Forest Loss Through Slash & Burn Doubles In Brazil In 2003 Over 2000

[hatrack]

CUIABA, Brazil (Reuters) - The forests on Brazil's agricultural frontier will disappear without international financing to provide alternatives to slash-and-burn farming, the farm secretary of Brazil's leading soybean state said. Fires to clear forest - a measure of deforestation -- in Brazil's center-west agricultural frontier on the edge of the Amazon doubled to 65,499 in 2003 against 2000, Brazil's Statistical and Geographic Institute (IBGE) said last week.

"Often it is much easier to reverse environmental degradation when lines of credit at low interest are available," Homero Alves Pereira, farm secretary of Brazil's leading soybean state Mato Grosso, told Reuters on Tuesday.

"Smaller farmers can then stop slash-and-burn farming when the area they are on gives out," he explained. "If we're going to succeed at preserving our forests as world assets, we need resources and rich countries will have to chip in."

Although Brazil subsidizes farm credit at below market levels, there is virtually none for restoring degraded land. Brazil has a long history of poor farmers squatting on land on the frontiers of agricultural expansion, farming it until the fragile forest soils give out and then moving on. Pereira said conflict abounds in Brazil's search for trade revenues, jobs and economic growth through large industrial farms; its desire to establish small, less efficient, family farming communities for landless peasants; and its need to preserve the environment on virtually zero budget."

EDIT

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=753&e=2&u=/nm/20041110/sc_nm/brazil_environment_forest_dc_1