In the public interest. Funnily enough I felt Amazon as I wrote it to be Silicon Valley. Just felt a nexus. Real life is not online it is off line in the forest deeply experiencing your nature as life intended. You must walk into nature and put your feet in the water and deeply contemplate – will this make me truly happy? All business links to the environmental demise where our consumption far outweighs are true and natural needs. We are out of balance on a massive scale justifying economic growth narratives as people do not know how to break the addiction to profit. Until we do it is a sinking ship, the titanic comes to mind. The industrialist in the real story wanted the ship to go faster to arrive in New York Harbour to feature on the news. His ambition preceded the safety of those on the ship. As it turned out there were not enough LIFEBOATs to save all the people. I feel an analogy here.
The only real change that will impact climate is when we move from economic growth to peaceful transformation of who we are and get clear on what we genuinely need. It really will come down to a shift in consciousness. As you change, you see differently and what was valued in the past drops away as it holds no value. You more from material wealth to inner wealth.
This is an article discussing the Amazon and fires and deals with environmentalists. I don’t think you can negotiate on the environment. You are either in balance or not. Even activists are not in balance when they invest in the very system that is undermining earth systems. I recall years ago learning that Greenpeace was hierarchical. I know from my inner feeling that hierarchy structures in superiority, inequality and power over. These are the bases that create consumption patterns that go beyond need = want. This latter state of being is not ‘going without’ but ‘going within’ as you no longer need more than you have. This is the shift in consciousness and how it is experienced. You cannot go back to the insecure life filling gaps with things to feel better. You awaken yourself to the reality that you have what you need, all needs are met, therefore conflict over unmet needs disappears like a vapour in the morning sun.
Version:1.0 StartHTML:000000258 EndHTML:000394414 StartFragment:000305967 EndFragment:000394335 StartSelection:000305967 EndSelection:000394309 SourceURL:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/world/americas/amazon-fires-brazil-cattle.html?smid=li-share Why Amazon Fires Keep Raging 10 Years After a Deal to End Them – The New York Times
Promises made
Why Amazon Fires Keep Raging 10 Years After a Deal to End Them
Many of the thousands of fires burning in Brazil’s Amazon are set by ranchers. A deal inked 10 years ago was meant to stop the problem, but the ecological arson goes on as the Earth warms.
By Clifford Krauss, David Yaffe-Bellany and Mariana Simões
- Published Oct. 10, 2019Updated Oct. 18, 2019
When things go wrong, those in power often promise to make it right. But do they? In this series, The Times investigates to see if those promises were kept.
SERRA DO CACHIMBO BIOLOGICAL RESERVE, Brazil — A smoky, choking haze drifted over a lush rainforest reserve in the Brazilian Amazon last month, as fires lit by cattlemen illegally ranching on protected land spread through the jungle.
From an elevated vantage point, a dozen blazes could be spotted across an 845,000-acre nature preserve.
As damaging as these fires would be to the Serra Do Cachimbo Biological Reserve, they represented just a tiny fraction of the total number burning vast swaths of the Amazon, with 26,000 recorded in August, the highest number in a decade.
The immense scale of the fires in Brazil this summer raised a global alarm about the risks they posed to the world’s largest rainforest, which soaks up carbon dioxide and helps keep global temperatures from rising.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Ten years ago, an agreement was reached that was intended to help end these devastating acts of ecological arson.
- Thanks for reading The Times.
In 2009, the three biggest Brazilian meatpacking companies signed an agreement with the environmental group Greenpeace not to buy cattle from ranchers who raised their beef in newly deforested areas.
The deal was meant to be a model for the world, a partnership between private industry and environmental activists that would benefit both.
For Greenpeace, the agreement offered a solution to one of the biggest causes of rainforest destruction: The cattle industry is responsible for up to 80 percent of the clearings in recent years, according to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
For the meatpackers, the agreement relieved pressure from a growing international environmental campaign against them and threats of boycotts against retailers selling their beef.
But the vows made by those three companies — JBS, Minerva and Marfrig, which handle about 50 percent of the beef raised in the Amazon — have been only partially kept, according to prosecutors, environmentalists and academics who study the cattle industry.
The failure to fulfill crucial elements of the ambitious promise — which were always going to be a challenge to achieve — is one of the main reasons the Amazon is on fire.
Cattle ranching has been responsible for 18,000 square miles of additional deforestation — equivalent to New Hampshire and Vermont combined — since the 2009 agreement between Greenpeace and the meatpackers, according to University of Wisconsin researchers.
Convinced that the meatpackers were not living up to their commitments, Greenpeace pulled out of the agreement in 2017.
“We saw that they failed to comply with what they had promised,” said Adriana Charoux, the lead Greenpeace Amazon activist. “They could have done much more. The slaughterhouses are making a minimal effort.”
What We Found
From Jaguars in Jungles to Cows in Pastures
In September, the fires were abundant in the Serra Do Cachimbo Biological Reserve, set aside by the Brazilian government 15 years ago as a pristine wilderness area off-limits to all commercial activity.
But driving over the creaky river bridges built by the ranchers in this reserve, it was easy to find illegal cattle operations here, as it is throughout Brazil’s Amazon. Where giant otters and jaguars once roamed, there were fields where cattle grazed.
Fazenda Canaã, a 2,700-acre farm carved out of the reserve’s rainforest around 2013, made no effort to hide. The jungle that had stood on this land was replaced by open savanna — grazing land for its 400 cattle.
For a ranch hand working there, the exchange of rainforest for productive farmland seemed like a fair deal.
“The right thing to do is let people work,” said Isaías Hermogem, as he watched over cattle grazing in a clearing edged with papaya and coconut trees. “Let’s open up more space.”
Many ranchers have taken that advice.
Fazenda Canaã is just one of at least 71 ranches in the Serra do Cachimbo, and both the number of ranches and the size of each appears to be growing. In August, just as the rampant fires in the Amazon gripped the attention of a warming world, Fazenda Canaã extended its turf with additional burning.
About 200 million heads of cattle are raised in the Brazil, with an estimated 173,746 square miles of forest — the size of California, plus Massachusetts and New Jersey — converted to cattle pasture over recent decades, according to the Yale School of Forestry.
Livestock farming generates more than $6 billion in annual export revenues and about 360,000 jobs. Much of the exported beef goes to meet growing demand in China.
Despite the promise of the major meatpackers not to buy cattle from ranches like Fazenda Canaã, cattle that spent time on this farm were purchased by JBS over the last three years, according to government data.
In fact, JBS, the biggest meatpacker worldwide, bought cattle that passed through 11 ranches in the preserve over the last two years, according to the government data.
Marfrig and Minerva each made indirect purchases from one ranch here, according to government data that traces a complex supply chain.
An audit in 2016 by federal prosecutors in Pará State, where the Serra do Cachimbo reserve is and where about a third of the cattle slaughtered in the Amazon come from, showed that 6 percent of the cattle JBS had bought between October 2009 and 2016, totaling 36,739 heads of cattle, came from ranches that had been illegally cleared.
In 2016, 118,459 cattle, or 19 percent of the total bought by JBS in Pará, were acquired “with evidence of irregularities,” according to the audit by the Brazilian Federal Prosecution Service using satellite information, on-the-ground inspections and traced purchasing data.
“There is no reason why after 10 years there could not be better results,” said Nathalie Walker, a director at the National Wildlife Federation, who has studied the Brazilian cattle industry. “There were firm negotiated agreements.”
What We Found
‘Cattle Laundering’ Subverts the Supply Chain
Brazil has many thousands of cattle farms in the Amazon, spread out across one of the world’s most remote areas, which hinders efforts at law enforcement, inspections and, especially, tracking cattle over their life spans.
It’s rare for a cow to spend its entire life on the farm where it was born; it may be bought and sold multiple times, until it reaches the ranch that sells it directly to a slaughterhouse.
This complex supply chain has made the phenomenon of “cattle laundering” common and is the crux of the problem in fulfilling the deal’s promise.
A calf may be born on illegally deforested land and then ultimately sold to a fattening ranch whose land was cleared long ago and is within the terms of the accord.
When the slaughterhouses buy from these ranches, they can say they have acquired a cow from a compliant source.
JBS asserts that 100 percent of its cattle purchases from its direct suppliers “were in compliance with our responsible sourcing policies,” according to a statement from a company spokesman.
The company said it uses satellite technology, geo-referenced farm data and official government records to monitor more than 280,000 square miles, an area larger than Texas, and that it assesses more than 50,000 potential cattle suppliers every day.
“JBS has an unwavering commitment to combat, discourage and eliminate deforestation in the Amazon region,” said the company statement.
Despite those efforts, an audit commissioned by JBS acknowledged that the company does not fully monitor indirect suppliers because of a lack of accessible public data tracking the transport of animals.
“JBS can track 100 percent of its direct suppliers,” according to its third-party auditor, DNV GL, a Norwegian quality-assurance and certification company. But JBS “has not yet been successful in implementing traceability processes” for indirect suppliers.
And this gap, critics say, has rendered the agreement largely ineffectual.
Most of the Amazon ranches that sell cattle directly to JBS, Marfrig and Minerva are essentially middlemen, aggregators of cattle from multiple, inadequately monitored farms, according to data provided by University of Wisconsin researchers.
Based on an analysis of publicly available property records as well as on-the-ground interviews with hundreds of farmers in the Amazon, the University of Wisconsin researchers found that at least 15 percent of the indirect suppliers to the three major meatpackers have continued to deforest land since the 2009 agreement was signed.
“The agreement has so many holes, the deforestation is still just going on,” said Holly Gibbs, a University of Wisconsin geographer who has studied the agreement.
In a separate study of the cattle export market in the Amazon and the nearby Cerrado, a region which is not covered by the agreement, Trase, a research group that studies commodity supply chains, said that beef exports by JBS contributed to an estimated 100 square miles of deforestation a year from 2015 to 2017.
And the deforestation totals in the report reflect only a small part of the problem, because 80 percent of the meat produced in the region goes into the domestic market, whose effect on deforestation Trase did not measure.
“The lack of monitoring of indirect suppliers is a big blind spot,” said Erasmus zu Ermgassen, a researcher with Trase and the Université Catholique de Louvain. “Slaughterhouses, like JBS, have no way of guaranteeing that cattle from deforesting properties don’t ultimately end up in their supply chain.”
What We Found
Great Promise and Initial Progress Come Undone
The landmark agreement signed by JBS, Minerva and Marfrig was considered very promising.
The deal obligated the three companies to ensure that farmers who sold them cattle were not actively engaged in deforestation.
Soon after the Greenpeace deal, federal prosecutors reached an accord with 13 additional national meatpackers allowing federal law enforcement officers to monitor the source of their cattle so slaughterhouses would cut ties with cattlemen who cleared a significant amount of forest. Eventually, about 100 signed on, including the Big 3.
At first, the agreements did lead to improvements, as the meatpacking companies established the necessary protocols to monitor their direct suppliers.
In Pará State, for example, the University of Wisconsin research team found that while 36 percent of supplying ranches had recent deforestation in 2009, only 4 percent did in 2013.
But at the same time that the agreements limited the amount of new land for grazing, demand for beef was growing both domestically and internationally.
The incentive to clear more rainforest for pasture became hard to resist, and the result was a surge in the cattle laundering practice that has undermined the deals and ravaged Brazil’s rain forests.
Compounding the problem, farmers and ranchers have treated the inauguration of the right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro as president in January as a green light to burn deeper into the rainforest.