Since the first roads opened the way to the cheap and unexplored lands of northern Brazil in the 1950s, the Amazon Rainforest has been playing an unglamorous role in the global economy. Despite its cultural and environmental richness, the rainforest became a commodity source of low-value-added products, which left behind a trail of deforestation and little economic development. The transformation of the Amazon into an agribusiness hub was pushed by the beef and, more recently, grain industries: The region’s contribution to the country’s total cattle herd rose from 9.5% in the mid-1970s to 44.5% in 2022, and from 0.02% to 41.5% for soybeans. Part of it is exported to China, Europe, and other regions, as it was long emphasized by the media and activists. With 13.2% of the rainforest lost, pressure to stop the clearances falls not only on those operating the chainsaws but also on the consumers of these products. Scientists have been warning that the rainforest could lose its capacity to store carbon if deforestation reaches a 25% “tipping point” — where the Amazon would start to dry up and look like a savanna and not as a forest anymore. To stop this trend, environmentalists have been pressuring companies and governments to tackle deforestation. “The whole discussion has always been on the supply side,” Eduardo Haddad, a professor from the Department of Economics of the University of São Paulo, told Mongabay. “But the question now is: Where does this demand come from?” To answer this question, he and…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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