Drivers of Deforestation in Latin America and the Caribbean

Latin America and the Caribbean

Latin America and the Caribbean is home to the largest and most species-rich stretch of tropical rainforest in the world, the Amazon, and as of 2005, contains approximately 48% of the planet’s remaining rainforest cover. Rainforest can also be found as far north as Mexico. Latin America has a total population of around 569 million people and a combined GDP of $3.33 trillion.

Three of the countries in the region that The Prince’s Rainforests Project has been working with are Brazil, Colombia and Guyana. Brazil is the richest and most populated of the countries in the Latin American region, but also has the highest deforestation rate of all the rainforest nations, losing 3.6% of its rainforest cover over the 5 year period between 2000 and 2005.

The Amazon Basin comprises nine countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guyana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. In the Brazilian Amazon alone, approximately 600,000 square kilometres has been deforested, an area about equal to Spain and Portugal together. The main drivers of deforestation in Latin America are: logging, cattle ranching, soy, mining, infrastructure development and shifting cultivation. More information on these drivers can be found below.

Drivers often closely interlinked and follow each other in a chain of events. For example, trees are cut down for their timber after which the cleared land can be used as pasture for cattle, followed by plantation of soybeans. The building of infrastructure to facilitate movement of goods and people often facilitates the expansion of these activities into the forests.

Logging

Logging of timber is an important economic activity in Latin America, largely providing for domestic markets. With only a third of timber from the Amazon exported to foreign markets. Areas logged are more likely to be settled and fully cleared by small scale farmers or large plantation developers, thus not allowing natural regeneration of forests.

Cattle ranching

The farming of cattle for the production of beef is big business in rainforest countries such as Brazil which is the world’s largest beef exporter. Around 70% of the area deforested in that country is now cattle pasture. Brazil’s biggest export market for beef is the EU followed by the Middle East and Russia.

One third of Brazilian beef exports comes from the Amazon region. That proportion has been growing over recent years due to comparatively lower land prices in the Amazon region. In addition, more lucrative land uses in Southern Brazil, including grains and sugarcane (used in part to produce biofuels), have also contributed to buying up pasture land and pushing cattle ranching into the Amazon. Friends of the Earth Brazil estimate that cattle ranching in Brazil has been responsible for some 9 to 12 billion tonnes of C02 emissions over the last decade (this figure includes land use change and the greenhouse gases produced by animals’ digestive systems, but doesn’t take processing and transport into account). This is a huge amount, roughly equivalent to two years worth of greenhouse gas emissions from the United States.

Soy

Soy production in the Amazon region has been greatly enhanced in recent years by the development of a new strain of soy suitable for the region’s climate. The production of soybeans in the closed-canopy forest region of the Amazon increased 15% per year from 1999 to 2004. Large scale soy production is also implicated in deforestation as it increases land pressure which provides new impetus to the expansion of cattle ranching into the rainforest.

Mining

Developing and developed countries’ demand for raw materials has put new pressures on the Amazon rainforests. Minerals known to exist in the Amazon Basin include diamonds, bauxite (aluminium ore), manganese, iron, tin, copper, lead and gold.

Infrastructure development

The governments of Amazonian nations feel a strong obligation to improve the livelihoods of their people. This often results in major infrastructure projects such as the building of roads and dams. Unfortunately, this can often result in irreversible damage to the areas of rainforest in which they are located. For example, roads built in Ecuador for the extraction and transport of oil in the rainforests countries have led to deforestation along those roads by settlers and commercial enterprise.

Hydroelectric dams also threaten the forests with flooding. Hydroelectric power is a key source of electricity for many South American countries. Currently, the biggest of these planned projects in the Amazon is the Tocantins River Basin hydroelectric project, the effects of which stretch over a distance of 1,200 miles.

Shifting Cultivation

Transient settlers or people who have neither the money nor the political power to acquire permanent holdings on productive lands follow and settle along roads constructed in the rainforest by development or extractive activities. These people use the trees for building materials and slash-and-burn techniques to clear plots of forest for small scale agriculture, planting crops like bananas, palms, manioc, maize, or rice. Denuded of their trees, the productivity of the soil declines after a year or two, and farmers move on to clear additional forest for more agricultural land.