Ironically, this time the Amazon may offer one bit of heartening news in an otherwise calamitous decade.