Amazon deforestation accelerates

In 1970 Brazil's military government under President Emilio Garrastazu Medici announced the Trans-Amazonian Highway, a road of some 4,000 kilometers across the Amazon basin. It was sold as a way to settle landless families from the drought-stricken northeast, under the slogan of a land without people for people without land. The road and others such as BR-364, which reached Rondonia, brought settlers, ranchers, loggers and miners into forest that had been home to Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Tax breaks and subsidies encouraged cattle ranching.³²

The Amazon basin covers some 6 million square kilometers, about 60 percent of it in Brazil. Until the 1960s it was reachable mainly by river, apart from a rubber boom in the late nineteenth century. The military regime, in power since 1964, saw the region as a security and development frontier, and the global demand for beef and later soybeans rewarded clearing. Cattle pasture became the main use of cleared land, and fires set to clear it spread into standing forest. By 2020 roughly a fifth of the Brazilian Amazon had been cleared.¹²³

Annual clearing in the Brazilian Amazon peaked at more than 27,000 square kilometers in 2004, then fell by about 80 percent by 2012 under stricter enforcement and a soy moratorium. It rose again after 2018 and fell sharply in 2023 under a new government. The forest stores large amounts of carbon and recycles rainfall across South America, and scientists warn that heavy loss could push parts of it toward dry savanna. The rubber tapper Chico Mendes, murdered in 1988 for defending the forest, became a symbol of the struggle.³⁵⁴