Meat consumption leads to deforestation of the Amazon

Forests continue to be cleared to raise cattle

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Cattle and deforestation in the Amazon

Agriculture contributes 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with meat constituting an outsized portion of those gases. Because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and because cows belch so much methane, beef is the most carbon-intensive food you put on your plate.

There is another reason you may want to limit the amount of meat you eat—or opt for a complete vegetarian or vegan diet. As pointed up by a paper published this past June, meat consumption is the main driver of deforestation of the Amazon River basin.

The research was conducted by a team associated with the Federal University of Santa Maria in Brazil. This team looked at land use and land cover maps provided by MapBiomas Brazil, a collaborative project of NGOs, universities, and other organizations. Although the researchers considered the Amazon as a whole, they focused on agriculture and deforestation in the state of Rondônia, comparing data from 1985 to 2022. They also looked into the meat consumption of Brazilians as well as the country’s meat exports. Their results were published in the journal Sustainability.

In 1985, pasturelands occupied about 1.7 million hectares in Rondônia, and it looks that no other kind of agriculture was practiced at the time. By 2021, about 8.5 million hectares of land were in agricultural production, with pasturelands comprising about 5.5 million of those hectares. The increase in pasturelands corresponds to an increase of cattle, rising from 764,299 head (1985) to 14,349,219 head (2019), an increase of over 1,700 percent! This is about as direct a link anyone can make showing that increasing cattle production leads to deforestation.

The Pasture Lot, Carleton Wiggins 1909, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Open access media. We love bucolic images of cattle grazing open fields, but cattle grazing usually transforms the landscape.

The researchers found that forest conversion peaked in Rondônia between 2002 and 2003, when 459,000 hectares were turned into pasturelands. Deforestation dropped dramatically the next year but has been climbing ever since. Most of the meat produced in Brazil is consumed domestically. The largest export market is China, followed by Hong Kong, the U.S., Chile, and the European Union.

This relationship, cattle and deforestation, affects the rest of the Amazon. Since the mid-eighties, the region has lost 80 million hectares of forest while agriculture expanded by more than 84 million hectares, an area more than twice the size of Germany. Although it is possible to raise livestock without deforestation, the two are joined at the hip. Through grazing and raising of crops as feed, worldwide livestock production uses 80 percent of all agricultural lands.

And our hunger for meat grows

There are more and more people, and more and more people are consuming more and more meat. Global population presently stands at over 8 billion and is projected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050. Much of the rest of the world is adopting diets similar to that of the U.S. which consumes 264 pounds of meat per person annually, the equivalent of every American eating three McDonald’s Quarter Pounders every day. In China, in 1990, the average rural person ate about 26 pounds of meat in a year; that figure has now tripled. Worldwide, by the year 2050, demand for meat will be 73 percent more than 2010 levels.

What to do

The authors of the paper recognize the difficulty of reducing or stopping deforestation in their country, saying:

“In this context, it is important to recognize that a global political commitment to the protection of the Amazon is complex, with a history of violent power struggles over the exploitation of the territory and its natural resources, combined with a specific reality of rules and disputes, mostly linked to illegal actions. After a long period when deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon attracted little public attention, meetings have been held to discuss the issue, such as the Amazon Summit 2023. In the European context, measures are also being implemented, such as the European Regulation 2023/1115, published in June 2023, which regulates the export of products linked to deforestation and forest degradation.”

The researchers encourage folks to adopt vegetarian or vegan diets. But I don’t see this as being effective enough, considering that many folks who traditionally did not eat much meat are now eating more. The only thing I see working is for governments worldwide to acknowledge the problem of emissions from agriculture and, just as there are treaties for fishing, they could establish treaties on the trade of meat. I’m curious what my fellow Substacker and vegan author

Michael Corthell

has to say about this problem. Most of the meat produced in Brazil is consumed domestically. Much of the onus for the deforestation in Brazil is on Brazil.

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The best thing to come out of Brazil!

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