Food and Deforestation

Economic development and Population Growth in China leading to increasing need for food. This has lead to the clearance of land for cattle ranching and growth of soya bean as food for cattle in the Amazon.

Chinese beef imports have jumped by about 50 times since 2011, reaching a million tonnes in 2018. China consumes 28 per cent of the world’s meat. And it has turned to Brazil, home to the world’s largest cattle herd, to feed its appetite for beef. Last year, Brazil shipped 1.64 million tonnes of beef, 44 per cent of which went to China. 

Amazonian forests are being cleared for farms at a worsening rate. In the first nine months of 2019, deforestation was up by 93 per cent from 2018 and  at a 10-year peak.
China still has a massive livestock industry, which is why the country is buying not only Brazilian beef, but also soya beans, a vital grain in animal feed. Tariffs on American soya beans have made Chinese buyers look elsewhere, so 75 per cent of their soya bean imports in 2018 came from Brazil as its shipments to China jumped by almost a third. 
To ease the transportation of the soya beans, one of the infrastructure project is to build more than 40 dams to turn the Tapajos River and its tributaries in the Amazon into an industrial waterway fit for large ships. The indigenous people are negatively affected as there is no longer enough fish to make fishing viable.The land is taken away from them for cattle ranching and growing soya beans. The water is contaminated and this brings diseases through the dirty water.



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https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/cnainsider/china-hungry-for-food-amazon-left-counting-cost-beef-soya-beans-12097850

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