Posted on 11/10/2005 3:50:43 PM PST by blam
A hunger eating up the world
China's insatiable demand for proteins as well as oil is turning Brazil into the takeaway for the workforce of the world. In the second part of our series, we reveal how the soya trade is creating a gold rush which is deforesting the Amazon
Jonathan Watts in Santarem, the Amazon
Thursday November 10, 2005
The Guardian (UK)
A smoky haze blurs the frontier between the world's mightiest forest and its biggest threat: the humble soya bean. The four-month burning season in the Amazon is when the giant trees felled to make space for crops are slowly reduced to ashes. Even after being slashed and burned, the trunks of the tauari and maçaranduba are so huge that their embers glow on and off for more than two years. Some are left to burn where they stand, creating giant pillars of charcoal stretching 30 metres into the sky.
You cannot see the wood for the beans in an ever-widening expanse of the Amazon, and it is increasingly thanks to China. Brazil's boom crop and China's growing appetite are clearing more forest than logging, cattle farming and mining. It is one of the more remarkable developments of a globalised world in which Brazil is rapidly becoming the takeaway for the workforce of the world. Travelling from Beijing to a farm in the heart of the Amazon showed how far China's reach has extended. It took five flights and nearly three days to reach Santarem, followed by a two-hour drive.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
and in an earlier post China buying the old white farms in Africa after the Euros got kicked off...
and in an earlier post China buying the old white farms in Africa after the Euros got kicked off...
Isn't the U.S. the no. 1 soy producer in the world.
When can we start blaming China for stuff like this? I'm getting tired of blaming Bush.. ;-)
This doesn't fit into the "Blame America" mold.
"For years, he said, the most important trade route for food was between the US - the world's biggest exporter of grain, soya and meat - and Japan, the main importer. But last year for the first time Brazil became the top exporter and China the top importer of soya."
Brazil has become the top exporter, I don't know about the top producer.
Wonder what the enviro-vegans will have to say about this. A few years ago, they were complaining that the rainforest was being destroyed to raise beef for McDonald's.
This article cannot possibly be true. Everyone knows, because the leftist enviromental wackos tells us so, that it is the USA that is causing deforestation. /sarcasm off
I thought vegetarianism was supposed to save the world. Ya mean it won't? Hee-hee! Soy kills. Beware!
And just think, America is paying her farmers to NOT grow crops.
Our government is also planning to sell out our agricultural sector in the name of global socialist "free trade". The "poor countries" of the world will demand that the Us decimate its agricultural sector at the Doha round in Hong Kong, coming up in a couple of weeks, and invest in their agriculture instead. The ultimate goal is to make the US a food importer, and to put us at the mercy of the third world countries that will become our suppliers.
Which would be China, Brazil, Russia, and other basket case countries.
Yes. Brazil is especially keen to kill off US agriculture and, if our corrupt Congress goes along with it, will be close to accomplishing their goal using the Doha round and "free trade" as their tool.
Yes, but Brazil is rapidly catching up. They have a natural advantage in that their yields per acre of soybeans are generally higher than ours.
Chinafault!
It's so very anglo-oppressive to measure the beans by the bushel. I stand corrected this is Bushfault!
There is a lot more soybean rust in Brazil as compared to the US and it has really impacted the crop. So you know the fields there in the future will be bathed in fungicides.
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