Land clearing in tropical countries for
production of export crops gets a lot of attention, and rightly so. However,
the understanding of the mechanisms involved and how to allocate the effects of
deforestation in terms of environmental damage or carbon emissions, is still
very low. While it is true that exports are important for this, most
deforestation are driven by domestic factors.
A study by Henders
et al (2015) show that in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Indonesia,
Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea one third of deforestation was embodied in exports
in 2011, up from a fifth in 2000. This means that two thirds of the
deforestation is driven by domestic factors.
In the study beef was identified as the main
driver of forest loss in the seven countries, accounting for nearly 60 percent
of embodied deforestation and just over half of embodied emissions. Soybean
production was the second largest source of embodied deforestation area whereas
oil palm was the second largest source of embodied emissions.
But one can argue against how to allocate
emissions and land use changes. For instance, pasture areas in Brazil have been
stable in the last decade, while grazing has moved towards the forested areas
because it is more profitable to plow and farm crops in the pasturelands than
to graze them. It might be more correct to allocate impacts of land use changes
based on the relative expansion of agriculture area for different crops or
production in a country. In the case of Brazil, it would mean that soy
production would still be a major cause of deforestation, but sugar cane
cultivation would carry 20 % of the burden of deforestation and associated
carbon emissions while beef from pasture would carry almost none of this, This
would be the case despite that there is very little sugar grown in the recently
deforested zones and a there are a lot of animals grazing there.
A study of de Ruiter
et al (2016) goes a step further and state that “all global LUC [Land Use
Change] emissions should be allocated to agricultural land itself, not only to
recently cleared land, resulting in a calculated average emission of LUC for
every hectare in agricultural use.” This means that an average hectare in
Europe would have the same emission factor as a recently cleared patch in the
Amazon – LUC emissions of 1.18 tonne of CO2e for every hectare of agricultural
land.
One can of course argue back and forth; it is
simply not the case that we can say that one way of counting is the correct
one. But it can hardly be correct to let any “meat” carry the burden of
deforestation in the Amazon; it is not primarily the consumption of Amazonian
pastured beef, nor the fact that European pigs eat Brazilian soy beans that drive
Brazilian deforestation. It is simply cheaper to import Brazilian soy than to
feed European animals with European protein feed. Europe has taken much bigger
areas of farm land and pasture out of production than Brazil has opened. It is
still correct to allocate the emissions caused by deforestation to the agricultural
system, but rather to the globalized trade than to the consumption of any
particular commodity. One can make a similar argument about soy bean oil from
Brazil or palm oil from Indonesia or Malaysia.
Another complication with all these
calculations is that they are based on a rather static view of developments,
while the reality is a lot more dynamic. For example in our farm we are now
clearing 10 hectares of secondary forest for making pasture for cattle. If we
allocate carbon emissions from deforestation per kg meat for a ten year period
in a similar way as is mostly done in LCA analysis our meat will be responsible
for several hundred kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents per kg! But the
wood will, perhaps, replace other wood in the paper pulp industry, or will be
used for renewable energy. And regardless of that, the land was open and grazed
some fifty years ago, even earlier it was a wetland (emitting a lot of
methane). Sweden has lost more than a million hectares of pasture land in
hundred years, and previously cattle, sheep and goat also grazed the forest
which was not at al as dense as it is now. None of these aspects are covered
well with the current approaches, neither with LCA analysis of a particular
production, nor with macro-level studies as the ones referred to above. We
actually get government (EU) support for restoring this pasture.
de Ruiter H, Macdiarmid JI, Matthews RB,
Kastner T, Smith P. 2016 Global cropland and greenhouse gas impacts of UK food
supply are increasingly located overseas. J. R. Soc. Interface 13: 20151001.
Henders S. et al 2015, Trading forests:
land-use change and carbon emissions embodied in production and exports of
forest-risk commodities, Environ. Res. Lett. 10 (2015)
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