Pay a toll to the ferryman, cross the Xingu River, and you pass a stretch of the Trans-Amazonian Highway that feels as if it is paved with bad intentions. From Anapu to Belo Monte, the 86-mile road – a small portion of the nearly 2,500-mile highway – has passed by some of the most violent communities, disrupted waterways and degraded land in the Amazon.
For most of the two-and-a-half-hour drive, the hillsides on both sides of the road have almost more cows than trees. The land is so purged of foliage and wildlife that it is hard to believe this is a passage through the world’s biggest rainforest. It looks more like an endless ranch. The other side of the river is even worse, as this is the site of the biggest hydroelectric dam in the Amazon – a Mordor-esque rampart of concrete behind which lies a cemetery of thousands of white trees drowned by the reservoir.
This is where the perverse logic of growing the economy by running down nature reaches its grim apotheosis. And this is where the search for solutions to the Amazon’s degradation must focus, because it is on this road that the problems began. Fail to understand that and no matter how much money, labour or technology is thrown at the issue by governments, companies and civil society groups, it is unlikely to be effective. Like any fire, the conflagration needs to be put out at its source.
A potted history of the rainforest reveals why. For thousands of years, Indigenous people lived in the Amazon, not just in harmonious balance with what was already there but also actively planting trees that provided food and medicine, thus nurturing and strengthening the environment. By one estimate, 20% of the forest was planted by ancient civilisations. This started to change after the first European colonisers invaded five centuries ago, followed by prospectors and bandeirantes – fortune hunters who pushed into the forest in search of Indigenous people to enslave, and lost cities of gold. It was not until the 1970s that industrial-scale deforestation took hold, when Brazil’s military dictatorship built a road through the rainforest as a centrepiece of its nation-building ambitions. This opened the way for a wave of settlers who were encouraged to carve up and clear the land, regardless of existing Indigenous communities or any concern for nature.
Since then, the pattern has been repeated across ever-wider swathes of the Amazonian region. First, illegal prospectors and loggers invade, next road-builders open up, and then landgrabbers seize and burn, followed by ranchers and farmers, and finally politicians, who retrospectively legitimise all of the previous illegal activity. It is essentially colonialism, but from within the borders of a nation state for the benefit of a wealthy, often global, elite. On the ground, the result of the policy of violence is social and environmental chaos: ever more people, ever more destruction and ever more crime, but diminishing rates of economic return and increasing climatic impact. Today the rainforest is fast degrading towards what scientists call a “tipping point”, after which it irreversibly dries up because it is no longer capable of generating its own rain. That, of course, puts an even higher premium on agricultural produce and even more pressure on the land.
Breaking this vicious cycle is essential for global climate stability, the irrigation of regional crops and the long-term wellbeing of the Amazon’s human and non-human inhabitants. How to do that remains elusive. The first Lula government came closest. With Marina Silva as environment minister, it put in place policies that led to a more than 80% reduction in deforestation. Since then, however, successive governments have only made matters worse, culminating in the catastrophic administration of Jair Bolsonaro, when deforestation increased by 60% in just four years. Finding solutions is now more urgent than ever. Countless universities, NGOs and businesses have devoted themselves to this task. The new Lula government will host an Amazon summit later this year to address the challenge. Guardian contributor Dom Phillips was murdered last year while researching this subject for a book: How to Save the Amazon: Ask the People Who Know.
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Step 1
Political and Indigenous leadership
But who to ask first and where to begin? After the Trans-Amazonian Highway, the next stop is Brasília, the centre of power in Brazil. Nationalist paranoia and market failure – rewarding those who destroy and penalising those who defend – have to be addressed in the search for any long-term solution. Political leadership must therefore be the starting point.
Lula’s current presidency appeared to present a great opportunity. After winning the election last year, the former trade union leader made an international pledge to cut deforestation to zero by 2030 and to halt the expansion of the agricultural frontier. He also created an Indigenous ministry, which gives more power than ever to the people who have the best record of maintaining a healthy forest. Efforts are under way to drive illegal miners from Indigenous territories. Most encouragingly, Lula reappointed the Amazon’s greatest champion, Marina Silva, as environment minister. She has declared protected status to public land the size of Spain through the creation of Indigenous territories and national reserves, and vowed to “fight for the Amazon”.
But the forces against her are mounting rapidly. Congress, which is dominated by the rural lobby, has moved to gut her ministry’s powers. The state-managed oil company Petrobras is also up in arms about the environment ministry’s refusal to approve an oil-drilling licence in the mouth of the Amazon. The construction industry wants Silva out of the way so it can build a new road through Amazonas. Most state governors in the Amazon are pro-mining and pro-ranching Bolsonarists. Faced with this resistance, Lula may once again be tempted to ditch his 21st-century climate concerns along with his troublesomely effective environment minister and go back to his 20th-century instincts to build more infrastructure and open more oilwells. If Silva goes, so does Brazil’s environmental credibility.
Step 2
Land reform
If Silva remains in power, however, there is no shortage of ambitious plans she could adopt. The Amazon Environmental Research Institute says 20m hectares (49m acres) of land could be better conserved through agrarian reforms, such as titling smallholders and compensating them for forest stewardship, while another 10m hectares could be saved by investing in sustainable agriculture. More ambitious still, the Science Panel for the Amazon, which aims to serve a similar role to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but for the rainforest, has proposed “arcs of restoration” that would help to regenerate degraded and cleared land. Such policies would be gamechangers.
Step 3
Hold foreign countries, businesses and consumers to account
To maintain the current positive course, international support needs to be ramped up, and fast. Foreign nations, businesses and consumers must accept their responsibility for much of the destruction of the Amazon, which has accelerated to sell more beef, soy and iron ore to Europe, China, the US and other industrialised markets. The global north also needs to compensate the global south, including Brazil, for climate damage and to pay for the carbon-reducing benefits of natural sinks such as the Amazon. Without this, there is no economic incentive or moral argument for Brazil to reduce deforestation. It seems that last point is finally being understood. At the Cop15 biodiversity summit in Montreal last December, rich nations promised between $20bn (£16bn) and $30bn a year for poorer, biodiverse countries like Brazil. A month earlier, the Cop27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh had seen a similarly groundbreaking pledge of “loss and damage” climate payments. One vehicle for acting early is the Amazon Fund, which has raised more than $1bn, mostly from Norway, which is being used for rainforest projects. More is needed. Encouragingly, President Biden recently asked the US Congress to make its first contribution of $500m to the fund and the UK prime minister Rishi Sunak pledged £80m. This money needs to flow quickly and be increased in the future. Foreign governments also need to crack down on deforestation-related trade. The EU recently enacted progressive legislation in this area. The US and particularly China – the main export market for soy and iron ore from the Amazon – should be encouraged to follow.
Step 4
Radically reform the beef industry
Beef needs to be the primary target as the industry accounts for about 80% of agriculture-related deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Cattle are used as occupying armies to consolidate land ownership in an extension of the nationalist mindset encouraged by the generals in the 1970s. The government still gives subsidies to ranchers. Looked at in terms of revenue for every hectare of forest destroyed, it is horrendously inefficient and provides relatively few jobs. The world’s biggest meatpacker, JBS, and rivals such as Marfrig need to be more transparent, efficient and accountable to the public as well as to their shareholders. The prices of their products should also include the indirect damage they do to the Amazon, and subsidies removed. Once these costs are forced on to the balance sheet, only the most productive ranches will remain. Carlos Nobre, Brazil’s most influential climate scientist, says consolidation of the beef industry was long overdue. “It’s possible to increase production of beef and reduce deforestation. It can be done. The technology exists. We can improve them genetically. It’s a question of going to scale,” he says. “You can feed the world for ever using less and less land.”
Step 5
Build intelligent (rather than concrete) infrastructure
Technology offers other solutions. Instead of integrating the Amazon destructively with roads, as in the past, moves are under way to build a less intrusive and more sustainable communication and energy network. Brazil already boasts the world’s most sophisticated satellite system for monitoring biomes. One analytical platform, MapBiomas, is able to rapidly identify whether land changes from forest to cattle pasture, soy plantation, fruit orchard, mining site or other categories. This is now used by banks to determine whether land owners are entitled to loans or sanctioned for environmental violations. The next step, according to Tasso Azevedo, the founder of MapBiomas, is to provide solar panels and satellite internet access to remote communities so they can quickly denounce invasions of their land and pollution of their rivers in return for social benefits. “We need to think of technology as infrastructure. Internet in remote areas is now possible, which helps access to health and education,” he says.
Environmental defenders believe improved communications could help with enforcement, which is vital to end impunity, but public security institutions need to put more boots on the ground and helicopters in the air. “The population now has internet. They tell us what is happening. Now we need a rapid reaction squad,” says a local public prosecutor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We have to identify and support communities that are bases of vigilance and detection. This means building up the capacity of environment protection and indigenous affairs agencies, which were gutted during the Bolsonaro and Michel Temer administrations.”
Step 6
Create a bioeconomy
The market failure of Amazon destruction needs to be recognised. The World Bank – which has previously financed forest-clearing industries – recently issued a report showing that the economic losses caused by Amazon deforestation, estimated at $317bn, are seven times higher for Brazil than the gains from extractive industries, such as ranching, mining and logging for Brazil.
Forest dwellers need alternatives. This needs to be handled sensitively with regulations to ensure money flows do not cause more problems than they solve. Instead of making money from landgrabbing, illegal mining and destructive cattle ranching, people have to be persuaded they are better off with a standing forest. That can mean ecological stewardship payments for smallholders, subsidies for sustainable agriculture, stronger law enforcement to protect Indigenous territories and carbon credits for big landowners and traditional communities. The latter is essential but controversial as the carbon credit market is unregulated and open to abuse.
“Now we are seeing a new wave of carbon cowboys promising the earth to indigenous and traditional communities,” says Paulo Moutinho of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. Lula’s government needs to build a system to ensure money is channelled towards projects that offer the maximum benefit to the climate and local communities, rather than open a new era of green colonialism.
The promised land at the end of this journey is a bioeconomy that grows in tandem with the forest, providing decent livelihoods to local communities, promoting agroforestry that rewards biodiversity, and punishing corporations that take more than they give. Such a system does not yet exist in any comprehensive form, but there are concrete examples at the grassroots and a raft of initiatives at a state, national and global level. In some ways, the bioeconomy is a 21st century attempt to achieve the balance that indigenous communities mastered long ago in growing the forest while providing livelihoods. The academic brothers Carlos and Ismael Nobre have sketched out how Brazil could become an “environmental powerhouse” by adopting what they call Amazon 4.0 – a economic model of new technology and advanced conservation thinking.
For idealists, the bioeconomy is the best potential vaccine to the virus of destructive neoliberal capitalism. But it could just as easily prove the latest greenwashing buzzword. The Pará state governor Helder Barbalho touts the bioeconomy as a way to pitch for international investment. His administration has just announced the creation of a bioeconomy park with 4.2m hectares devoted to carbon capture and will soon host a large bioeconomy conference in the state capital of Belém.
Forest residents remain suspicious of Barbalho’s motives, but he is at least willing to engage with Lula’s government. Lula has created a new government post, secretary for bioeconomy, with the challenging task of inventing a whole new economic system. The holder, Carina Pimenta, says she is wary of including carbon credits and prefers to direct government support and subsidies away from industrial monocultures and towards sustainable forest products and communities. “Brazil must define its own concept of the bioeconomy,” Pimenta says. “It must be based on what already works, such as extractive reserves.” These reserves are occupied by traditional riverine communities that harvest forest resources sustainably.
On the Trans-Amazonian Highway, there is a possibility of changing direction once you reach Altamira, a frontier town for ranching and mining. Switch here from car to boat, and after four or five hours on the Xingu and Iriri Rivers you finally get beyond the reservoir of the Belo Monte dam and can once again see the true wealth of the Amazon: dense forest, clear tributaries and abundant biodiversity. This is the territory of the Cantinas Network, a cooperative of sustainable producers who live in extractive reserves and provide an example of what the bioeconomy might look like. Now, with radio and basic internet, they pool resources, knowledge and harvests of brazil nuts, babaçu oil and other products so they can sell together at a better price. There is a vibrant local culture and strong commitment to maintaining the forest. The seed is here of an alternative way of existing with the forest that blends decent livelihoods, high technology and a healthy forest. But there is a long way to go before this can be any kind of model. Healthcare and education need to be improved, river transport electrified, and prices guaranteed. The state must also provide better protection against the constant threats of incursion by landgrabbers, loggers and illegal miners.
Step 7
Rethink the concept of national security
A change of outlook is essential. For hundreds of years, the function of the state has been to encourage extraction and open up new markets – an essentially colonial, destructive project. If that is to end, as the imminent approach of the Amazon tipping point suggests it must, then governments need a different set of priorities and a new way of thinking about national identity and security. That is true, too, of the police and military, which have neglected or been co-opted by environmental criminals. State power should be directed towards 21st-century threats to climate stability, the physical integrity of national biomes and the wellbeing of the population. For the moment, that is far from mainstream thinking. But as the economic and strategic threats of climate change become more apparent in the future, this argument should become more persuasive. Hopefully, there will still be a forest left by then.
