Threats and Solutions

Between August 2003 and August 2004, more than 6.4 million acres of rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon were lost to illegal and destructive logging, mining, industrial agricultural plantations and other human industries such as road building. A significant part of what remains is under direct threat - as are the forest plants, animals and people who depend upon the forest.

Burning Forests to Grow Soy

Most people know that the Amazon is under threat but few people know that today, the principal cause of the Amazon’s destruction is soy.  Soy traders encourage farmers to cut down the rainforest and plant massive soy crops. The traders take the soy and ship it to Europe where it is fed to animals like chickens and pigs. The animals are then turned into fast food products.

Soy farming in the Amazon is financed by four major companies - Cargill, ADM, Maggi and Bunge. Cargill owns an illegal export terminal in Brazil that is supplied by farms operating on illegally cleared rainforest land. Almost all of the soy passing through this terminal is destined for Europe – and fast food restaurants like KFC and McDonald’s.

We're calling on companies to ensure that their soy comes from legal sources outside the Amazon rainforest, farmed without slave labor and free of genetic engineering.

Illegal Logging

Logging is also one of the principal causes of the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest. By building logging roads into pristine rainforest, the logging industry also opens the door to further devastation of the forest ecosystem through clearing for cattle ranches and soy plantations, over-hunting, fuel wood gathering, and mining.

Fueled by the demand for cheap supplies of tropical timbers for both the Brazilian domestic market and the international market, the illegal timber trade represents a major factor in forest degradation. Between 60 and 80 percent of all logging in the Brazilian Amazon is estimated to be illegal and of all the timber that is cut, as much as 70 percent is wasted in the mills.

Solutions

As industrial logging and other destructive industries move further into what remains of the Amazon Rainforest, many indigenous people's cultures and ways of life are put at risk. While the Brazilian law provided for the complete protection of all indigenous lands by 1993, to date only half of the indigenous lands in Brazil have been demarcated.

Indigenous groups are not the only people dependent on the forest for preserving traditional ways of life. Rubber tapping has been a traditional way of life for many people living in the Amazon Rainforest. Today, as many as 63,000 families depend on rubber tapping, a livelihood that does not destroy the trees from which the latex is extracted.

Extractivist Reserves - protected areas of forest established by the Brazilian government to allow the rubber tappers to maintain their traditional way of life - cover perhaps one percent of the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest. Greenpeace has been working with the rubber tappers and other groups to demand an increase in the area under Extractivist Reserves to ten percent of the Brazilian Amazon.

With the protection of indigenous lands through demarcation and other initiatives such as the creation of more Extractivist Reserves, as much as 30 percent of the Amazon would be legally off-limits to industrial logging and large-scale industrial development.

Certified logging operations offer an important way forward for the logging industry in the Amazon. Greenpeace believes that the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is currently the only socially and ecologically responsible certification system that independently verifies logging operations to a set of international recognised standards. Some companies in the Amazon, such as Precious Woods and Gethal Amazonas, have already received FSC certification and are now selling timber from their operations to countries around the world.

Many solutions are needed to protect the Amazon Rainforest and its resources, on which the lives of 20 million people depend. Effective solutions must maintain people's quality of life and ensure long-term protection for the forest and its unique plants and animals. But these can only be achieved if sound environmental and economic alternatives replace the current destructive models.

There is no single solution to saving the Amazon rainforest and stopping the destruction. The solutions for the forest and the peoples whose ways of life depend upon it must be based on a wide range of socially and ecologically responsible initiatives.