Why even a leftist govt under Lula may not restore Brazil's forests

=To hear many people talk, the fate of the planet hangs in the balance depending on the outcome of the second-round vote in Brazil’s election. On one side is Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the leftist who all but halted the logging of the Amazon in his term as president from 2003 to 2010. On the other is Jair Bolsonaro, the Trumpy right-winger who razed the rainforest and pushed deforestation last year to nearly double its levels during his first year in office.

A sharp left-right dichotomy is a common way to think about the stakes in the runoff poll on Oct. 30. Still, as with the candidates’ economic platforms, their forest policies have a lot more in common than you might expect.

While Bolsonaro’s management of Brazil’s ecosystems has been appalling, Lula’s policies on forest protection were already being loosened under the presidency of his successor and party ally Dilma Rousseff. Dependent, like Rousseff, on the votes of an agribusiness-dominated bloc in Congress that’s more dominant now than it was in his first term, he’s made efforts this time around to woo farming interests who strongly identify with Bolsonaro.

The central plank of Lula’s forest policies has always been a sort of devil’s bargain: In return for protection for the Amazon rainforest, soy and beef farming would see few restrictions in the cerrado savannahs, a less renowned biodiversity hotspot of open forest and grasslands that stretches to the south and east. About half of the cerrado has already been converted to farmland, and expansion is still under way. In the Matopiba region on the borders of Maranhao, Tocantins, Piaui and Bahia states east of the rainforest, a land rush has been going on over the past decade to exploit the country’s last agricultural frontier.

Barely more than 5% of Brazil’s soy is grown in the northern region that’s more or less synonymous with the rainforest. Most deforested land in the Amazon is given over to cattle, rather than crops. Major grain processors have refused to buy soy from the Amazon since a 2006 moratorium, and landowners there have for decades been required by law to leave 80% of their holdings undisturbed, compared with levels of 20% or 35% in the cerrado.

That sacrifice is probably a worthwhile compromise. The Amazon has matchless potential to store carbon in its trees, roots and soils, and government data indicate that the relatively small amount of deforestation in the rainforest still results in more land-use emissions than the vastly greater volumes of industrial agriculture happening elsewhere. 

It is a compromise nonetheless. In the cerrado where soybean predominates, the drive in recent years has been toward intensification — converting degraded pastures into soya fields, and using the animal feed that results to fatten herds on smaller plots and in shorter timespans than on a typical Brazilian ranch.

That switch results in emissions of its own. The soils of the cerrado hold about 24 billion tons of carbon, compared to 36 billion tons in the Amazon — most of it in the top meter of the soil. Switching that earth from trampled pasture to row crops that are tilled every year results in substantial releases into the atmosphere. One study last year from Uruguay showed that pasture-to-soybean conversion resulted in a sevenfold increase in land emissions.

Any Brazilian president is going to contend with the fact that developing a country that’s suffered years of economic stagnation depends upon increasing volumes of its largest farm exports: soybeans and beef. And there is a potential route to make this work in tandem with environmental safeguards. More protections for the rainforest are likely to speed ratification of the stalled free-trade agreement between the European Union and the Mercosur trade bloc, of which Brazil is the largest member. Injecting more rigor into the confused and often scammy world of emissions offsetting could even generate sustainable revenue streams for land preservation, and turn the country’s nascent carbon market into something worthy of the name.

Even so, the path is narrow. A Lula victory would allow him to use his executive power to veto a suite of damaging agriculture bills currently stuck in Brazil’s Congress and staff up the neutered agency responsible for preventing illegal deforestation, but results may not show up for some time. One study in June argued that sheer policy inertia is likely to push Lula’s target of net-zero deforestation well past 2025. 

His first administration proved that deforestation can be prevented in the Amazon, but only at the expense of declaring open season elsewhere in the country. Should he win a third term in office later this month, he’ll need to repeat the same trick in the less iconic savannahs of the cerrado. Current plans would only be enough to start reversing the damage of the past few years. To really turn Brazil into a climate leader, Lula needs to go further.