UK chief scientist brings food message to Brazil

The world faces a major challenge to meet the demand for more food and energy from the millions of people being lifted out of poverty, the United Kingdom government’s new chief scientific adviser has warned on a visit to Brazil. And this country can play an important role in providing both, but must not do so at the expense of key ecosystems, he added.

Professor John Beddington, who took over from Sir David King in January as the principal adviser on scientific issues to the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, spoke to the website O Eco at the start of a five-day visit to Brazil, his first trip outside the UK since he started in the job. He is here to close the Brazilian-British Year of Science and Innovation, which has resulted in a number of research partnerships on issues such as bio-energy development and climate change.

Sir David King had played an important international role in raising the profile of climate change on the world agenda, famously provoking controversy by claiming it was a greater threat to humanity than terrorism, and convincing Tony Blair to make it a priority for the G8 group of leading economies.

Now his successor is trying to bring the same sense of urgency to the question of global food demand, while insisting that he is not in any way questioning the vital importance of dealing with climate change.

In his interview with O Eco, Prof Beddington said the big increase in the price of basic food commodities in the last two years had a number of specific factors, including the switch from grain to biofuel production in the United States, a disastrous drought in Australia, and an enormous increase in demand, primarily from India and China.

Unfortunately, according to the British scientist, this is not a temporary phenomenon. In the first place, population is still increasing dramatically, with more than the equivalent of the current population of the United Kingdom (about 60 million) being added to the planet each year.

But equally important, he says, is the large number of people moving from a state of abject poverty to more decent living conditions. “As anti-poverty programmes are working rather successfully in a number of countries including China, India and Brazil itself, what you are seeing is a change in consumer demands for different types of agricultural products including livestock,” Professor Beddington said.

As people get richer, in other words, they tend to eat more meat, and that requires not just more land for the animals themselves, but more grain such as soya to feed them, especially in the case of pigs and chicken. And when you consider that around 3bn people currently live on less than two US dollars a day, successful anti-poverty measures will create enormous extra food demand as these people change their dietary habits.

“So you don’t just have population growth which is projected to increase by 50% over the next two or three decades, you have this increase in basic demand for foodstuffs and for energy as well. What you are looking at is an expected increase of 50% in demand for energy, and somewhat in excess of 50% increase in demand for food. So this is a long term problem,” added Prof Beddington.

In his analysis of the impact of biofuels, Prof Beddington was careful to distinguish between the pressure on grain supply created by the switch to ethanol in the US agricultural regions, and Brazil’s biofuel policy. “Brazil’s biofuels are actually extremely useful to the world, because we are all aware of the problem of climate change, but we do need energy for fuelling out transportation system. We also have these problems of food supply, so we will be needing to produce both food and biofuels on the land, and one thing that Brazil has is a great deal of potentially productive land.”

One implication of the warning about ever-greater demands for food is the added pressure this will create to open up more ecosystems such as the Amazon and Cerrado for grain and meat production. In the recent announcement of increased deforestation figures for the last five months of 2007, the environment minister Marina Silva made a specific link with increased prices of commodities such as beef and soya – a link immediately denied by the agriculture minister.

Professor Beddington agrees this is a danger, but says it is one that can and must be avoided: “I think the challenge for the world, for Brazil and the UK amongst others, is to try to ensure that agricultural production grows sufficiently to meet both the requirements of the extra demands for food and energy, but also to ensure that the key ecosystem services are properly preserved. It’s not an easy job, but it’s absolutely essential that it’s tackled appropriately.

“It’s not going to help world food production if you get problems of cutting down rainforests and an increase in greenhouse gases. It would be incredibly unfortunate if by trying to sort out one problem you created another, but I don’t believe that is likely to happen because I think people here are well aware of the issues.”

This article appeared in Portuguese on the O Eco website, an information service focussing on environmental issues in Brazil

Operation Arc of Fire Targets Deforestation

A remote Amazon logging town has become the turbulent starting point for a major crackdown by Brazilian government authorities, aimed at preventing a new wave of deforestation.

Sawmill workers have been queuing for food handouts in Tailândia, after logging operations were halted by the arrival of hundreds of police and troops, in an operation codenamed Arc of Fire.

With the seizure of more than 500 truckloads of illegally-felled timber, this is just the beginning of an anti-deforestation drive which is anticipated to last several months. It follows the release of new figures in January revealing that rainforest loss in the Brazilian Amazon had accelerated in late 2007, following three years of declining figures.

The massive challenge of controlling illegal activity in the region has been further revealed in a new report, showing that an area of the Amazon more than six times the size of the UK is covered by questionable land claims – in other words, nobody knows to whom it belongs.

The swoop on Tailândia began last week, with the confiscation by federal environment agency officials of around 13,000 cubic metres of timber, worth at least ₤1.5m, said to have been felled illegally.

The action brought hundreds of local people onto the streets in protest, as the town is virtually entirely dependent for employment on around 90 timber companies operating in the area. At one point, several officials were held hostage and the main highway through the town blockaded.

The arrival of around 200 heavily-armed police and special troops this week has enabled the enforcement effort to continue unimpeded, with officials engaged in a complex paper trail to determine just how much of the wood is illegal. The vast majority was destined for the internal Brazilian market, with less than 20 per cent of wood from the Amazon going for export.

Tailândia lies in a notoriously lawless part of the state of Pará in the Eastern Amazon, and has a population of 67,000. It grew up around the activities of loggers some 40 years ago, and the municipality is estimated to have lost about 60 per cent of its original forest cover. The wood is used not just for timber, but also for charcoal made in hundreds of small kilns to supply the iron and steelmaking industry.

With some 6,000 local people already facing unemployment as a result of the crackdown, the authorities face a major challenge finding alternative jobs for a town that largely owes its existence to illegal exploitation of the rainforest. However, Tailândia is being used as a demonstration by the government that it is serious about clamping down on deforestation in areas that have been virtually abandoned by the state.

Operation Arc of Fire is set to progress through the other 35 municipalities identified by the government as the problem areas for deforestation, and where special measures have been introduced to try to bring illegal activity under control.

One key step is a requirement for all large landowners in these areas to re-register their properties, in an attempt to end the endemic problem of fraudulent property claims that are often used to justify clearing rainforest for cattle pasture.

But the scale of the problem is revealed in a new report published today by a respected Brazilian research organization, the Institute for Man and the Environment in the Amazon (Imazon). It estimates that despite three recent attempts to regularize land holdings in the Amazon, some 1.5 million square kilometers, or more than six times the land area of the UK, is under uncertain ownership.

“The federal government still does not know who owns a large part of the Amazon,” the report concludes.

The lead author of the report, Paulo Barreto of Imazon, said the ability of ranchers to move freely into public forest land using false property claims made it cheaper for them to deforest new areas for grazing, rather than increase productivity in already-cleared areas.

“Without clear identification of who is owner of the land, the government has difficulty applying penalties against those who carry out illegal deforestation,” said Mr Barreto.

Another measure announced this week as part of the crackdown following the deforestation upturn is a new rule designed to deny finance to those destroying the forest. From July, all banks operating in the Amazon will be forced to demand documents showing that land is legally held and that environmental laws have been followed, before offering credit to farmers and other rural businesses.

The test of whether these measures have been effective will come later this year when the annual deforestation figures, covering the period from August to July, are published. The government is desperately hoping it will show a continued fall from last year’s figure of 11,000 square kilometers, the lowest since 1992.

With the January 24^th announcement that some 7,000 square kilometers of rainforest had already been lost by December, it is going to be a major challenge to keep Amazon deforestation on a downward trend.

This article was originally published on the Earth pages of the Daily Telegraph website

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