2023-10-21 12:54:00
When Carminha Maria Missio’s family bought land in the Cerrado, a huge Brazilian savannah to the southeast of the Amazon rainforest, they attracted sarcasm.
“We were told that we couldn’t even hope to see lizards coming out of these sandy lands,” she told AFP.
It was 1979 and his modest farming family was selling a small farm in southern Brazil to go on an adventure to the other side of the country.
Today, this dashing 67-year-old grandmother is considered by the Brazilian edition of Forbes magazine as one of the country’s most influential women in the agricultural sector.
Little known outside of Brazil, the Cerrado is the savannah richest in biodiversity on the planet.
In addition to an extraordinary variety of plants and animals, including jaguars, it is home to the springs that feed watersheds across the country. This earned it the nickname “cradle of waters”.
But while the preservation of the Amazon is a global concern, the destruction of the savannah is accelerating out of sight.
Half of the native vegetation of the Cerrado has already disappeared: meadows and shrubs are replaced by fields of soya, cereals or cotton as far as the eye can see.
If the largest country in Latin America has become a leading agricultural power, the world’s leading exporter of soybeans, it is in large part thanks to the Cerrado.
“Sacrificed ecosystem”
At the heart of this territory, the municipality of Sao Desiderio, in the state of Bahia (north-east), is at the top of the national ranking of deforestation this year.
Its landscape after the harvest season is a gigantic patchwork, with rare green patches of native savannah vegetation remaining amid immense brown fields.
Growing cereals on sandy, nutrient-poor soils is profitable if production occurs on a large scale.
Mostly financed by agri-food multinationals like Cargill or Bunge, farmers invest massively in irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides.
To transform the savannah into arable land, they use the “correntao”, a large chain connecting two bulldozers which razes all the vegetation in its path.
The burning technique is also used. An area the size of Switzerland burned in the Cerrado last year, according to the MapBiomas research collective, which brings together NGOs and universities.
Experts also warn that the region is drying out due to the degradation of soils and irrigation systems.
The Cerrado is “a sacrificed ecosystem,” says Leticia Verdi, of the environmental defense NGO ISPN.
Left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has so far kept his promise to curb deforestation in the Amazon: it has fallen by half since his return to power in January.
But in the savannah, the situation has worsened, with a 27% increase in deforestation.
“Deforestation has spilled from the Amazon to the Cerrado,” laments Leticia Verdi.
“Underground Amazon”
Rodrigo Agostinho, president of the public environmental agency Ibama, is categorical: “The Cerrado is as important as the Amazon in the fight against the climate crisis.”
These two ecosystems are closely linked.
The savannah feeds on precipitation favored by the tropical forest, which depends on the sources of the Cerrado to feed its waterways.
Both play a major role against greenhouse gases: the Amazon forest thanks to its millions of trees, the savannah through a system of very deep roots which are full of biomass absorbing CO2. Hence the nickname “Underground Amazon”.
This mirror effect is also valid in other respects. In the Amazon, 95% of deforestation is illegal. In the Cerrado, 95% is done completely legally, according to Ibama.
A paradox due, according to environmental NGOs, to the influence of the powerful agribusiness lobby.
Farmers in the Amazon are only allowed to deforest 20% of their land. In most localities in the Cerrado, it is quite the opposite: they only have to preserve 20% of the occupied surface area.
Violence rurale
Some large landowners use strong-arm methods to circumvent these rules.
Joao da Silva paid the price. At the home of this fifty-year-old (whose name has been changed for security reasons), there is neither electricity nor running water.
But this man had five solar-powered surveillance cameras installed around his small farm after his mother was threatened in 2018 by armed men who broke into her property.
He himself was subsequently threatened with death and narrowly escaped leaving the road when a pick-up hit his vehicle.
“They told me that I had to leave my land, that it no longer belonged to me,” confides this father of five, who had already survived a knife attack in a market in 2016.
According to several NGOs, owners of huge ranches are taking over undeforested land from small farmers in the Cerrado to incorporate it into their own and thus respect the quota of preserved areas.
Leaders of traditional herding communities in the region told AFP they were victims of attacks by thugs who shot them, killed their livestock and burned their farms.
Violence is common in Brazil, where 377 murders of environmental defenders or victims of land conflicts in rural areas have been recorded since 2012, according to the NGO Global Witness.
Education durable
Mario Alberto dos Santos, professor at the Federal University of Western Bahia, is trying to change the situation through education, by giving courses in sustainable agriculture to young people from remote towns in the Cerrado.
He teaches them how to grow native species, favoring organic cultivation and planting trees among the plantations.
“We have a long way to go,” he admits, recommending “profoundly transforming” the global production system, very largely based on “monocultures which use pesticides and are not compatible with the preservation of the environment “.
The European Parliament adopted a regulation in April which prohibits the import of several agricultural products when they come from deforestation.
But the Brazilian savannah is not concerned: its native vegetation is not strictly speaking considered a “forest”.
Environmental movements are putting pressure on the European Union to extend this rule to “other forested areas”, such as the Cerrado.
For Daniel Santos, of the Brazilian branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), there is no doubt: including these three words in the text would “promote the transition towards more sustainable production”.
10/21/2023 12:49:50 – São Desidério (Brésil) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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