Tropical rain forests are home to near half of the world’s biodiversity. They used to occupy 14% of the earth’s surface, but now they represent only 7% of it; in fact, experts predict they will soon disappear (“Geoexplorer”). The Amazon Basin is the largest rain forest, and most of it is located in Brazil. The rate of deforestation in the Amazon rain forest is 4.8 million acres per year, which is equivalent to approximately seven football fields a minute (Laurence 1). Deforestation is a sad reality in our current world and it will probably never stop. However, there are various techniques that, if practiced in different disturbed areas of the Amazon forest, will diminish the rates of deforestation in this Brazilian forest.

Deforestation is the destruction on great scale of the forest by human action. Forests play a key role in the storage of CO2.  If they are eliminated, there will be CO2 excess in the atmosphere, leading to global warming. The reasons that lead to deforestation are very complex, and involve economic and social problems of Third World countries. Soils in rain forests are not nutrient rich; nutrients are stored in the plants. Therefore, farmers must abandon fields rapidly and look for a different place to grow their crops. Hence, there are near 165,000 square kilometers of empty fields, which have been abandoned in the Brazilian Amazonia (“Science” 2). The canopy, the second highest layer of the forest, acts as a protective cover maintaining the humidity and shade necessary for other plants to grow. When this layer is removed, other small trees and plants die massively. In addition, the way logging occurs and the processes that are carried out in the soil after deforestation have a direct relation with the amount of nutrients available; and therefore, the time it takes to the forest to regrow.

A possible solution to the problem of deforestation is to encourage farmers and large scale timber companies to use different techniques of logging. The most common logging technique currently used by farmers in the Brazilian Amazon is known as “slash and burn”, which consists of cutting all the trees in an area where crops will be grown, and then burning them there. The purpose is to clear a field and release the nutrients available in plants and pass them to the soil, because most of the nutrients in the rain forest are in plants and not in the soil. However, after the first rain, these nutrients will flow away and the soil will be left naked. Crops will not grow properly and farmers will have to abandon the area rapidly. If farmers grow crops known as “shadow lovers” (e.g. coffee), they will be able to use alternative techniques of logging such as reduced impact logging (RIL). In this case some trees will remain, usually the older ones, thus the ecological balance will not be completely destroyed. If some of the trees are left, the nutrients available may diminish, but will not entirely disappear. Farmers will be able to settle in one place longer, without having to continuously adapt fields for working. Furthermore, RIL has been proved to be 12% cheaper than other methods such as clear cutting (leaving no trees) (“Science” 2). In conventional logging, old trees are cut down and then thrown away because their damaged trunks are not useful. This represents a loss of money and work. Using RIL, those same trees are left to balance the forest ecology.

As mentioned earlier, the Amazon rain forest has a large number of empty fields. Reforestation techniques may not work in some of these regions. However, if the field in question has not been affected by pesticides, it can be recovered in about 20 years.  In general, intensive agriculture (e.g. Banana Plantation) uses many pesticides and changes the hydrology of the soil. On the other hand, small farmers do not affect the chemical composition of the soil so drastically. The fields these farmers leave behind can be recovered using two different techniques. The first one is called “direct seeding”. As the name implies, direct seeding involves directly placing seeds for new trees in the soil. An advantage of this technique is that the seeds will develop in the same place they are planted. As no transplantation is therefore necessary, they will grow more naturally and quickly. The other technique involves planting young trees. This latter technique has a better survival rate, but it is also more expensive. Both techniques will successfully recover partially disturbed rain forest. 

In order to slow the existing rates of deforestation, we must to change the traditional idea of preserving the rain forest by creating reserve parks. Instead, existing laws regarding logging and mining should be enforced in the entire Amazon area, not only in specific parts. Previous preservation projects selected limited areas to turn into parks. Only 4 percent of the Amazon rain forest is currently protected (Carvalho et al.  8). By protecting only small selected areas, the great biodiversity of rain forest is ignored. In the tropical rain forest there is an average of 20 to 86 species of plants per acre (“Rainbowbody”). This range also means few individuals per species, and it is common not to find individuals of certain species in a specific zone. There has been some progress, however. The Brazilian government has changed its legislation regarding the Amazon rain forest. The previous legislation encouraged people to settle in the rain forest. As a consequence, about 12 million people live in the Amazonia, and this population increases by 3.7% a year (“Science” 4). One of these changes is that the Brazilian government stipulated that 50 percent of the land involved in a development project in the Amazonia must be left as uncut forest (Laurence 4). Legislation necessary to preserve large percentages of the forest therefore already exists. It is up to Brazil’s federal environmental protection agency, Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaveis (IBAMA), to enforce it. 

Although Brazil’s legislation has improved regarding the protection of the Amazon rainforest, some Brazilian laws regarding taxes still encourage deforestation. In order to augment the use of the Amazon rain forest, taxes charged to the products obtained from the Amazon rain forest are very low. The amount charged may continue to be even lower depending on the intensity of the use of the land. Therefore, they support large corporation and ranches. These laws increase the demand of land for agriculture and pasture. Reforming these laws will greatly support the goal of diminishing deforestation rates.  Laws of taxes on agricultural income exempt between eighty and ninety percent of this income. An effective way of claiming possession of land is cultivated by a law recognized since 1850 that states that if a person lives and uses effectively public land for a year, this person has right to own it. In Brazil small farmers pay no land taxes and large farmers pay 3.5 percent of the unimproved value of the land. This amount can be reduced according to the productivity of the farmer. It is imperative that the government change its definition of land use. Then, land use will not be defined by how many products can we take from it, but as a balance between these products and the forest ecology. In order to no longer facilitate the deforestation of fields by large companies, taxes should be increased.

Diminishing the rates of deforestation will not only preserve the world biodiversity, but will also attenuate the conditions that lead to global warming. At this point of human history many species have already disappeared. This process is a part of natural evolution, but it is also true that one of the impacts of humans is the premature loss of a great amount of species and a large list of endangered species. It is important for us to take measures in this matter, and one of these measures is preserving the rainforest that provides habitat for more than half of the world’s plant and animal species. Climate changes have been increasingly notorious during the past years, where the rainy seasons in some areas have been longer than they used to be and other times shorter (“Climate changes”). As a consequence, there are times of the year when flooding is a major problem, and other times when there is lack of water. These climate changes are a result of the growing phenomenon of global warming.

There is much we can do to diminish rates of deforestation in the Amazon rain forest. The use of reduced impact logging will lessen the damages in the soil as well as decrease the costs of logging. Direct seeding and planting will help recover already disturbed land that is no longer being used. Enforcing existing legislation that supports preservation in order to protect large percentages of rain forest and improving the Brazilian legislation that encourages deforestation will also result in a lower rate of deforestation. By combining these efforts, we will eventually reach a point, where the ecological balance of the rainforest will no longer be threatened by the human impact.


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