Beef drives 80% of Amazon deforestation

Mongabay: Nearly 80 percent of land deforested in the Amazon from 1996-2006 is now used for cattle pasture, according to a report released today by Greenpeace at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil. The report, Amazon Cattle Footprint: Mato Grosso: State of Destruction [PDF], confirms that cattle ranching is the primary driver of deforestation in Earth's largest rainforest: the Brazilian Amazon.

Over the past decade more than 10 million hectares – an area about the size of Iceland - was cleared for cattle ranching as Brazil rose to become the world's largest exporter of beef. Now the government aims to double the country's share of the beef export market to 60% by 2018 through low interest loans, infrastructure expansion, and other incentives for producers. Most of this expansion is expected to occur in the Amazon were land is cheap and available — 70 percent of the country's herd expansion between 2002 and 2006 occurred in the region.

The number of cattle bred in the Legal Amazon is growing fast: between 1990 and 2003, the bovine herd more than doubled, from 26.6 million to 64 million head of cattle – 60% of the herd are in the states of Mato Grosso and Pará.

Recent reports suggest that much of this expansion has been illegal. Laws for maintaining a "legal forest reserve" on Amazon land are widely flouted and many landowners acquire land without proper title. Corruption is rampant in frontier areas making law enforcement ineffective and sometimes complicit in illicit activities — including illegal logging and abuse of workers — that often accompany land clearing….

Amazon deforestation seen from space, NASA