Day 268 - 24 Jun 96 - Page 26
1 soil aluminium, which is present at toxic levels for
2 virtually all cultivated crops. The cost of this
3 application is about US $350 per hectare and represents
4 nearly twice3 the purchase price of the virgin land. The
5 arable crops planted are, in order of importance, soya,
6 maize, rice and mandioca. Soya is at present enjoying a
7 good price on the export market and occupied no less than
8 3.9 million hectares of cerrado in 1994, producing 8.8
9 million tonnes, while 4.0 million tonnes of maize were
10 produced (World Wildlife Fund Brazil, pers. Comm).
11 However, far more of the cerrado is exploited as improved
12 pasture, planted with such exotic grasses as Brachiaria,
13 Hyparrhenia rufa and Panicum maximum, than as arable land.
14 It is difficult to find recent figures for the number of
15 cattle raised on the cerrado but in 1995 it was estimated
16 at 38 million and the present number is certainly much
17 higher.
18
19 The system of cultivation of the cerrado is far from
20 environmentally friendly. The employment of intensive
21 mechanization requires huge tracts of monoculture with
22 great areas of bare soil and the concomitant problems of
23 erosion by rain and wind, while the legally required
24 reserve areas have to be kept in concentrated blocks so
25 that the trees do not impede spraying aircraft."
26
27 Can I just say that the reserve areas he is referring to
28 will be in a biological sense rather than Indian reserves.
29
30 "Clearly it would be better if such reserves were dispersed
31 as a web to act as corridors for animals and a more
32 widespread seed source for recolonization. Incidentally,
33 the Brazilian laws for maintenance of reserve areas are
34 extremely enlightened, requiring 50% of land to be kept
35 under natural vegetation in Legal Amazonia and 20% in all
36 the rest of Brazil. If such laws were strictly observed,
37 problems of conservation would be greatly reduced. Of the
38 many other environmental problems, heavy, and often
39 careless, use of pesticides and depletion of water reserves
40 by giant rotating irrigators are amongst the most
41 important.
42
43 Obviously the cerrado biome has received a formidable
44 agricultural onslaught and has been much altered during the
45 last 20 or so years. It is very difficult to estimate the
46 total area which has been changed to arable, planted
47 pasture or other man-made landscape but a conservative
48 figure seems to be about 40% (Ratter, 1991; Dias, 1992; WWF
49 Brazil, pers. Comm). It is interesting to compare this
50 with the well-publicized figures for destruction of the
51 Brazilian Amazonian rainforest, for which accurate
52 information is available. To date approximately 450,000
53 square kilometres of rainforest, representing some 13% of
54 its original area has been destroyed, while at least
55 800,000 square kilometres of cerrado, 40% of the original
56 area, has suffered a similar fate. So much emphasis has
57 been put on the emotive issue of the destruction of the
58 rainforests that the world has largely forgotten the fate
59 of their floristic cousins, the savanna woodlands.
60
