Do you like a meat? I like meat. In fact, Brazil's main dish is the meat with beans so that consume of meat in Brazil is significant. However, the appetite for meat has a negative impact on environment. Today, I would like to introduce you how the export of Brazilian beef leads to deforestation in the Amazon.

Brazil is well known for the largest beef exporter across the world and the beef production has increased dramatically in here. Approximately 60-70% of Amazon has deforested to being used for cattle ranching, which leads to large amounts of carbon dioxide emission causing greenhouse effect. Interestingly, these beefs are not main factor to harm environment. The emission of carbon dioxide from cattle is zero while the average for carbon dioxide emissions from the beef's digestion and feed production is twice as high as that in Europe.

The study from Environmental Research Letters says that 30% of Brazil's carbon is emitted from deforestation, 29% of the one is due to soybean product and 71% are from cattle ranching. It is expected that the rate of deforestation will be increased and the beef export is also going to rise in the future as well. The report said that the greenhouse gases will be raised more due to beef production than the transportation industry (The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization).

As I mentioned the soy above as one of factors of emission in Brazil, some people might wonder what it could be related to. You can imagine soy with soy milk and some health stuff for human. However, most of soy is used to feed for pork, cattle or farmed fish so that expansion of soy for meat demand has resulted in deforestation.

Furthermore, biodiesel and ethanol are produced from soy and sugarcane, which lead to raising the land prices. Unfortunately, the vicious circle is repeated by for ranchers buying more land for cattle in less expensive place, northern regions. Unfortunately, Brazilian's desire to continue economic growth seems strong. We have a promising huge nature, Amazon, but at the same time we have a serious risk element to damage environment, a heavy producer of carbon dioxide.

In conclusion, I intend to decrease a lot my meat consumption and could be great if other could do the same in order to protect our environment of negative impacts.

Source : ScienceDaily / RTCC news / WWF Global