Day 239 - 23 Apr 96 - Page 10
1 protein that could be produced by a plantation of Brazilnut
2 trees. After three or four years the pastures typically
3 fail, at which point they must either be abandoned or
4 expensively resuscitated."
5
6 Can you explain what you mean by "resuscitated"?
7 A. "Resuscitated" means to maintain the pasture. That is
8 the meaning I was trying to convey. Basically what happens
9 is that once you have cleared a piece of land in the Amazon
10 and you just leave it as it is, it will very quickly be
11 swallowed up by forest again. The forest is very
12 ferocious. It is very good at replanting itself and coming
13 back. But if you want to maintain an area, especially a
14 comparatively large area, as pasture, then you must treat
15 it very heavily with a lot of burning and a lot of
16 pesticides and, indeed, reseeding which is now going on,
17 especially since about 1990.
18
19 Q. So, that is what you mean by "resuscitated", maintaining
20 pasture?
21 A. That is correct.
22
23 Q. Continuing to read:
24
25 "It is now possible to raise the productivity and the life
26 of the land by means of new techniques, but these have only
27 been adopted by a small minority of the Amazon's ranchers.
28 Outside the Amazon, beef productivity is higher and its
29 production is one of the major motives for land clearance.
30
31 F. Environmental impact: Nearly all the deforestation in
32 the Brazilian Amazon (variously estimated at between 8 and
33 12% of the forest area) is directly, if not always
34 indirectly, the result of cattle ranching. Ranching may,
35 as stated above, be the first cause of deforestation or it
36 may be the final cause, the ranchers clearing the land
37 after it has been opened by timber cutters or colonists.
38
39 The Amazon rainforest is the most biodiverse region on
40 earth. It could contain as many as six million insect
41 species and 10,000 species of trees. In any hectare of
42 forest there may be as many as 250 tree species, around
43 thirty times the maximum one could expect to find in
44 British woods. Clearing this land for cattle pasture
45 results in the elimination of virtually all the ecosystem's
46 biodiversity and its replacement with a few, often exotic
47 species of plants and accompanying fauna."
48
49 "Exotic", that means from outside of the natural,
50 geographical vegetation?
51 A. That is right, and what we see nowadays is that
52 certain grass species in particular have been imported and
53 often, interestingly, with a whole package of weeds mixed
54 in with the grass seed and this can have quite serious
55 ecological implications as these may possibly have the
56 capacity to spread through other parts of the eco-system
57 from the ranches with they are introduced. Some of the
58 seeds and grasses come from the United States.
59
60 Q. Continuing to read:
