Brazil Farming Needs Decade to Stop Deforestation

Raymond Colitt, PlanetArk 16 Jan 08;

BRASILIA - Brazil's farm sector is only just realizing the need to protect the Amazon rain forest but it could be many years before deforestation stops, the agriculture minister said.

Brazil's fast-growing agriculture business, one of the world's biggest food providers, is often blamed for much of the destruction of the Amazon.

Government authorities, many farm product traders and some producers are beginning to accept the need to conserve the world's largest rain forest but appropriate policies and resources were still inadequate, Agriculture Minister Reinhold Stephanes told Reuters.

"Today Brazil has the conscience not to cut down trees to increase its production," he said in an interview on Monday.

"The government has decided -- no more deforestation. Now, it will be at least a decade before the policies are in place and working."

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has repeatedly boasted that Brazil reduced deforestation by 50 percent over the last two years. But record commodity prices are increasing the pressure to make Amazonian land productive and deforestation has increased again since last August, the environment ministry said.

Stephanes, a former congressmen, said Brazilian agriculture would grow by recovering 50 million hectares (124 million acres) of degraded pasture land, as well as developing another 50 million hectares of virgin savanna.

"What we cut down already is enough," he said.

But he said there were no funds or concrete policy to provide farmers with incentives not to chop down trees.

"We haven't started yet, it's not necessary yet," Stephanes said. "This discussion is new, at least in this ministry, and still needs to mature so we can create new lines of finance."

He said he fully supported the government's decision in December to ban farm products coming from illegally deforested areas. But its implementation was not his job, he said.

"If there are still people deforesting, that's a matter for the police," he said.

A tradition of conquering and settling Brazil's huge wilderness persists among many farmers and is an obstacle to environmental awareness, the minister said. Deforestation by small and mid-size farmers was likely to continue.

"You'll have small infractions, the important thing is that the big ones are over," he said.

Friends of the Earth said in a report that beef production in the Amazon increased 46 percent since 2004 and now accounted for 41 percent of the total output. Stephanes said poor peasants and small-scale ranchers who received land and loans as part of government social welfare policies were partially to blame for beef production increases.

Stephanes said cattle did not always occupy deforested areas in the region. But he urged meat packers to follow the example of soy traders and sign an agreement not to buy beef from deforested areas.

(Editing by Reese Ewing and Philip Barbara)