The Greenpeace report ‘Slaughtering the Amazon’, published in June this year, was wrong to depict cattle farming in the Amazon region as ‘the largest driver of deforestation in the world’.

European consumers, for example, can rest assured that in buying Brazilian beef they are not exacerbating Amazon deforestation. The reason is simple: the European Union only licenses imports of beef from specific farms in Brazil, and at present every one of them is at least a thousand kilometres away from the edge of the rainforest. As for Brazil’s total beef exports to countries worldwide, less than 2% come from the Amazon.

The Greenpeace report suggested that cattle ready for slaughter are moved thousands of kilometres from the Amazon to farms in southern Brazil that are licensed to export beef to the EU, but in fact it is very unusual in Brazil for cattle to travel more than 300km between farm and slaughterhouse. Longer journeys would be particularly unlikely in the case of animals raised in the Amazon, where many roads are unpaved and vehicles tend to move at an average speed of less than 40km per hour.

As for a connection between purchases of Brazilian leather and Amazon deforestation, the bulk of Brazilian leather goods come from the south and south-east of the country: the northern region, which includes most of the Amazon rainforest, contributes a mere 1%.

Also worth emphasising is the fact that despite the ever increasing sales of Brazilian beef around the world, cattle farming in Brazil actually occupies less land now than it did in the mid-1990s. Between 1996 and 2006, for example, the total area of pasture for cattle decreased by 5 million hectares, even though the total number of cattle increased by almost a third. The reason, quite simply, is the significant increase in productivity in the cattle sector.

It seems appropriate to also provide some background context for the ongoing discussions regarding Amazon deforestation. Brazil has so far preserved 81% of the Amazon rainforest, and 69% of all the forest that existed in its national territory prior to significant human demographic expansion (the equivalent figure in Europe is less than 0.5%). Also, in recent years there has been a clear downward trend in deforestation as measures such as satellite monitoring and an intensification of federal police operations have started to produce results. In 2008, even with the small increase that took place over the course of the year, the total deforested area was 65% smaller than in 2004, and in 2009 the total area deforested between February and April was the smallest in any three-month period in the last 20 years.

Source: Ministry of Agriculture and Embassy of Brazil in London