Race to Save the Amazon Leaves out Brazil's Crucial Savanna

Aerial view of agriculture fields, in Sao Desiderio, western Bahia state, Brazil, taken on September 29, 2023. Nelson ALMEIDA / AFP
Aerial view of agriculture fields, in Sao Desiderio, western Bahia state, Brazil, taken on September 29, 2023. Nelson ALMEIDA / AFP
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Race to Save the Amazon Leaves out Brazil's Crucial Savanna

Aerial view of agriculture fields, in Sao Desiderio, western Bahia state, Brazil, taken on September 29, 2023. Nelson ALMEIDA / AFP
Aerial view of agriculture fields, in Sao Desiderio, western Bahia state, Brazil, taken on September 29, 2023. Nelson ALMEIDA / AFP

People thought she was crazy when Carminha Maria Missio and her family bought what was considered "sterile" land in the Brazilian savanna to farm soybeans, she says.

Missio, a beaming grandmother named one of the most powerful women in agriculture by Forbes Brasil, remembers the surprised reactions when her poor southern family sold their land in 1979 and moved across the country to the "Cerrado," a huge savanna below the Amazon rainforest.

Little-known outside Brazil, the Cerrado is Earth's most biodiverse savanna, nicknamed the "cradle of waters" for its vital rivers and aquifers, said AFP.

But it is disappearing at a record rate, its twisted trees and grasslands replaced by endless fields of grains and cotton.

Even as Brazil races to stop Amazon deforestation, experts warn environmental destruction is surging in the Cerrado, fueling violent land-grabs and exacerbating the climate crisis.

Some scientists say the Amazon and Cerrado are equally important for the planet.

But when she arrived in the northeastern state of Bahia, the Cerrado was widely seen as a "wasteland," says Missio, 67.

"Locals said the only thing you could grow here was lizards," she laughs.

Sleeping under tarps and sweating in the tropical sun, her family joined a stream of pioneers who literally bet the farm on transforming this once-vast wilderness.

It worked: the Cerrado is now a global breadbasket, making Brazil the world's top exporter of soybeans and, this year, corn.

It grew half the 155 million metric tons of soy Brazil produced last year, used in the animal feed that puts beef, chicken and pork on plates worldwide.

Spillover effect
Today, half the Cerrado is farmland.

In places like Sao Desiderio, Bahia, the county leading Brazil in deforestation this year, the landscape after harvest season looks like a giant quilt, the green patches of remaining savanna surrounded by vast brown fields.

The savanna is typically cleared using a "correntao" -- a large chain strung between two bulldozers and dragged across the ground, razing everything in its path.

Fire is also used. A Switzerland-sized area has burned in the Cerrado this year, according to research group MapBiomas.

Farming the sandy, nutrient-poor soil is all about scale: producers invest big in irrigation, fertilizer and pesticides, financed by global commodity giants like US-based Bunge and Cargill.

But experts warn irrigation and soil degradation are drying the region. A recent study found river flows have decreased 15 percent from their historic averages, and will fall 34 percent by 2050.

The Cerrado has become a "sacrificial ecosystem," says Leticia Verdi, of Brazilian environmental group ISPN.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has largely delivered on his promise to protect the world's biggest rainforest, halving deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon since taking office in January. But destruction has increased 27 percent in the Cerrado from last year, including 659 square kilometers (254 square miles) razed in September, a record for the month.

"There's been a spillover of deforestation from the Amazon to the Cerrado," says Verdi.

'Upside-down Amazon'
Yet "the Cerrado is just as important as the Amazon in confronting the climate crisis," Rodrigo Agostinho, head of Brazil's environmental agency, IBAMA, told AFP.

Scientists say the two are intricately linked.

The savanna depends on the precipitation generated by the rainforest. The rainforest meanwhile depends on the savanna to feed the rivers crisscrossing its southern half.

Both remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere -- the rainforest through its billions of trees, the savanna via its deep, carbon-absorbing root systems, dubbed an "upside-down Amazon."

The Cerrado is a mirror-image of the Amazon in other ways, too.

In the Amazon, an estimated 95 percent of deforestation is illegal. In the Cerrado, around 95 percent is officially authorized, according to IBAMA -- a result, environmentalists say, of outsize agribusiness influence on regional authorities.

Brazilian law allows landowners in the Amazon to deforest just 20 percent of their property. The opposite applies in most of the Cerrado: farmers must preserve just 20 percent of their land.

'Green land-grabbing'
In some cases, that law is being brutally twisted.

Joao da Silva lives in a shack in a rural community with no indoor plumbing or electricity. But the 50-year-old smallholder has five security cameras mounted outside, powered by solar panels.

He had them installed after gunmen surrounded his home in 2018 while he was out, threatening his mother at gunpoint.

Gunmen in a pickup later tried to ram his car and threatened to kill him, he says.

"They told me to get off my land, that the 'owners' were evicting us," says the father of five.

He also survived a stabbing attack at a local market in 2016.

Activists say Da Silva -- whose name has been changed for his safety -- and his neighbors are victims of "green land-grabbing," in which landholders seize un-deforested territory to claim it as their 20-percent protected reserves.

Leaders of several traditional cattle-herding communities told AFP of being targeted by gunmen who killed their cows, torched their farm buildings and opened fire on them.

Such violence is common in Brazil, where 377 land and environmental defenders have been killed since 2012, according to rights group Global Witness.

Three little words
Working the room with a preacher's charisma, Mario Alberto dos Santos is giving 40 middle-school students a crash course in sustainable agriculture in the poor Cerrado town of Ponte de Mateus.

Dos Santos, 43, a professor at the Federal University of Western Bahia, teaches teenagers eco-friendly techniques like growing native species, organic farming and interspersing crops with trees.

The program aims to train the next generation to farm with nature, not against it.

It is a "long road to walk," Dos Santos admits.

"We need to profoundly change the food system, not just in Brazil, but worldwide," he says.

Climate campaigners are meanwhile pushing commodity-importing countries to demand clean environmental and human-rights records from suppliers.

The European Union adopted a regulation this year requiring companies to show products are deforestation-free.

The policy is a "game-changer" for the Amazon, says Daniel Santos, of environmental group WWF-Brasil.

But it excludes most of the Cerrado -- not technically "forest."

Environmentalists are pushing the EU to extend the policy to "other wooded lands."

Adding those three words could transform the Cerrado, Santos says.

"It's a major opportunity to transition to more sustainable farming."



Children Suffer as Schools Go Online in Polluted Delhi

Confined to her home by the toxic smog choking India's capital, Harshita Gautam attends an online class on a mobile phone - AFP
Confined to her home by the toxic smog choking India's capital, Harshita Gautam attends an online class on a mobile phone - AFP
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Children Suffer as Schools Go Online in Polluted Delhi

Confined to her home by the toxic smog choking India's capital, Harshita Gautam attends an online class on a mobile phone - AFP
Confined to her home by the toxic smog choking India's capital, Harshita Gautam attends an online class on a mobile phone - AFP

Confined to her family's ramshackle shanty by the toxic smog choking India's capital, Harshita Gautam strained to hear her teacher's instructions over a cheap mobile phone borrowed from her mother.

The nine-year-old is among nearly two million students in and around New Delhi told to stay home after authorities once again ordered schools to shut because of worsening air pollution.

Now a weary annual ritual, keeping children at home and moving lessons online for days at a time during the peak of the smog crisis in winter ostensibly helps protect the health of the city's youth.

The policy impacts both the education and the broader well-being of schoolkids around the city -- much more so for children from poorer families like Gautam.

"I don't like online classes," she told AFP, sitting on a bed her family all share at night in their spartan one-room home in the city's west.

"I like going to school and playing outside but my mother says there is too much pollution and I must stay inside."

Gautam struggles to follow the day's lesson, with the sound of her teacher's voice periodically halting as the connection drops out on the cheap Android phone.

Her parents both earn paltry incomes -- her polio-stricken father by working at a roadside food stall and her mother as a domestic worker.

Neither can afford to skip work and look after their only child, and they do not have the means to buy air purifiers or take other measures to shield themselves from the smog.

Gautam's confinement at home is an additional financial burden for her parents, who normally rely on a free-meal programme at her government-run school to keep her fed for lunch.

"When they are at school I don't have to worry about their studies or food. At home, they are hardly able to pay any attention," Gautam's mother Maya Devi told AFP.

"Why should our children suffer? They must find some solution."

Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 30 million people, consistently tops world rankings for air pollution.

The city is blanketed in acrid smog each winter, primarily blamed on agricultural burning by farmers to clear their fields for ploughing, as well as factories and traffic fumes.

Levels of PM2.5 -- dangerous cancer-causing microparticles that enter the bloodstream through the lungs -- surged 60 times past the World Health Organization's recommended daily maximum on Monday.

A study in the Lancet medical journal attributed 1.67 million premature deaths in India to air pollution in 2019.

Piecemeal government initiatives include partial restrictions on fossil fuel-powered transport and water trucks spraying mist to clear particulate matter from the air.

But none have succeeded in making a noticeable impact on a worsening public health crisis.

- 'A lot of disruptions' -

The foul air severely impacts children, with devastating effects on their health and development.

Scientific evidence shows children who breathe polluted air are at higher risk of developing acute respiratory infections, a report from the UN children's agency said in 2022.

A 2021 study published in the medical journal Lung India found nearly one in three school-aged children in the capital were afflicted by asthma and airflow obstruction.

Sunita Bhasin, director of the Swami Sivananda Memorial Institute school, told AFP that pollution-induced school closures had been steadily increasing over the years.

"It's easy for the government to give a blanket call to close the schools but... abrupt closure leads to a lot of disruptions," she said.

Bhasin said many of Delhi's children would anyway continue to breathe the same noxious air whether at school or home.

"There is no space for them in their homes, so they will go out on the streets and play."