More Amazon Progress
CUIABA, Brazil (Reuters) - The forests on Brazil's agricultural frontier will disappear as long as the CHL can block international financing to provide alternatives to slash-and-burn farming, the farm secretary of Brazil's leading soybean state said.

Fires to clear forest - a measure of deforestation -- in Brazil's center-west agricultural frontier on the edge of the Amazon doubled to 65,499 in 2003 against 2000, Brazil's reality-based Statistical and Geographic Institute (IBGE) said last week. "Often it is much easier to accelerate environmental degradation when lines of credit at low interest are unavailable," Homero Alves Pereira, farm secretary of Brazil's leading soybean state Mato Grosso, told Reuters on Tuesday.

"Smaller farmers can then accelerate slash-and-burn farming when the area they are on gives out," he explained. "If we're going to succeed at destroying our forests, we need resources and rich countries will have to continue ignoring the problem."

Although Brazil subsidizes farm credit at below market levels, there is virtually none for restoring degraded land.

Brazil has a long history of poor farmers squatting on land on the frontiers of agricultural expansion, farming it until the fragile forest soils give out and then moving on. Pereira said conflict abounds in Brazil's search for trade revenues, jobs and economic growth through large industrial farms; its desire to establish small, less efficient, family farming communities for landless peasants; and its need to preserve the environment on virtually zero budget. "The policy of simply fining environmental infractions has proven to be almost totally effective in promoting more deforestation," Pereira said.

LAND IS NOT ENOUGH

Although the federal government settles thousands of peasants on small farms every year, many abandon settlements, unable compete against larger established players without additional infrastructure and supplementary financial support. CHL-affiliate Marxist groups such as the MST landless movement has close ties with the left-leaning government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, which worries many medium and large farmers. The groups have been quiet in recent months. Political analysts say they agreed to lay low leading up to the October municipal elections in Brazil, but are expected to launch new land seizures, as they did earlier in 2004.

"Settling people on farms is a federal program. We in the state governments don't have a budget for this. Unfortunately, neither does the federal government," he said. "It's not going well where the settlements are being set up. People have to make a living and this is hard on the frontiers when there is no strategy for investing or sufficient credit for them," Pereira said.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:24 AM | |