Opinion: Why Brazil is an agro-environmental powerhouse

By Lygia Pimentel

Brazil is a much-criticized country, especially when it comes to environmental preservation. Erroneously, our country is blamed for deforestation, but is this true?

To start this conversation, it is essential to understand the dynamics of the Brazilian state concerning land allocation.

Currently, we have a lot of land allocated in Brazil, 18% of the national territory is in conservation units, and 14% is allocated to indigenous lands.

It is all outside the production area and is considered by the UN (United Nations) as protected land. There are 260 million hectares designated for protection.

To have an idea, while Brazil has approximately 30% of protected land, Australia has 19%, China has 17%, the United States has 13%, Russia and Canada have 10%, and Argentina has 9%.

I took all these countries with extensive territory to compare apples with apples. Another critical point in this discussion is what exactly Brazil reserves in protected lands.

While the United States protects the Sonora desert, the Mojave desert; China protects the Mongolia desert; and Algeria the Ténéré desert, Brazil protects areas with real productive potential.

Besides the 30% of protected land, Brazil also allocates 10% to agrarian reform and quilombolas.

It amounts to more than 90 million hectares for this purpose, or one and a half times the area of Brazilian grain production. It amounts to 40% of the Brazilian territory in assigned lands.

When we talk about the occupation of this territory, there is also preservation. Of the Brazilian rural properties, 218 million hectares of forests are preserved, or 50% of the total area of rural properties.

That is the equivalent of 26% of the Brazilian territory. Is that clear? The farmer is directly responsible for preserving 26% of the Brazilian territory. And preserving it has costs.

In the first place, because even though it is a forest area, he needs to collect land taxes on this area.

He needs to fence it because if someone invades and hunts a wild animal, he will be blamed and fined. If someone sets fires or illegally extracts wood, the same.

So, it is necessary to have surveillance and a firebreak, to prevent fires, which can also spread to the property and make production unviable. And this would be an immeasurable loss or recovery for this producer.

The estimated asset value of the producer’s property for preservation is almost R$4 trillion (US$750 billion). And the annual cost of this reaches R$26 billion.

Who else in Brazil preserves 50% of their property and still bears this cost alone? Nobody else does this. Not in Brazil or anywhere else in the world.

Adding up the assigned areas, the vacant lands, and the private areas destined for preservation, we have 66% of the Brazilian territory destined for protected areas.

It is equivalent to more than 15 countries in Europe by far. There are still a few Norwegians left.

Almost 4% of areas are left over for cities and infrastructure, and the other 30% are left for Brazilian food production.

Of the remaining production area, we have 8% for native pastures, such as the one we see in the Pantanal, 13% for planted fields, 7.8% for crops, and 1.2% for planted forests.

To get an idea, in the United States, 20% of the areas are for conservation, and 75% are for agricultural use. What is left is cities and infrastructure.

All the data that I mentioned are available on the website of Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation), Ministry of Environment, IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), Funai (National Indian Foundation), Dnit (National Department of Transportation Infrastructure) and are also corroborated by partial research by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the USA).

So I think it is a fundamental mission that we clarify to society and the world that we have done an exceptionally better job than any other country in preserving its forests and jungles. It is more beautiful than reciting false information like a parrot without knowing the facts.

Lygia Pimentel is a veterinarian, economist, and consultant for the commodities market. She is currently the CEO of AgriFatto.

Since 2007 she has worked in the agribusiness sector, holding positions as a market analyst at Scot Consultoria, commodities transaction manager at XP Investimentos, and head of beef cattle market analysis at INTL FCStone.

With information from Forbes

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