See brands' supply chain linkages that are contributing to Amazon deforestation | Hacker News Reader

See brands' supply chain linkages that are contributing to Amazon deforestation

stand.earth

Here's a related recent video from Kurzgesagt, discussing how space for beef cattle drives deforestation in Brazil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Hq8eVOMHs

The actual brands are shown on Slide 31.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/KDFLe-kvVS34briUiLj2nhQXkP...

I'm sort of surprised that the focus is on the leather industry, which I assumed was a byproduct of raising cattle for beef. Are cattle raised specifically for their hides?

My understanding is Amazon deforestation is to accommodate other land uses, in this case presumably cattle. The cattle maybe be used for beef and leather, but whatever the end use the forest impact is the same and focused on a shortsighted incentive.

They state the number one driver of Amazon deforestation is cattle ranching.

It isn't quite true that cattle is the biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon. The number one driver is soy. However, landowners will typically deforest and then place cattle on land for five years, before converting to soy to circumvent regulation. This creates the impression that cattle was the driver, when it was in fact soy.

That said, a lot of the soy does feed cattle too!

Reading this surprised me …

How much is soy worth per acre? I assume the demand/payoff must be sizable to justify the cost of converting forest to agricultural land?

Soy is exported at about 380 USD per ton, and yield is something like 3 tons per hectare.

I'm not sure how much the farmer doing the deforestation gets though. But deforesting the Amazon is sadly very cheap. Much cheaper than it should be given the value of the Amazon. It's a disastrous market failure.

A viewpoint I've never seen addressed - if the people of this country have unmet economic needs they can only meet by using some land from the Amazon, is it really more important to preserve it as a landmark than for the land to go to use? I'm all for conservation but there must be some reason everyone down there wants some of this land as opposed to going elsewhere.

A lot of the people doing deforestation in the Amazon are incredibly poor, and deforestation is the only option to them to increase their standard of living.

However, to say we are preserving the Amazon as a "landmark" is not quite right. Globally speaking the best use for the Amazon is as a carbon sink and biodiversity hotspot. What should be happening is that the global community should be paying for this benefit: a big capital flow from the whole world to Brazil. But they are not, they are just free-riding.

> is it really more important to preserve it as a landmark than for the land to go to use

The Amazon has 10% of the worlds biodiversity, I wouldn't exactly call it a landmark, this isn't historic preservation - and the land is already "in use". Also I'm not sure that "the people of the country" are buying and farming cattle on large chunks of the Amazon, I'd assume the economic gains are highly concentrated amongst a few companies (this is conjecture). Either way, lowering demand for cattle raised in the Amazon would be one way to make this less common.

Very true that it's focused on just a few companies. Mostly JBS: they are massive.

However while these companies take the lion's share of the profit it is poor people who are doing the deforestation to improve their standard of living, often hired by those companies via various intermediaries to hide their links to deforestation.

It states that amazon deforestation is driven by demand for beef and leather. Presumably leather is easier to transport and hence global leather demand plays a role here? Just a guess though.

It's not really about transportation. Cattle are transported live to slaughterhouses near the port, before global export. However leather "subsidies" the industry because it makes the cows more valuable: this is how it contributes to deforestation.

Of course it is driven by demand. Government corruption has nothing to do with it.

Yeah, it's interesting. I was under the impression that the majority of leather is used for cars and furniture. But I don't see any auto brands here. This appears to be focused on the shoe industry.

I tried to find a breakdown of what leather is used for, and came up with this instead:

https://blog.bizvibe.com/blog/top-10-largest-leather-produci...

Italy imports and exports more leather than anybody?

It's surprising but true that shoes come out top! A breakdown is hard to come by because supply chains are proprietary information but see this article: https://medium.com/trase/european-and-us-companies-need-defo...

That is a horrible website. I suspect that a lot of people will take one look at the front page, see that there is no obvious way to find out if a brand they are interested in is there and just drop it.

> For more information view our slide deck. And no, I'm not going to view their slide deck. Just make a table of brand names and companies.

A great idea spoiled by a web design that seems to have forgotten that the purpose of such a site is communication.

If anybody is interested in learning more about this issue check out the documentary "Grazing the Amazon"

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