The Real Deal with Deforestation and some Lingerie

Who let the cows out?

This morning after breakfast, Robin le Breton, one of the owners of Iracambi, gave Nathan, Rogeria, and me a full tour of the property and surrounding areas. Robin has lived here for many years and is very knowledgeable about the history of the area, reforestation practices, and the complications of conservation efforts and intentions.

The roads around Iracambi are all primitive dirt roads (some more than others), but Robin's Land Rover handled them all very well. It has been raining intermittently since Friday night, and so we drove through the mud, and our views were often obscured by clouds.

The dark green stripe on the hill is a coffee plantation.

Coffee farming is a large endeavor in Brazil; in fact, Brazil produces more coffee than the entire African continent. However, a big problem with coffee plantations is that there is next to no vegetation anchoring the topsoil. Robin said that if you ask the farmers how much soil is being carried downstream per year, they will tell you "about 1 ton". In reality, it is more like 90 tons (I assume this is per field or per square kilometer of plantation). This soil is washed downstream and ends up (in this area) in Muriae, where there are not as many hills. The stream and river beds fill up with soil, causing major flooding problems for the city. In response, the city of Muriae plans to build a dam costing around 50 million reais; had they spent even 10 million reais on erosion control measures upstream, the problem could have been avoided completely.

Another major driver of deforestation and resistance to reforestation is cattle farming. Much of the land has been clearcut for this purpose; in fact, 93% of the Atlantic Rainforest in Brazil has already been lost to deforestation. With the removal of the trees and the accompanying biodiversity from the landscape, the soils quickly lose most of their productivity, since by themselves they are extremely nutrient-poor. A hillside like the one on the bottom left can sustain approximately one cow for one week per year. In fact, the land can sustain only an average of one cow per hectare of pasture per year. Interesting note: I asked Robin if the cows were primarily used for meat and he said no, they are mostly dairy cows. This means that much of the milk in this area is unsustainable, and I am debating whether eating milk products while I am here is at all feasible. (It isn't a huge issue, about half of my diet consists of rice and beans anyway).

There are several Brazilian laws that deal with the preservation of forest on farmland. There is supposed to be a 30 meter border of forest on each side of a body of water, and the tops of the hilltops are supposed to be forested. However, there is almost no enforcement of these laws, and as a consequence, it is rare to see any forest next to streams or on the hilltops, as those are the flattest areas in this landscape and therefore best for farming or grazing.

To reforest a pasture like the bottom left picture, the land would have to be left fallow for 4-5 years before any trees planted there could even survive there. However, the farmer would likely have to sell one of his 20 cows (most farmers here are small-scale farmers), thereby reducing his income by 5%. This is a big deal and unlikely to occur unless he can be compensated somehow for this loss.

According to Robin, there are 4 main reasons to reforest that are economically feasible.

1. Water Quality

Forests around bodies of water significantly improve their quality and make for safer drinking water downstream. But who would pay for these forests? The clear answer is: the consumers of the water downstream. A survey about the willingness of people to pay extra for water quality was done in the town of Muriae, with very interesting results. The poor people declared themselves willing to pay more for their water to improve the water quality. The middle and upper classes stated that "they pay too much for water as it is" and would resist an increase in the price of water.

2. Air Quality

It is well known that trees clean the air and sequester carbon, so planting more trees would improve the air quality. One possibility for funding is to tax everyone who breathes. Another system that is technically in place but lacks structure and is unsuccessful on the smaller scale is one in which large companies pay "fines" for the pollution they put into the world. These "fines" are then used for reforestation and thereby mitigate the pollution. This system is fine for large areas: if a company from the US can pay several million dollars to a large preserve in Brazil to plant several million trees, then the system "works". However, reforestation needs to occur much more than several million trees at a time. Every patch of forest matters, but there is no system in place for large international companies to pay small local farmers for the half kilometer of forest they plant on their land, because how would a company know if that is what their money is actually going to? As a result, the small farmers have no monetary incentive to replant the forests, and continue to degrade the land by raising cattle and growing coffee.

3. Biodiversity

Although for us preservation of biodiversity seems like an obvious issue, many of the people here fail to see the intrinsic value of having a large number of species on their land. Robin told us about another survey that was done in which people from Norway were asked if they would be willing to pay $50 per year for the conservation of giraffes in the Serengeti. A great majority of them said yes. Ask many Brazilians the same question, even about preserving biodiversity in their own country, and they will look at you like you're crazy. (Note: these data have not been fact-checked, I am only retelling what Robin told us).

4. Ecotourism

Ecotourism offers the possibility that conservation of rainforest could be truly economically feasible. If people from other countries pay money to see rainforests and animals, bringing in money from the outside, then there would be an incentive to reforest and preserve. However, there is currently no infrastructure in place, especially in this region, for this kind of tourism, and very few tourists actually come here.

Eucalyptus plantation that is not in Iracambi; notice the lack of undergrowth.

A comment about Iracambi: although Iracambi's mission is rainforest conservation, it used to be a dairy farm and there are still cows on the property that belong to Iracambi. Eucalyptus is also grown as a cash crop here. Eucalyptus forests have notably poor biodiversity, but Robin grows many different types of eucalyptus mixed together, and this allows there to be an undergrowth with higher biodiversity in the eucalyptus plantations at Iracambi.

Now, you are probably wondering why I mentioned lingerie in the title. The story is this: Binka le Breton, Robin's wife, asked if anybody could do video editing, and I volunteered, having made a few videos for school and considering myself generally technologically capable. When I met her, she explained that a lingerie company that makes lingerie out of organic cotton and recycled plastics, called Dorina, has sponsored Iracambi's community outreach and reforestation efforts. They want to have videos of what they support on their website, and a few weeks ago, a group of local schoolchildren came to Iracambi to learn about the forest in an effort sponsored by Dorina. They were all given shirts to wear that said "Dorina Goes Green", and were filmed doing activities and interviews. Although I was originally tasked with creating those videos, that task has been passed to someone else. I will spend the next two days sorting through the footage and finding good clips for the videos and then relay the information to the videographer (who has much more experience than I do). Additionally, Dorina has a Brazilian model for their products who lives in New York, but she will come to Iracambi in the next few months to do a photoshoot here. Of all the things I expected to be doing here, I have to say, it was never this!

Thank you for reading! In the next few days/weeks, I plan to do a couple of themed posts, such as what I eat, what animals I've seen, and what the different buildings are like. Additionally, next week we will begin planting trees, and I will make sure to update!