Human activities in Tropical Rainforests5EVILS GEOGRAPHY PRODUCTION

Shifting Cultivation

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CHAPTER 1

Shifting cultivation (slash and burn) is a common farming practice in the hilly region of the tropical rainforests. Mainly the natives and landless people are the shifting cultivators.

What is shifting cultivation?

Shifting cultivation is an agricultural sys-tem in which plots of land are cultivated temporarily, then abandoned and al-lowed to revert to its natural vegetation while the cultivator moves on to another plot. The period of cultivation is usually terminated when the soil shows signs of exhaustion or, more commonly, when the field is overrun by weeds. The length of time that a field is cultivated is usually shorter than the period over which the land is allowed to regenerate by lying fal-low.

Characteristics of shifting cultiva-tion

• Clearings made in the rainforest by cut-ting and firing trees (slash and Burn)

• Largest trees often left because they are difficult to move and can provide a source of food in the form of fruit.

• Ash is scattered after trees have been burned to fertilise the ground.

• Little fertiliser is added apart from the ash, so the nutrient levels drop quickly leading to the cultivators abandoning the plot and finding a new one after 7-10 years.

• Labour intensive little use of machines (some have chain saws). Crops tend to be planted using digging sticks.

• Crops planting between remaining tree trunks which decompose slowly adding extra nutrients into the soil.

• When the clearing is abandoned it is left for many years, allowing the vegeta-tion to recolonise.

• With a low population density this form of agriculture is sustainable.

[Reference: wikipedia]

How is shifting cultivation prac-tised?

The followings are the procedure the shifting cultivators carry out the farming practice.

1. Cut and burn a small piece of forest.

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(Credit: Mark Edwards/Still Pictures)

2. Grow crops on it with ash as organic fertilizer for one to three years.

3. When the soil is exhausted, the land will be abandoned.

4. Move to a new site of forest and start growing new crops.

5. The old piece of forest will be fallowed and waits for forest regeneration.

Advantages of shifting cultivation

This farming practice is sustainable and environmental-friendly because

1. The native population is small

2. The forest area remains large

3. Sufficient time is given to the aban-doned land for fallowing and forest re-generation.

4. Using ash as organic fertilizers which are more eco-friendly

Disadvantages of shifting cultiva-tion

In recent decades, shifting cultivation has become destructive to the rainfor-ests. It’s because less time is given to the abandoned plot for fallowing and regen-eration.

Reasons why there is less time

1. Food demand is great due to the rapid growth of tribal or native population.

2. More and more landless farmers prac-tice shifting cultivation.

3. Forest area is getting smaller due to other human activities, e.g. cattle ranching and lumbering.

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It is a type of commercial farming where one particular crop is growing on a large scale and sold for cash and export

It is a commercial tropical agriculture system which is essentially export-oriented

Production is mainly for the market and not for the farmers’ self-consumption

Involves modern inputs such as chemi-cal fertilizers, insecticides and pesticides

Also known as Cash Crops

Plantation Agriculture

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CHAPTER 2

A plantation is a long, artificially-established forest, farm or estate, where crops are grown for sale, often in distant markets rather than for local on-site consumption.

Examples: Palm oil plantation, rubber plantation,cocoa plantation, coffee plan-tation and soybean plantation.

Certain types of palm trees produce large red fruit which are rich with oil. After re-fining, this oil, known as palm oil, can be used to produce all sorts of products, in-cluding oils used in foods like chocolates and cookies, cosmetics like makeup, and even biodiesel, a fuel that can be used in cars instead of diesel.

Oil palms, as these trees are called, have very high oil yields -- some of the highest of any crop used for biofuel (plant-based fuel) production. A single hectare (2.5 acres) can produce up to 7 tons of oil, many times what would be produced

from the same area of corn, soy, or canola.

Indonesia is now the leading supplier for a global market that demands more of the tree's versatile oil for cooking, cos-metics, and biofuel.

However, palm oil's appeal comes with significant costs. Oil palm plantations of-ten replace tropical forests, killing endan-gered species, uprooting local communi-ties, and contributing to the release of climate-warming gases.

Due mostly to oil palm production, Indo-nesia emits more greenhouse gases than any country besides China and the United States.

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Reasons for the growth of oil palm plantations in Malyasia

1. Rising demand for biofuels which are regarded as more eco-friendly.

2.Lack of fuel reserves in tropical coun-tries and therefore, there’s a tendency for them to develop more biofuels.

3.Growing population and economic ac-tivities in some less developed rainfor-ests countries, e.g. Brazil, Malaysia, lead to growing demand for fuel

4.Government support

5. More profitable to grow oil palm than other traditional tropical food crops

6.Easy management for growing one type of crop (monoculture). Lower pro-duction cost due to specialization.

7. Well-developed transport infrastruc-ture for the export of palm oil.

Sandakan, an important port for palm oil trade in Malaysia

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Cattle Ranching

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CHAPTER 3

Cattle ranching is now the biggest cause of deforestation in the Amazon, and nearly 80 per cent of deforested areas in Brazil are now used for pasture. The cattle industry has ballooned since the 1970s, giving Brazil the largest commercial cattle herd in the world. Since 2003, the country has also topped the world's beef export charts and the government plans to double its share of the market by 2018.

Characteristics of cattle ranching in the Amazon

• a kind of large-scale commercial farm-ing

• Raising and grazing livestock in exten-sive land

• trees are cleared to provide pasture land for ranching

• Ranch land are usually native prairie or forested land

• Usually on low land

Favourable factors of the Amazon for cattle ranching

• Ranchers are attracted to the Amazon because of the globalization trend

• Sufficient supply of land in the Amazon

• Lands are fertile for cattle ranching by applying chemical fertilizers

• Less restrictions in land tenure law

• Rapid development of transportation networks and improved accessibility

• Large demands from the food indus-tries in the More Developed Countries

• Beef producers have turned to LDCs for pasture and feed as the MDCs get the scarcity of land resources and ris-ing awareness of environmental protec-tion

• depreciation of Brazilian dollars fur-ther lowers the production cost

• government support to develop cattle ranching

• free from mad-cow disease and foot-mouth disease

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INTRODUCTIONIn 2006, cattle occupied 79.5% of the land already in use in the Brazilian Legal Amazon. Around 40% of Brazil’s cows are currently located inside the Amazon. From 2002 to 2006, 14.5 million of the total 20.5 million head of cattle added to Brazil herd were located in the Amazon.

Situation in Brazil

Now, with the Brazilian government pushing for the industry to expand on such a massive scale, it throws their tar-gets announced last month for reducing deforestation into serious doubt. It also poses a significant threat to efforts to combat climate change. Deforestation is largely responsible for making Brazil the fourth largest greenhouse gas emitter, and the cattle industry also contributes a significant quantity of emissions in the form of bovine methane emissions (or cow farts if you want to be less tactful).

The new cattle footprint maps our Brazil-ian team have produced focus on Mato Grosso, a state which has the largest cat-tle herd in Brazil and seen large areas of forest lost in favour of pasture, and an in-novative process has been used to ana-lyse satellite imagery. The new technique uses images from the Moderate Resolu-tion Imaging Spectroradiometer (Modis) satellite to identify whether land is being used for crops or pasture, or if it's still covered in trees.

By comparing the spread of cattle ranch-ing with other data - such as the loca-tions of industrial-sized slaughter-

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CATTLE STATION IN MATO GROSSOThe building of new roads allows human occupation and further destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

houses, roads and other infrastructure elements - they've built a picture of how the livestock industry is affecting the re-gion.

They also demonstrate how roads have opened up new areas of the forest to agri-culture, including unofficial roads which don't feature on government charts.

Cattle and pastures are rapidly replacing the Amazon rainforest. When the forest is coverted to pasture, biodiversity goes up in smoke, and masses of carbon diox-ide is released into the atmosphere.

Therefore, the Brazilian government must adopt ambitious deforestation re-duction targets in order to achieve zero deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon by 2015.

The following are the suggestions:

• Provide sufficient annual funding to tackle tropical deforestation and make it available immediately;

• Is accessible to all countries with tropical forests, including countries with low deforestation rates;

• Protect biodiversity values and the rights and livelihoods of indigenous peo-ples;

• Protect against ‘leakage’ via na-tional- level accounting and reduction ap-proaches in deforestation;

• Does not directly include forest off-set credits in carbon markets;

• Does not support the replacement of natural forests with plantations and must not subsidise the expansion of in-dustrial logging, agri-business and other destructive practices into forests.

• enact and enforce the currently pro-visional act in the Forest Code, which stipulates that no more than 20% of any private land holding in the Amazon can be legally cleared. This would avoid addi-tional legal deforestation permits.

• redirect investments that drive de-forestation into diversified economies in-cluding investing in people that support the sustainable use of forest products.

• Increase investments to strengthen the monitoring and control systems to fight forest crimes in the Amazon to en-sure effective governance and law en-forcement in the region.

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Lumbering

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CHAPTER 4

Illegal and predatory logging plays a central role in the destruction of the Amazon. It is now generally accepted that illegal logging is the norm, rather than the exception in the Brazilian Amazon. Between 60 and 80 percent of all logging in the Brazilian Amazon is estimated to be illegal.

With the depletion of forests in South-east Asia and central Africa, the Amazon is being targeted by domestic and tran-snational corporations as a key source for tropical timber products. Huge majes-tic trees like the Samauma, also known as the "Queen of the Forest", are being ex-ploitedto make cheap plywood for con-struction industries in the US, Japan and Europe.

Working in remote forest areas, the log-gers often use false permits, ignore limi-tations of legal permits, cut species pro-tected by law and steal from protected ar-eas and indigenous lands. These are of-ten small or medium scale operations

that are able to avoid detection because of the remoteness of the logging loca-tions, the weak presence of the federal en-vironmental agency IBAMA, and a com-plex chain-of-custody in the cutting, haul-ing and transporting of the logs.

Legally approved forest operations in the Brazilian Amazon commonly provide cover for illegal logging. Logs are fre-quently cut illegally up river from ap-proved operations and clandestinely floated downstream. Once past an ap-proved operation, they are "legalised" with forged documents claiming that the logs were cut on the property of the for-estry operation.

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AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHView from the space shuttle Atlantis of the Polonoroeste Project, an effort by the Brazilian government to populate and deforest a large area of the Amazon Basin. Farms, ranches, and factories have replaced most of the rainforests in this region

Ways to carry out logging in the Amazon

1. Selective logging

• Trees are first marked to identified the species of timber they want as not every species are suitable for sale as well as to leave sufficient tress to re-gain the volume of harvested

• After that, workers will cut the woods following the marks

2. Clear-cutting

• In the South East-Asia

• ∵ most of the tress species are valuable

• ∴usually all the tress are removed at once in very large-scale

• regardless the sustainability and the ecosystem of the forest

• large number of labour and different kinds of machines are involved

• dividing the logs into different sections and required sized

• transporting to the local mills or indus-try.

Favourable factors for lumbering in the Amazon

1. tropical rainforest provide a large amount of hardwoods

• (including teak, rosewood and mahog-any) which are of high value

• ∴its strength, durability, texture and beauty and they are used in construc-tion purposes and furniture making

• ∴lower quality wood is made into household utensils and chopsticks

• ∴sometimes cut up into chips used for pulp and paper

2. renewable (new trees can be grown in the same place ones trees are cut)

• produce more logs

• commercial logging is commonly car-ried out

3. high demand in more developed coun-tries

• especially in the late 1990s (after deplet-ing much of their own timber stocks)

• aware and concern about forest re-sources in their own countries

• tried to import timbers from less devel-oped countries

• Main importers in Asia:

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Japan (world's largest consumer of tropi-cal timber), South Korea, Taiwan, China

4. For transporting timbers

• roads were even exploited by Japanese timber companies in rainforest area

• in the 1980s, Japan received the vast majority of tropical timber from Sara-wak and Sabah in Malaysia

• Nowadays, most of the timber exported to Japan with Malaysian label is actu-ally from trees that have been illegally logged in Indonesia

5. Poor forest planning and management

• ∴logging is allowed without having to observe any conversation regulation

• ∴ the loggers often use false permits

• ∴ ignore limitations of legal permits

• ∴ cut species protected by law

• ∴ steal from protected areas and in-digenous lands

• restrictions are unenforceable due to corruption and limited resources

• increasing rate of illegal logging

6. serious corruption

• Widespread collusive corruption from local officials to the judiciary

• combined with decentralized govern-ment structures in many tropical coun-tries

• existing forestry laws nearly unenforce-able

• while lack of transparency in commer-cial transactions means that corrupt of-ficials can grant concessions to cronies without regard for the environment or consideration of local people

• encouraged illegal logging in tropical rainforest

Conclusion

Selective extraction of valuable trees can directly change the forest structure and its species composition, as in most cases, other trees are destroyed in the process. According to scientists, Amazon logging companies extract or damage 10 to 40 percent of the live biomass of a forest area, and open up the canopy by 14 to 50 percent.The reduced canopy cover can also make the forests more vulnerable to-forest fires. The indirect consequences of offsetting the cost of roadbuilding and forest clearance opens up the forest to further destructive activities including large-scale hunting, fuel woodgathering and clearing for agriculture.

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Hydro-electric Power

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CHAPTER 5

The Brazilian Government is building the world's third largest hydroelectric dam on one of the Amazon's major tributaries, the Xingu River. The Belo Monte Dam complex is designed to divert 80% of the Xingu River's flow, devastating an area of over 1,500 square kilometers of Brazilian rainforest while resulting in the forced displacement of between 20,000 - 40,000 people.

The Xingu River basin is home to 25,000 indigenous people from 40 ethnic groups; it is a living symbol of Brazil's cultural and biological diversity. The Xingu flows north 2,271 kilometers from the central savanna region of Mato Grosso to the Amazon River and, although nominally "protected" throughout most of its course by indigenous re-serves and conservation units, the Xingu is severely impacted by soy monocultures and cattle ranching throughout the basin, and now by the threat of a series of large dams.

Belo Monte is highly complex: the project includes two dams, one massive canal span-ning 500 meters, two reservoirs (one flooding dry land), and an extensive system of dikes, some big enough to qualify themselves as large dams. In addition to the 1,500 km2 of area directly impacted by the dam, including the permanent flooding of 400 km2 of forest, the construction of Belo Monte threatens to result in explosive deforesta-tion in the Xingu basin.

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Reasons for the development of HEP in the Amazon

• growing demand for electricity due to large population

• growth of commercial sector

• preparing for the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro

• increasing industrial operations and mining activities in the Amazon, e.g. bauxite, nickel and gold mine requires large amount of electricity in the process of refinery

• to provide cheaper electricity for ordinary citizens

Possible impacts of the construction of the dam on the tropical rainforest ecosystem

• The National Amazon Research Institute (INPA) calculated that during its first 10 years, the Belo Monte-Babaquara dam complex would emit 11.2 million metric tons of Carbon dioxide equivalent, and an additional 0.783 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent would be generated during construction and connection to the na-tional energy grid.

• Dams in Brazil emit high amounts of methane, due to the lush jungle covered by wa-ters each year as the basin fills.

• Belo Monte's 668 square kilometres (258 sq mi) of reservoir will flood 400 square kilometres (150 sq mi) of forest, about 0.01% of the Amazon forest.

• The loss of vegetation and natural spaces, with changes in fauna and flora;

• Changes in the quality and path of the water supply, and fish migration routes;

• Temporary disruption of the water supply in the Xingu riverbed for 7 months;

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Mining

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CHAPTER 6

The Amazon is considered to have great potential for mineral assets, namely copper, tin, nickel, bauxite, manganese, iron ore and gold. As a result, governments are providing tax incentives for large-scale projects, in order to boost development. As extractive technologies improve, it is likely that the scale of Amazon mining will increase.

What are the impacts of mining?

Mining can impact the area’s water drain-age, pollute water with run-off from the mine, and threaten local communities, including indigenous people, by affecting the quality of the food supply. Other ef-fects include:

Speeding up of deforestation: In the Carajas Mineral Province, Brazil, maybe the world’s largest copper reserve (iron ore, manganese and gold are already found there), wood from surrounding for-est is cut for charcoal to fuel pig iron plants, resulting in annual deforestation of 6,100 km2. Mining companies create extensive networks of roads throughout the Amazon Basin, deforesting land and disrupting nature. 

Pollution: A notorious pollutant used in gold extraction is mercury. In the vicin-ity of gold extraction sites, it may be found in high concentrations in fish, af-fecting local populations. Mercury also ends up in the atmosphere, from where it returns to forests. For example, 90% of fish caught by rural villagers south of gold mining areas of the Tapajós River in Brazil were found to be contaminated with methyl mercury. This chemical is dangerous for the nervous system as well as foetuses.

Encroachment on indigenous lands: When mining takes place in areas that are settled by indigenous people, clashes may occur. It has been reported that there are half a million gold prospectors (garimpeiros in Portuguese) working throughout the Amazon Basin in small operations. In Brazil’s state of Roraima, conflicts have flared up between the in-digenous Yanomamo Indians and gold prospectors, and the government had to step in with military intervention to evict miners from Indian lands.

Spread of tropical diseases: Mining re-quires blasting which may cause enor-mous gaps in the landscape turn into stagnant water pools. Later, they be-come breeding grounds for mosquitoes. These mosquitoes are notably feared be-cause they cause malaria, a widespread epidemic in Brazil, in the local popula-tions. After blasting, massive trucks (i.e. taller than jumbo jets) are then brought into the area to extract the rock from the pit and bring it to a processing facility. 

Increasing toxicity: once at the refinery, the rock is sprayed with cyanide or mer-cury to separate the gold particles from the rock.  However, careless contain-ment procedures and improper disposal lead to the release of these chemicals into the natural surroundings. Even

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though mercury stored in the soil is in an organic form, which is rather harmless, when released in large concentrations through mining it inhibits plant growth and animal immunity, resulting in the death of flora and fauna. According to es-timates, amount of mercury effectively dumped into the rivers has been 2000 tons in the last century alone. 

Contamination of groundwater: The min-ing processes and their side effects also constitute a major source of threats to groundwater. Acid mine drainage (or AMD) is a solution of sulfuric acid along with toxic metals and other contami-

nates from the mines.  It is carried off in rain or surface water and is deposited in nearby water sources including the groundwater.

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IRON ORE MINEOpen-cast mining methods may expose more tropical soil for erosion due to heavy rainfall.