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The United States once had one of the largest forests on Earth. The Eastern Forest covered almost everywhere east of the Mississippi. 2,560,000 km2 of forest. Now it is largely gone. Replaced with farmland and sprawl. So it is hard to criticize. Even areas that are now heavily forested like Vermont were clear cut almost entirely by the turn of the century.

The Amazon should be preserved, but to do that the world is going to have to pay. You can't tell a country you can't progress like the USA it is hypocritical.

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> So it is hard to criticize. Even areas that are now heavily forested like Vermont were clear cut almost entirely by the turn of the century.

As someone born in Brazil, I don't see why it's hard. Please criticise away. My country should be learning from the mistakes of others, not repeating them in order to favour some higher political caste.

To quote flaviojuvenal below, "Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation.". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32152630

The point is that every rich country first became rich, then started worrying about the environment.

It is hypocritical from rich countries to ask Brazil to stop deforestation if that means halting its economic development. If the rich countries really believe that preserving the environment is more important than the economy, then they need to either (a) pay underdeveloped countries to preserve their forests or (b) sacrifice their own economy and spend their own resources to re-grow their forest land. Ideally both.

The thing is, "paying Brazil to not raze the Amazon" has already been tried and failed. The government sees it as a way to fleece rich environmentalists and has no interest in abandoning their meal ticket.

Even if the government was aligned on keeping the Amazon as it was, they have their own enforcement struggles. Once an illegal developer has razed a plot of land, there's not really much the government can do to stop them. The damage has already been done. Even worse, by the time the government is even aware of a particular section of illegally cleared land, it's already been sold off, developed, and has people living in it. The only option now is to either:

1. Grandfather in the illegal land

2. Forcibly evict and ruin the lives of people who bought into the illegal purchase so that the scarred land can remain fallow for decades

Overwhelmingly Brazilian courts have chosen #1 over #2. Enforcement is too far behind land development to make any sort of "pay to save" scheme work.

And my point is that Brazil won't get rich by doing what it is currently doing. The primary sector won't enrich the general population or make the country more developed. Only some people favoured by the current government. That's what's currently happening, not some cuckoo theory.

Brazil is rich though, and largely because of those things. The fact that such richness is so unjustly distributed across the population is an orthogonal problem.

Yep. But one way of distributing this across the population is by favouring other sectors rather than strangling them to favour the primary.

The number of people working in the agricultural sector has only shrunk and will keep shrinking due to mechanisation/automation. The general population won't see the benefits of the primary sector growing, unless we have a Soviet-style wealth redistribution.

We can agree on that.

My point was not that the current model is a good one, but rather that its problem is not one of generating wealth but rather one of distributing it, which you just demonstrated as well.

I guarantee you, I was not defending the current focus on developing /latifúndios/ at the expense of everything else.

Ah perfect, then we're in agreement.

A lot of people assume I'm being a radical and saying Brazil should stop exporting meat/soy/etc. I'm not.

What I'm saying is that Brazil needs is a plan that's not simply "keep fucking the country even though it's not really working".

I'm not a fan of people from richer countries saying "Brazil should keep doing what it seems to want to do", because this is also way too favourable to them.

I'm not a fan of richer (or poorer!) countries saying much of anything about what other countries should or should not do. :) Everyone is biased. Everyone is hypocritical to some degree. We should find common ground, not impose or be imposed on.

Agree.

I think it's kinda easy to find common ground, but everyone should be allowed a voice. With the "shut up, let Brazil destroy forests, we did it too", the only people that seem to be getting a voice are politically-correct privileged people from rich countries (who want to keep taking advantage of Brazil), criminals in Brazil destroying the forest and the corrupt current Brazilian government.

There's a lot of people working in that automation. That earn much more and make the country more efficient, more production means more jobs down the road.

Also, countries like brasil don't export commodities just because they want, there 's a web of tariff to keep producing countries from industrializing those products.

> There's a lot of people working in that automation.

Sorry for the pun, but Brazil isn't really reaping the benefits of agricultural automation to compensate for the issues being an exclusively primary-sector exporter causes. Automation scales very well. Also notice that I'm not saying Brazil shouldn't keep doing what it is doing, I'm saying that other more developed-country-ish sectors should be expanded too.

> Also, countries like brasil don't export commodities just because they want, there 's a web of tariff to keep producing countries from industrializing those products.

If that's the case, then saying "Brazil needs to import primary sector stuff before they grow fo' real like us" is even worse :) They want Brazil to suffer before it has a chance to become a developed country.

They don't want more developed countries. Period.

Also, I don't know where you are from, but brazil has a healthy agritech industry selling know-how and technology to other countries.

The only people who "don't want more developed countries" are the people that want Brazil to keep being a primary sector exporter that suffers from Resource curse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse).

I'm from Brazil but I have lived abroad for a while. And what I said before doesn't negate the fact that Brazil has a healthy agritech industry. This industry still doesn't make up for the problems caused by the current policies. And one thing doesn't really negate the other. We don't have to kill the primary sector for others to develop.

You just described what basically goes on in every country.. some more blatantly than others.

Not exactly. What is happening now wasn't the reality in Brazil for some time before. Things were getting better.

The alternative to "not enrich the country" will be "make it even poorer and unequal than it already is".

Bullshit.

Brasil has >70% people working in the service sector. The percentage of people working in agriculture has actually shrunk since the Lula years. Mechanization and automation will guarantee it keeps shrinking.

The current economic measures are favouring only the primary sector to the detriment of others.

I'm not even calling for ceasing imports of agricultural stuff, all I'm saying is that the current madness is already making the people poorer.

It is precisely because so many people working in the service sector that the country does not get rich. Doesn't build any wealth, doesn't get to export anything.

And also, it is not the amount of people working that determines how to enrich the country. It is the overall output. Brazil has nothing but the agro sector at the moment. To build a stronger industry, they need to come up with the resources from somewhere. And agro is as good as any of the alternatives.

Yes, and? My point is precisely that those people aren't going to start working in agriculture. The number of people working in agriculture is only shrinking, and there's several labour problems with agricultural work in Brazil that won't cause farm/livestock workers to see the money.

I'm not suggesting people move to the services sector.

> The number of people working in agriculture is only shrinking

The number of people working doesn't matter. What matters is that the country gets through agriculture the resources needed to invest in the other sectors.

In theory that makes a lot of sense. Truly. In reality, believing that and going froward with this plan was an immense setback to the country and the population.

Europe/US/etc letting Brazil keep doing what it's doing is mostly helping Europe/US/etc at the expense of Brazilians and the environment.

I am not arguing in favor of the US or Europe, and I am also not arguing that Brazil should keep putting down trees just to sell more soybeans for the US and China.

What I am saying is that the rich countries need to quit their double standard. The EU keeps putting absurd trade barriers to protect their own farmers. The US subsidizes their corn farms, effectively killing the Brazilian industry for biofuels. European NGOs are financed to disparage Brazil's investments in hydropower, while depending on Putin for gas and coal.

So, yeah, agro business is far from ideal, but now is the only feasible alternative for Brazil to come up with any chance of development, and they will also work against that? I'd be more than willing to listen what they have to say if they were setting the example...

Alright then we're in agreement.

> What I am saying is that the rich countries need to quit their double standard. The EU keeps putting absurd trade barriers to protect their own farmers. The US subsidizes their corn farms, effectively killing the Brazilian industry for biofuels. European NGOs are financed to disparage Brazil's investments in hydropower, while depending on Putin for gas and coal.

Oh, I agree with all that. That's an important post.

> So, yeah, agro business is far from ideal, but now is the only feasible alternative for Brazil to come up with any chance of development, and they will also work against that? I'd be more than willing to listen what they have to say if they were setting the example...

I guess my whole point is that foreigners saying "we did it before to grow, Brazil should do it too" is nonsensical, hypocritical and very self-serving, precisely because of your second paragraph. At the same time, I'm ok with foreigners telling Brazil to stop cutting trees because it opens the door to us at least replying with something like the second paragraph.

Brazil is a rich country though. It's considered 2nd world due to violence, income/wealth inequality and sanitation problems, which are mainly political and not due to lack of money

Brazil is a top 10 economy only because of its population size. Per capita, it sits smack in the middle of the table and is behind "poor" countries from Eastern Europe and the Caribean.

Due to its inequality, I'd venture that a chart compared median income levels would put us below most African countries. Brazil can be an amazing place to live if you are already wealthy (and if you are willing to live surrounded by private security and completely removed from the reality of the population at large), but no one in their right mind would risk trading their lives with that of the median Brazilian.

It's considered "3rd world" actually, as much as the term is a bit useless. The term "2nd world" is reserved to former Soviet-aligned countries.

Think of it this way:

The countries pointing fingers at Brazil all did the same to become more developed and to make their population richer, they just want to stop Brazil from doing the same so they can keep the prices of commodities they sell higher.

They cheated but now don't want you to do the same in order to keep other countries in check, I mean, Europe is burning more and more coal, they are just a bunch of hypocrites.

Fun fact: That "newspaper*" that published the article is from Argentina, which is destroying the "Chaco" region as we speak and burning large areas of wetlands to increase the area for growing cattle, a market in which it's competing with Brazil.

Even thought the article is from another source, the BA Times belong to a company aligned with the Argentinian government which supports Lula in Brazil.

> The countries pointing fingers at Brazil all did the same to become more developed and to make their population richer, they just want to stop Brazil from doing the same so they can keep the prices of commodities they sell higher.

My point is that what made US/EU rich isn't what Brazil is doing. And even if it were, what makes a country rich pre-1900 won't exactly work in 2022. Brazilians could buy machinery from other countries. They don't have to go trough some mini industrial revolution again.

> They cheated but now don't want you to do the same in order to keep other countries in check, I mean, Europe is burning more and more coal, they are just a bunch of hypocrites.

It's even worse in my opinion, because people here actually do seem to think that "the west" has it under control nowadays, which is one of the dumbest things I learned recently.

There are so many factors which were omitted in order to create that misinformation, but there is only one thing you can trust the industry to do: suppress any information which could negatively impact them, even if it could very well become an existential threat ...

>mistakes

Yeah, that's a very hard sell, when your country is in such a shameful state, your economy is hanging by a thread that's agriculture, and without it your currency would be so messed up you'd be unlikely to be able to pay for the device you're typing that on. When you pledge for your own country that's suffering from hunger to reduce agriculture, you're part of the problem.

What does it have to do with anything?

Import oriented agriculture/livestock is not really serving the local economy or making the country grow. Like other poster said, "Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation".

People used to eat meat in Brazil every day, now even some middle class people had to reduce due to prices. The same goes for gas. That's because the economy changed heavily to favour primary sector exports at the detriment of every other activity.

Agriculture and Livestock were benefited at the detriment of every other sector.

EDIT: I wouldn't be able to even dream about buying the device I'm currently using if I were still working as a software engineer in Brazil, dude! I had to immigrate, as have about >60% of the co-workers I had in the last 10-ish years. The economical bullshit you're currently defending was shit even for people in well paying positions. However I was lucky, as my parents were immigrants themselves and I have foreign citizenship due to that. Some people weren't as lucky!

If you don't understand how the vast majority of goods made in your country helps your economy, you terribly need to read some economic theory. I suggest Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Brazil didn't suddenly deinvest other sectors out of a whim, they became less relevant thanks to economic pressure. To assume otherwise is accusing the entire country of incredible stupidity, which is laughable when you demonstrate so much lack of knowledge.

Oh nice, more condescension. I'll let it pass. Here's a real reply:

This might work in aggregate, but doesn't really help the average Brazilian, nor makes the country become developed. If the economic measures are only favouring the primary sector, the "vast majority of goods made in [my] country" is only making money for an extremely small part of the population. Plus, these measures are causing shrinkage of other sectors that actually would help the population richness grow.

What is happening only favours people in the primary sector (which isn't really employing that much people despite continuous growth) and richer countries buying cheaply for us.

Hypocrites who want Brazil to keep being a giant farm/ranch of the world selling cheap stuff are a problem as big as the country's government. Go away with your colonialism.

Note this is probably a false dilemma. According to Brazilian federal police, the recent deforestation surge is caused by illegal logging, not agriculture or cattle raising. Source in Portuguese: https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/nacional/pf-grilagem-e-madeira-...

Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation.

That's a very important post.

> Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation.

Thanks for putting it into words in a way I couldn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...

I'm not sure its accurate though. The marginal rate of forest coverage loss seems to have dropped substantially since 2008.

Fine, that's even better then: it continuous decreased from around 2004-2014, when the country was really really growing fast and fine af, to the point it was able to totally ignore the 2008 financial crisis. Amazeballs.

By the way the president from the first of those years is running in the next election. There's still hope.

Ilegal logging is the first step. Take down the valuable trees, burn the remaining, and finally start raising cattle.

The majority of deforestation took place prior to 1910, says Wikipedia. We didn't know nearly as much back then about the problems it would cause. So I'm not sure it's hard to criticize this when seeing it in 2022.

The USA could easily decide they would like to restore 50% of the forest by reclaiming farmland and exurbs and planting back trees. In 50 years it could be a large wild forest. Perhaps not old growth like before. So what is stopping this? It would cost a huge amount of money and drive food costs up dramatically. So even though it was not really as appreciated then to keep forests, it still is empty talk because nobody will pay to reverse those decisions as benefits are being reaped from it. So yes the USA is still not in a position to criticize without doing anything themselves or paying to preserve the Brazilian forests.

Brazil will face the same consequences as everyone else.

They can be mad that other countries got rich in the past, or they can put their big boy pants on and preserve something that is just as critical to them (probably more so critical to them) as everyone else in the world.

Sure, but you can face the consequences with a higher development, or face them while also suffering from widespread poverty or malnourishment.

Nah. It’s gonna be either both together or none at all.

Like another poster mentioned, when Brazil was growing, deforestation was shrinking.

The meme that the Amazon has to be destroyed for the country to grow is quite new. Please stop spreading it. I got people there.

So, now that we know should we replace some portion of the trees?

We are, up 2.6% from 1990 to 2010: https://rainforests.mongabay.com/deforestation/2000/United_S...

Sure, I don't have a horse in this race.

Killing the Amazon is a crime. Nothing done in the US or anywhere else changes that, regardless of whether that was a crime, too.

It is also not hypocritical unless you personally cut down a tree, or unless you believe in the collective responsibility of nations. I don't think 'the Brazialians' are responsible for killing the Amazon -- it's probably a minority of people and we shouldn't care which nation they belong too. This is a serious global problem, and it accidentally happens in some country. Neither collective blame nor collective shame will help. This problem must be criticised.

Well, crimes should not go unpunished, and if we can, revert the wrongdoing.

What are US or Europe citizens, NGOs and governments doing to restate their forests to, at least, their pre-industrial magnitude? Recover your environments before lecturing and chastising us third world humans.

It all depends on when it happened. We evolved as a species and what was perceived as normal way less than 100 years ago would be considered outrageous by today's standards. As an example, if you take 10 highly successful Hollywood movies from the 1950s, chances are that in 7 of them a woman is forced into kissing the male lead; do it today and your career is over. And we're talking about people, not trees. Back then we didn't know what damage we were bringing to the environment, now we do, so I think it's perfectly logical to call Bolsonaro a corrupt criminal while closing an eye on similar events from over a century ago.

Same goes for Europe.

We love to point the finger at Brazil and other developing countries, while profiting for centuries from deforestation of our own territory.

Maybe we should simply plant 18 new trees per second in the West?

The modern situation is different though. All those trees were used to bootstrap the current level of technological progress that Brazil doesn't need to do.

Ideally wealthier countries would purchase/subsidize these areas so they don't need to be logged

Yep. Brazil doesn’t need to go trough another industrial revolution. Germany is happy to sell machines to Brazil.

Yes. Use eminent domain to crawl back the suburbia. Pay people what is the value of newly forested land. Then provide them some living place few square meters is proven to be enough by examples in East Asia.

Could you explain why you want to grow trees on the 1% of land that has housing on it, instead of on the 99% of land that hasn’t?

Because grass, one of the the world's most well tended and sprawling crops, doesn't help feeding people near as much compared to the other 99% of the land that isn't "housing".

Because every bit helps and everyone should be ready to make some minor sacrifices for the planet. After all they are asking others to die from hunger.

Thanks for sharing, wasn't aware. The timelapse here is quite evident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forests_of_the_United_States#D...

Why do governments not start an international reforestation / ecological fund and pay some of their GDP into it so that it would make economic sense for Brazil, Australia and others to preserve their forests, kelp, reefs etc. These carbon credit half measures are pitiful.

Western governments pay part of their GDP for NATO, but defending against ecological collapse might be higher priority.

Governments tax citizens by force all the time. If it’s going to be used for anything, it should FIRST AND FOREMOST be used to coordinate large scale activity to mitigate negative externalities. And there’s no bigger one than the ecosystem collapse we are starting to see around us.

(Printing more money btw will only accerate consumption. There is very little thought to sustainability in most human economic systems.)

  > Why do governments not start an international reforestation / ecological fund and pay some of their GDP into it

they are busy pouring their gdp into competing with one another...unfortunately,our current economic system is based on endless growth and competition instead of equity and cooperation; i doubt anything will happen until its too late...

Exactly. Competition instead of collaboration means that organizations can’t meaningfully get together and solve large externalities before it’s too late. Same with wars.

We need to get our governments to work together and get things done, as they did with the Toronto Protocol but over and over. The United Nations can work to implement software-like release cycles of more and more mechanisms that facilitate cooperation between countries, even as they bicker.

Sadly, I do not think such solutions will be implemented top-down, and the bottom-up ones may take too long. But we can try !!!

With my idealists hat on: that would be great. Plus, it would suddenly make economic sense to build desalination plants and pump water into deserts and plant trees there.

With my realist hat on: that money will disappear as quickly as dodgy ngo can write empty “project proposals”. Trees will be planted, press fotos made, and trees will die. 70 years of “development aid”.

I'm pretty sure most of the damage was done before people realized the significance of deforestation.

We certainly now know the impact of deforestation, and that it affects the entire planet.

The eastern US forests cover 1.55 million km^2. So, no, it is not "largely gone". Granted, a considerable fraction of this is regenerated after being clear cut.

The Eastern Forest has fragmented a lot since it first started being settled, but don't exaggerate for dramatic effect. Vast tracts of it remain or have regrown and many of the eastern US states are thickly, heavily forested in ways that would make, say for example a European gaze in wonder at actually seeing them. Even many urban Americans simply have no idea just how many and huge the remaining or regrown eastern forest sections of the U.S are. They don't see them and their limited sight of woodland largely consists of scattered fragments around their cities, where obviously, the least forest would be visible. Also worth noting, they continue to grow back each year. You can largely thank industrialized, centralizad agriculture and urbanization for that.

You absolutely can and we have been doing so since, probably the 1970s. I think this hypocriticalness should continue. The world is FULL of hypocrtical shit and it doesn't stop of from trying to do what is right.

You are looking at this issue one-dimensionally. It is very easy to criticise given that we now know what the impacts of deforestation are a lot better than we did a century or three ago.

Optimizing profit since 1800. Didn't Napoleon sold Louisiana because of the consequences of Anglo-German bankers speculation on European economy?

two wrongs do not make a "right"

It doesn't and I am not advocating cutting down all the forests. But it is very easy to have had already done it, reaped the benefits of being an agricultural/economic powerhouse and then tell a developing country that was not good. Is the USA now reversing that mistake by turning farmland and sprawling suburbs back to forest? No. It could be done. It is just that will cost something to do. It is easier to tell someone else to not cut down their forest. That does not cost anything.

Timber and beef are not the significant chunks of the world's economy that they once were. There are alternatives now for consumers and for economic planners.

Alternatives that don't lead to future death of entire ecosystems and the impoverishment of large sections of the world's population.

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