Beefed up

The soaring global demand for beef and leather is fuelling the destruction of the Brazilian rainforest to make way for cattle farms according to a new report. Brazil is the world's largest beef exporter and has the world's largest commercial cattle herd of 200 million, a third of which is in the Amazon region. The government has backed the industry in recent years with financing to double Brazil's share of the global beef export market to 61 per cent by 2018, according to Greenpeace, which has been investigating the industry for three years. Environmental groups are hoping the deforestation associated with the burgeoning cattle industry will lead to a replication of the success of a 2006 campaign that persuaded Brazil's soybean industry to impose a two-year moratorium, now extended to three, on soybean from illegally deforested areas. They say Amazon cattle are now the biggest single cause of global deforestation, which contributes substantially to the world's greenhouse gases. Meat from the cattle is canned, packaged and processed into convenience foods and hides become leather for shoes and trainers, used by several key brands, the report says. Since the 1970s, when satellite mapping of the region became available, around 20 per cent of the Brazilian rainforest has been destroyed, an area the size of California. Greenpeace US estimates that between 2007 and 2008, another 1.2 million hectares have been lost. Logging, cattle farming and soy plantations are key to the destruction, as are the increased construction of dams and roads, shifting patterns of farming for local people, and mining for diamonds, bauxite, manganese, iron, tin copper, lead and gold. These factors are often interlinked — trees are cut down for timber and the cleared land can be used for grazing cattle. Soybeans are then cultivated on the same land. Also, land is cleared for biofuel crops, such as sugar cane, the report says. According to Greenpeace, around 80 per cent of the area deforested in Brazil is now cattle pasture. Brazil's biggest export markets for beef are Europe, the Middle East and Russia. Friends of the Earth in Brazil estimate that cattle farming in the country has been responsible for 9–12 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in the News focus past decade, almost equivalent to a year's worth of US emissions. In 2006, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation found that the livestock industry from farm to fork was responsible …