http://www.amazonia.org.br/english/noticias/noticia.cfm?id=307788
Brazil could triple its agricultural without the needing to clear additional rainforest in the Amazon Basin, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Brazil's Minister of Strategic Affairs, told Bloomberg in an interview.
“For every acre under cultivation in Brazil, there are more than four acres given over to low-intensity ranching and much of that has become degraded pasture land,” Unger was quoted as saying. “If we could recover even a small part of that territory, we could double the area under cultivation and triple our agricultural output in a brief time without touching a single tree.”
soybean expansion in the legal amazon of brazil, 1990-2005 Over the past decade more than 10 million hectares – an area about the size of Iceland - was cleared for cattle ranching as Brazil rose to become the world's largest exporter of beef. Now the government aims to double the country's share of the beef export market to 60% by 2018 through low interest loans, infrastructure expansion, and other incentives for producers. Most of this expansion is expected to occur in the Amazon were land is cheap and available. 70 percent of the country's herd expansion between 2002 and 2006 occurred in the region.
The argument that Brazil can expand its agricultural production without harming the Amazon is a mantra among Brazilian officials. The country has vast tracts of pasture and agricultural land that are being underutilized or have been abandoned: by some estimates up to 50 million hectares of degraded pasture could be available for intensive crop production, including oil palm, sugar cane, corn, soy, and tree plantations. But rapidly appreciating land prices, coupled with poor governance and inconsistent enforcement of environmental laws, means that it is often more profitable to clear new forest land — using timber sales as a subsidy — than to rehabilitate pasture. Cleared land is worth more than four times standing forest in parts of the southern Amazon in the states of Mato Grosso and Pará.
Conversion for cattle pasture has lately accounted for more than 80 percent of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon as the country has rapidly expanded its cattle herd and become the world's largest exporter of beef. Brazil is now also the leading exporter of other agricultural crops, including sugar, coffee, and orange juice, and is the second largest soy producer.
Nearly 20 percent has the Brazilian Amazon has been cleared over the past 30 years. Scientists fear that continued clearing, together with increased incidence and severity of drought and fire due to climate change, could result in a large scale die-off of Earth's largest rainforest by the end of the century.