The singer-songwriter narrates a video that explains why ever larger slices of the Pantanal and Cerrado end up in flames and then make way for the meat industry
Imagine a soccer field and visualize it in your mind, this is pretty easy. Try to imagine 6 million of them side by side: this is decidedly more complicated but it is precisely the impossibility of translating such a large surface into a single image that gives a fairly clear idea of the proportions we are considering. And what we reason about is the amount of vegetation lost in Pantanal, the largest wetland in the world. Let’s try another stretch of the imagination: let’s visualize the whole of Italy, Spain, Portugal and England as if they were extrapolated from the geographical map of Europe. Well, this area corresponds to the amount of savannah that was lost in the Closed, one of the biologically richest areas in the world. We talked about loss, but it would be better to use destruction: because, literally, scorched earth was not natural adversity, but the owners of the land themselves, who chose to convert them to direct livestock farming or soybean cultivation. The latter is destined not for direct human consumption, but for intensive farms all over the world where the animals, locked up in stables and never taken to pasture, are now fed with feed.
To tell what is happening in this part of the planet – it happens in Brazil, but the principal is the whole Western world that gets its supplies – the singer-songwriter Giorgia, which has decided to make its voice available to narrate a video report of the association Animal Equality, which explains what is the perverse mechanism that leads to deforestation. Making it clear that everything originates from the food choices of each of us. Large quantities of cheap meat, this is now the market rule, have a cost that we often do not see. And that cost is the loss of ever larger shares of biodiversity, with all that this entails in terms of climate change and the extinction of animal species.
Brazil on main exporter of beef, sells it in more than 150 countries. The demand on the international markets is getting higher and the trend shows no sign of abating. The business generated by this high trade and even if it is mainly some large multinationals who benefit from it, in fact the supply chain brings job opportunities for many. Certainly not qualifying jobs, such as jobs in unofficial slaughterhouses, where thousands of animals are killed every day, often with barbaric, antiquated and bloody methods. But which can still be seen as an opportunity in a land that does not offer great alternatives.
The controls are missing and when they are there they stop at the last steps, where everything appears regular. The illegalities occur upstream and in the various passages the criminal responsibilities are watered down and confused. There is no big doubt that it is the landowners who set fire to the vegetation to free the land which, once deforested, can be used for breeding and targeted crops. The firefighters try, but are unable to contain the phenomenon: Sometimes – says a disconsolate officer of the Mato Grosso firefighters in the video – hundreds and even thousands of fires in the same day. Impossible to intervene anywhere. The political will of the authorities to intervene with a heavy hand is also missing. Animal Equality calls for pressure to be put on the Brazilian government to end the devastation. And through Giorgia he asks everyone for a simple gesture, a small act that can have a disruptive force, equal and opposite to the one that generated everything: Leave the animals off the plate.
September 7, 2021 (change September 7, 2021 | 15:29)
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