The patchwork of Mato
Grosso: cleared land,
soybean fields and forest.
The land policies and environmental models
used to exploit the Mata Atlântica were replicated
in the country’s other biomes. A case in point is
the Cerrado, the world’s richest tropical savannah
in terms of biodiversity, where the greatest agricultural expansion in Brazil’s recent history has been
taking place. Since the 1970s approximately 60 percent of Cerrado’s 1. 2 million square miles ( 2 million
square kilometers) of savannah has been destroyed.
Today, the Cerrado is home to 13 percent of all world
soybean acreage. The furious pace of agricultural
expansion has devastated small farmers. Thousands
have been expelled from their lands, many of them
moving to the cities where, in effect, they changed
Cerrado’s demographic from a predominantly rural
population to a “majority who live in the cities in a
AMERICASQUARTERLY.ORG
matter of only two decades,” according to geographer
Pedro da Costa Novaes. The expansion policies have
also added considerably to Brazilian unemployment.
According to Novaes, Cerrado is the region where
commercial farming has made the least use of “jobs
per area utilized.”
Warning for the Amazon
Cerrado’s fate may be a picture of what lies in store
for the Amazon. The world’s largest tropical rainforest, which extends over 1. 6 million square miles
( 4. 2 million square kilometers) of Brazilian territory
(practically half the country), has already witnessed
the destruction of 18 percent of its forest. Although
the percentage may look small compared to the
destruction of other Brazilian biomes, studies sug-
