Opinion – Marcelo Leite: Cerrado deserves more attention than the Amazon

Brazil, homeland of inverted priorities. All they talk about is “spending” while the terrorist serpent’s egg hatches. Everyone is concerned about the Amazon, when they should be looking at the cerrado.

Check out Prodes, Inpe’s (National Institute for Space Research) deforestation monitoring system, which now covers the entire territory. And be amazed: 3 million km² of native vegetation were cut down in 522 years of colonization.

For those who have no idea how much this represents, they are 36% of the national territory, which has 8.5 million km². Or almost an India (3.3 million km²), where 1.4 billion people live, 6.5 times more people than here.

It’s a lot of land. Maybe that’s why the less brutal part of agribusiness has been saying for years that it’s not necessary to cut down more forests to feed Brazil and the world. Why, then, do ruralists in Congress want to prevent new demarcations of indigenous lands?

Because everyone benefits from land grabbing in the Amazon, not to mention the criminal mining of ores and hardwoods. There’s plenty of reason to be concerned about organized crime in the North and the devastation of the planet’s largest rainforest, but the numbers put things in perspective.

The Atlantic Forest is the most destroyed Brazilian biome, with only 28% of the initial coverage remaining, according to Prodes. I was going to say original coverage, but that number includes areas in regeneration, which will not soon exhibit the incredible biodiversity of the tropical forest that gave birth to Brazil as we know it.

The second worst situation is in the pampas, with 34% of remnants. Just like the Atlantic Forest, an anthropized (exploited) landscape for a long time, which we have become accustomed to belittling, addicted to conformism and accommodation.

In a better situation are the caatinga, with 57% of surviving vegetation, the Pantanal (77%) and the Amazon (80%). At the midpoint, between life and death, balances the cerrado, where half of the ultra-biodiverse Brazilian savannah has already perished.

Pay attention to INPE data: the cerrado lost 10,689 km² from August 2021 to July 2022. Less than the 11,568 km² cut down in the Amazon, true, but proportionally much more —after all, the Brazilian savanna corresponds to less than half of the area (2 million km²) of the Amazon rainforest (4.2 million km²).

Worse: in the cerrado, deforestation jumped 25% in the last year of the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government. In contrast, in the Amazon there was a decrease of 11% in clearcuts, although it is regrettable that the annual devastation there stabilizes at five digits, a level reached by the worst president in Brazil.

There are 13 states with areas in the cerrado biome: BA, DF, GO, MA, MT, MS, MG, PA, PR, PI, RO, SP and TO. However, large-scale destruction, over 1,000 km² per year, prevails in only four of them: Maranhão (2,834 km² this year), Tocantins (2,128 km²), Bahia (1,428 km²) and Piauí (1,189 km²).

In a word, Matopiba (MA, TO, PI, BA). In the region, there is a strong expansion of the agricultural frontier, with the opening of land for soy, corn, cotton and even wheat plantations. There are also a lot of cattle there. In addition to Brazilian flags at each gate and shooting clubs in droves.

The current plague in Brazil is not the ants, nor the PT’s petty developmentalists. It is the far-right landowners and ranchers who send employees and meals to support the crowd of coup-mongers at the door of barracks to flatter those inside.

Coming from the south, the truck patriots came from afar to destroy the cerrado first. There is their bridgehead, around the Plateau, from where they attack the Amazon and the weak national democracy in collusion with banditry.