When you try your best but you don't succeed.
For decades, the third-generation rancher in northern Brazil watched guiltily as his industry, feeding soaring global appetite for beef, razed ever more jungle. So, gradually he experimented with grasses and grazing techniques that today make his ranch one of the most efficient in Brazil. Costa became a model for those who believe beef can be raised profitably and sustainably – even in the Amazon.
The admission, from a rancher so"green" he addressed attendees of a United Nations climate gathering last year, illustrates the hurdles to responsible development in the Amazon jungle. The Amazon, a jungle larger than Western Europe, is a crucial natural bulwark against climate change. It's a major source of the world's oxygen and fresh water, its vegetation a giant filter for greenhouse gases.
Last year, after a climate conference in Madrid, he tweeted a photo of a large, rare steak, joking that he was offsetting the meeting's carbon emissions with"a veggie lunch." When challenged by lawmakers, environmental activists, and Brazilian media about his comments at the cabinet meeting, Salles in a statement said he had always supported deregulation"with good sense" and"within the law.
In 2009, Brazilian prosecutors threatened to identify and prosecute companies buying beef from illegal pastures. The big meatpackers, in response, started using satellite imagery and data to better track suppliers.But the data only showed the land farmed by the immediate seller – not pastures where cattle grazed previously. Because there is no unified system to trace cattle transfers between ranches, going further has proven impossible.
But the Environment Ministry shelved the project after Bolsonaro won, according to three people familiar with the decision."It could have really made a difference," said Juliana Simoes, one of the people and a former ministry official who led the effort. At 17, Costa moved to Para for good, working for a while on his father's ranch and later taking jobs at other ranches and a nearby slaughterhouse. Paragominas, the sawmill town nearby, was so violent it came to be known as"Paragobala" –"Paragobullet." The farm had no electricity, the roads and surrounding woodland dangerous.Soon enough, he met a fellow rancher's daughter. They fell in love, married and started a family.
Costa's zeal for conservation came not from a love of nature, but of numbers. He keeps a large Casio calculator in his ranch office and punctuates his conversation with clicks on its keys. Despite the ecological wealth that woodland represents, cleared land sells for multiples what virgin rainforest does because farmers find it more useful. The dynamic discourages conservation, incentivizing destruction even if fields aren't ranched.When leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva became president in 2003, he sought to tackle deforestation.
By 2015, the boom fizzled, draining government revenues. Rousseff and her successor, Michel Temer, cut financing and stripped powers from Ibama, Brazil's environmental agency. State and municipal authorities, squeezed by budget shortfalls of their own, struggled to fund law enforcement vital for monitoring destruction locally.After early success tracking supply, the 2009 agreement with meatpackers to better monitor ranches yielded less progress than hoped for.
The industry is so opaque that even ranchers sanctioned for deforestation sell their cattle easily. Moises Berta, who ranches near the frontier town of Novo Progresso, was fined by Ibama in 2016 for illegally cleared land. He admits he cleared the tract, but said he had no other choice to make a living.
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