David Munk and Gareth Chetwynd in Santarém, Brazil Saturday December 20, 2003 The Guardian
The dry, yellowing fields stretch out to the horizon, past shiny new silos, their polished tin gleaming in the noon sunshine. Beside freshly hoed fields stand new tractors and ploughs.
Look past the neat farmstead and on to the plain and you could think yourself in Kansas, maybe Texas - but then there would be no accounting for the billowing smoke in the hazy distance, the fires and the rainforest that they ravage.
This is the Amazon, a vast lung producing 20% of the earth's oxygen, and home to 30% of all plant and animal species. It is so immense that it would swallow Europe in full and three more Englands besides.
The rainforest is shrinking at a rate that is staggering environmentalists. Around 25,000 sq km (10,000 sq miles) disappeared last year - an area about the size of Belgium. Brazil's environment minister has confirmed to the Guardian that this year's figures will be as bad. Others think they will be worse.
Huge swaths of the land are being transformed not only by illegal logging companies and cattle ranchers, but also by a newer invader, the soya bean. For many the extraordinary expansion of this bean - used not only for its oil and food for humans but also as feed for cattle - is the new front in the battle for the Amazon.
From 300 metres above Santarém, a pleasantly old-time town in the state of Pará which trades at the coming together of two mighty rivers - the Amazon and the Tapajos - all does not look well to Fernando Bezerra. In the cockpit of his Cessna, he points all around and shouts: "That all used to be forest. Now, all soy."
He banks the four-seater plane into a tight turn, through vast plumes of smoke. Here the scene is hypnotic. Where the flames have passed, 30-metre trees stand like spent matchsticks. Others have fallen, forming a shadow of grey ash on the forest floor.
Mr Bezerra works for Greenpeace, which has put itself on the frontline of the battle in the region. It is a battle which regularly sees murder and threats of extreme violence, so that Greenpeace's staff must sometimes have police protection. Some of them carry bulletproof vests.
This week their campaign was highlighted tragically with the death of the 27-year-old London activist Emily Craddock. Her body was lifted from the Amazon river three days after she went missing from the MV Arctic Sunrise, the campaign boat that only days before had been in a confrontation with loggers on the Xingu river. The police are investigating her death.
Greenpeace and other frontline organisations say the vast expansion of soya is putting added pressure on the area. Driven by a rapidly growing market in China, Europe's growing tendency to feed soya to cattle, and the involvement of large multinationals, the land is being transformed.
The leftwing president, Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva, has publicly expressed a belief that the Amazon is "not untouchable". But in Santarém, the figures for expansion are startling. According to local officials, this year there are around 7,500 hectares (18,500 acres) of soya in production. Next year it will more than quadruple to 35,000 (86,500 acres). A year after that, the predictions are for a further doubling.
Cargill, the US food giant, has spotted the potential and built a vast soya terminal on a river bank in the town. The company is being challenged by the Brazilian government's environment agency, which is concerned that the terminal was built without an environmental impact report; but the evidence points to an escalation in development all around.
Highways
The important BR 163 route, linking Santarém with the city of Cuiaba 1,100 miles south, is to be paved - turning what is mainly a dirt road into a highway for soya growers, loggers and ranchers. This will undoubtedly bring prosperity to some in Santarém - but at what cost to the environment?
Local farmers say they are already coming under pressure to sell their land to big soya concerns. Conservationists say that without proper government control, the paving of the road will help those intent on destroying the forest.
A Brazilian law intended to regulate deforestation allows 20% of any given parcel of land to be farmed. Many believe this limit will continue to be ignored without extensive and effective policing.
At the centre of this conflict is Brazil's energetic and popular environment minister, Marina Silva, who took over the post in January.
Speaking to the Guardian, she said that despite a 20% cut in her department's budget, she was hoping to make headway. Inspections were significantly up on previous years and fines for illegal deforestation had risen 54%. But she admitted the task was enormous.
"I know that this year the levels will not be very different, because you can't change such a process in 11 months," she said. "These challenges are so huge they cannot be the work of one single person, one single ministry. It should be the effort of a government at large and a whole nation."
Campaigners say that if the problem is to be confronted head on, the problem of the soya revolution has to be addressed.
Cristovan Sena, a government forestry engineer, said: "Native primary forest is being destroyed at a much faster rate than was achieved by the loggers. In our region we will soon see the irreversible substitution of the rainforest by a landscape of grains... Saying that growers will respect the 20% limit is nonsense. You just have to look at what is being done now to see they don't respect legal reserves."
On the outskirts of Santarém, where the BR 163 starts to gather dust from the surrounding fields, Clovis Casagrande sits in his air-conditioned office, overshadowed by a vast processing mill.
Mr Casagrande farms 5,000 hectares (12,500 acres) of arable land and is generally regarded as the soya pioneer in the area. He has in the past formed partnerships with the Brazilian agricultural research institute and Cargill.
He admits that farmers want to farm more soy, but claims that the government's "20% rule" actually encourages deforestation: forbidden to cultivate more than a fifth of even deforested land, farmers buy up more virgin forest for partial clearance.
"Santarém has spectacular topography," he says. "There are areas where you can travel for 180 miles without seeing a ripple in the land. Perhaps the cheapest land in Brazil is here. All these factors make it an unbeatable agricultural frontier compared with any other region of Brazil."
But the social impact of large-scale farming is a factor that some feel is being overlooked. Jose Taveira da Silva, a rural workers' union leader, foresees the end of the small-scale producer, forced out - sometimes violently - by business muscle.
"The soya growers are following the loggers into land that was forested, and there have been cases of small farmers suffering threats or actual violence when they refuse to sell," he said.
"Small farmers produce for their own family and the local markets. Soya is geared to exports. Does this improve the lives of local people?"
At a conference in Santarém to discuss the sustainability of development in the region, David McGrath, an American researcher who leads projects in conservation and land management at Pará University in the city of Belém, says it is only a matter of time before much of the Amazon as we know it disappears.
"It is all going to go eventually, I think. But the question is, what kind of landscape is going to be the result of this process? Is the government going to get its act together and have effective presence, and order this process? Up to now there has been no effective government presence along the frontier.
"When you think this is a government for which the favelas of Rio are still outside state control, what do you expect on the frontier?"
Back in the smoky sky over Santarém, Mr Bezerra banks the Cessna over another farmstead. Standing next to the silver silos is a gargantuan tree trunk. It still stands 10 metres high, to where the chainsaw ended its climb. It is a symbol of what once lay on this land. Now the name of the farm, in metre-high letters, is painted on its side.