Poverty is killing the Amazon rainforest. Treating soil and farmers better can help save what's left
Brazil's Para state, flocks of noisy green parrots soar overhead as children run and play between wooden homes, kicking up sandy soil — in places white and bare as a beach.
The ground reveals one of the paradoxes of the rainforest. Renowned for its beauty and biodiversity, the life-giving nutrients of the forest are mostly stored in the trees and other plants, not the soil.
When the forest is cleared — for a cattle ranch, soybean field or even a small cluster of village homes — the combination of scorching Amazonian sun and intense rainfall combine to leach scarce nutrients from the soil in just a few years, leaving behind surprisingly barren ground.
This impoverished dirt makes it difficult to sustain agriculture in one place.
And in a region with some of the highest poverty levels in Brazil, people with few options have often just abandoned degraded fields and cleared more forest — hastening the cycle of deforestation that threatens the planet’s climate and the millions of species unique to the Amazon.
“The biodiversity is rich, but so many people are very poor,” said Judson Ferreira Valentim, a soil scientist for the government’s agricultural research agency, Embrapa.
“We can’t protect the rainforest without addressing the poverty of the Amazon.”
The only way to meet both goals is to find more paths for people to make a living in the Amazon without further destroying the rainforest, say experts who have long worked in the region. That means using already deforested land more efficiently — to reduce pressure to clear more forest — as well as supporting businesses that sustainably harvest native products such as açaí and cacao.
The scale of abandoned farm and pastureland across the Brazilian Amazon is massive —
