Roads pierce the last green heartland of the Amazonian rain forests to make it more accessible even as greedy land grabbers kill the trees at an unprecedented scale. Environmental crimes with forest fires, chain saws and bulldozers fill the pockets of the big fish while the small farmers suffer.

Industrial scale soybean producers join loggers and cattle ranchers in the land grab, speeding up destruction and further fragmenting the great Brazilian wilderness. It is not the poor small farmers felling the trees for subsistence agriculture rather the big shot’s bet on land speculation, money laundering and tax evasion.

Who does the dirty work for the Big shots?

Drug traffickers, illegal loggers and grileiros(large land thieves) appropriate land through fraudulent and sometimes violent means. Clearing a portion of the land is the only practical way to maintain claim to the area and avoid it being invaded by landless peasants, taken over by another large operator, or confiscated by the government for agrarian reform.

The value of land in Amazonia has generally climbed upward and invariably shoots to much higher levels where a road is built or improved. Buying land or claims to land at low prices and reselling it later at much higher prices can give greater returns to a landholder than do the ranching and agriculture that are undertaken during his tenure.

Markets feeding on the Earth’s ‘lung’

The Amazon covers an area making up fifty percent of the world’s tropical rain forests, and the abundant tropical plants growing in the Amazon generate twenty percent or more of the amount of oxygen available on the earth. These forests also absorb vast quantities of carbon dioxide. With Global warming on the rise, can we afford to loose the world’s largest carbon sink?

Nevertheless, consumers in the US, European union and China, buy wood from this very region. They are the ones who are in fact responsible for creating a demand for the wood. The marketplace has yet to assign a value to the forest: It is far more profitable to cut it down for selling wood, grazing and farming than to leave it standing.

Brazilians paving the way for there own demise

Today Brazil has emerged as the global agricultural powerhouse but the cost it has paid is high. It is the world’s leader in beef exports and only second to the US in Soya production. This triumph feeds on the barren grounds of decimation and deforestation of its prized rainforest’s. It has let the market forces of globalization invade the Amazon.

Experts agree that by leaving the rainforests intact and harvesting its many nuts, fruits, oil-producing plants, and medicinal plants, the rainforest has more economic value than if they were cut down to make grazing land for cattle or for timber. However, this is not what Brazil is sticking by!

How will trees grow if the soil becomes infertile?

The land of the Amazon Rainforest is naturally nutrient-deficient because most of the nutrients are stored within the aboveground biomass of the vegetation. The soils in the Amazon are productive for just a short period, and the farmers are therefore constantly moving and clearing more and more land.

Once the trees are cut, there will be no rain and the remaining trees will dry out and die. Further, rising temperatures with global warming will see severe droughts and chances of wildfires that could ravage the forest.

The Amazon is changing fast, largely because of human activities. At the current rate, in two decades the Amazon Rain forest will be reduced by 40%. The world’s largest rainforest, an ecosystem that supports perhaps 30 percent of the world’s terrestrial species, stores vast amounts of carbon, and exerts considerable influence on global weather patterns and climate stands vulnerable. Does the preservation of nature in the Amazon tropical rain forest not directly apply to the protection of the earth?

Graph: Image credit: [1], [2]