Carnival, samba and dream beaches. Gang crime and drug trafficking. Amazon rainforest and deforestation. This is what Brazil is known for in Europe. What’s often forgotten is: Brazil is Latin America’s largest economy and a major player in the global economy.
Thousands of kilometres of soy
As we travelled through western Brazil, we saw this development with our own eyes. We travelled on the BR-163, a highway that connects the entire west and is also known as the “Soya Highway”. We saw plenty of soya. For more than 500 kilometres, the road was lined with fields to the right and left, with posters advertising pesticides of large, well-known companies and the silos of global players such as the Chinese company COFCO INTL. The economic lifeline of the region is 3,500 kilometres long. The road creates jobs in the agricultural sector, but it’s extremely boring and dangerous to drive.
The BR-163 is narrow. It has only two lanes, and it’s full of lorries on their way to the nearest river port in Itautuba. This is where the goods are shipped down the Amazon to the rest of the world. According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (an MIT data visualisation site), in 2021 Brazil exported soybeans worth USD 39 billion, mainly for animal feed, to China (USD 27.2 billion), Spain, Thailand, the Netherlands and Turkey (about USD 1.6 to 1 billion each).
Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of soya beans, and the state of Mato Grosso, with an area of 900,000 square kilometres, produces 26% of them. According to the latest MapBiomas report (2023), almost 50% of the original Amazonian transition zone has been deforested over the years. Situated between the Amazon and the Pantanal, Mato Grosso has its own ecosystem: the Cerrado tropical savannah. It plays an important role in Brazil’s water supply, storing water and feeding many rivers. But, the forest is being cleared for agriculture, and the nutrient-poor soil has to be heavily fertilised. Not exactly the ideal way to go to preserve an ecosystem.
Cattle farming for a change
The soybean is mainly used as animal feed. This is the second picture you see in the region. Huge cleared fields with white cattle. Only the 50 metre high Brazil nut trees are still standing, as they’re protected and can’t be felled. The roads are lined with double-decker cattle trucks. The animals are packed tightly together on their way to the slaughterhouse. The JBS company dominates the scene. They export meat all over the world, much of it to China, but they’re also the leading exporter of halal meat to the Middle East. The Iranian flag even flies outside one of their huge production facilities.
Hope for sustainable development
Cattle farming brings the same problems to the region as soya farming: Deforestation. Many people told us that 40 years ago the whole area was forested. Today you can hardly see any original forest. But it still exists.
Some indigenous reserves are still forested, and the French organisation ONF, tother with Peugeot, runs a climate compensation programme near Alta Floresta. There, research is being conducted into sustainable management of the Amazon forest over an area of 108,000 square kilometres. It’s a beautiful forest on the banks of the Jurena River, but unfortunately still the exception in the region. Let’s hope they can change the local belief that the forest must first be cleared for cattle farming. At Fazenda São Nicolau, ONF shows that there is another way.