Corona - Deforestation & Land Use

 

I have just participated in a really interesting & informative Greenpeace Zoom on deforestation & the Amazon. I really wish the Zoom's that various climate / eco charities are doing during Covid 19 were more widely viewed. Greenpeace & Client Earth in particular are disseminating some really useful presentations.

I thought I was quite well informed, but I was wrong. There are so many things impacting in a very negative way on the worlds forests today - Soya, Palm Oil, Cocoa & cattle to name but a few. These are driven by some of the biggest multinational corporations in the world who make mega profits. We are not talking about farmers here, we are talking about agribusinesses. We are not talking about the indiginous inhabitants clearing land for subsistance farming. Nor are we talking about dairy farmers, we are talking about industrial scale meat production.

JBS Holdings are the leading processors of beef, pork and prepared foods in the U.S. and Canada with 73,000 employees. Tyson Foods is the world's second largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork after JBS and annually exports the largest percentage of beef out of the United States with 122,000 employees. Cargill Meat Solutions is a subsidiary of the multinational agribusiness giant Cargill Inc North American beef, turkey, food service and food distribution business. These 3 companies virtually control meat production & therefore deforestation & ecological damage.

By May 2, 2020, Cargill's High River facility in Canada, was the site of one of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks in North America with one death and 921 confirmed coronavirus cases among employees—representing about 50 percent of the facility's 2,000 employees. After closing for two weeks, the plant reopened on May 4. By May 6, of the 5,893 confirmed cases in the entire province of Alberta, the province's health services had "linked 1,560 cases to the Cargill facility."

Research now suggests that, rather than deadly pathogens lying in wait for humans, viruses – like  Swine ‘Flu, Ebola and, now, Covid-19, amongst many others – are often triggered by human destruction and exploitation of wildlife-rich tropical forest habitats like the Amazon. 

I've only mentioned farming - there is also mining. In the Carajas Mineral Province, Brazil, maybe the world's largest copper reserve (iron ore, manganese and gold are already found there), wood from surrounding forest is cut for charcoal to fuel pig iron plants, resulting in annual deforestation of 6,100 km². Then there is logging. More than 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest is already gone, and much more is severely threatened as the destruction continues. It is estimated that the Amazon alone is vanishing at a rate of 20,000 square miles a year. 

If nothing is done to curb this trend, the entire Amazon could well be gone within fifty years. The government of Jair Bolsonaro sees  stewardship of the Amazon as synonymous with ownership of the Amazon. Standing before the planet’s largest and most biodiverse carbon sink, he thinks: What an amazing business opportunity.

We humans continue on the road to destruction.