Per below:  I first read about the Cerrado  in a Nature Conservancy article 
years ago where it was described as a  biodiversity hotspot.  It has at least 
10,000 plant species, 600 bird  species, including some endemics, and 200 
mammals.  The megafauna  include the maned wolf, giant armadillo, jaguar, and 
ocelot.  
 
Below, it seems that agriculturists and  environmentalists aren't talking the 
same language when it comes to  "harm."  Converting most of the Cerrado to 
agriculture may be  necessary (or at least inevitable), but is losing all that 
wild land and  biodiversity really causing no harm?  And as a tallgrass prairie 
 advocate, I hate to read any implication that only natural areas with trees  
really matter.
 
In recent REGISTER editorials, the Cerrado has  been referred to as "barren" 
and "unproductive."  Meanwhile  at conservation meetings I attend, the term 
"rowcrop desert" is used as a  matter of course.  
 
How can agriculturists and environmentalists around the  world bridge this 
huge language gap?  And how can we make  progress in saving what's left of the 
wild world if we don't try?
 
Cindy
 
***
 
Laureates: Farming renders no harm to Brazil
This year's World Food Prize winners say the changes  they helped bring about 
actually have helped the environment.

_By JERRY PERKINS_ (mailto:[log in to unmask]: Farming 
renders no harm to Brazil) 
REGISTER FARM  EDITOR


October 21, 2006




Opening Brazil's vast Cerrado region to agriculture has  improved - not hurt 
- the environment, this year's World Food Prize laureates  say.

The three men - American Colin McClung and Brazilians Edson Lobato  and 
Alysson Paolinelli - were credited with helping turn the 300 million-acre  inland 
region in Brazil into some of the most productive cropland in the  world..

Norman Borlaug, the Iowa native who founded the World Food Prize  in 1986, 
has called the opening of the Cerrado one of the great agricultural  
achievements of the 20th century.

Critics say farming in the Cerrado has  harmed the habitat for frogs, birds 
and other species.

The three  laureates said Friday at the final event of the two-day 
international World Food  Prize symposium in Des Moines that the environment has been 
enhanced by the  coming of agriculture to the Cerrado, which means "closed" or 
"inaccessible" in  Portuguese.

"Don't confuse the Cerrado with the Amazon" rain forest,  Paolinelli said. 
"It's completely different."

Environmentalists say the  cutting of large areas of the rain forest in the 
Amazon has contributed to the  buildup of greenhouse gases in the Earth's 
atmosphere by removing trees, which  turn carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Paolinelli, who was Brazil's Minister of  Agriculture from 1975 to 1979, said 
the Amazon forest is being cut by people  leaving Brazil's urban areas and by 
illegal logging, not by farmers.

"It  is not economical to cut down the Amazon forest and plant corn," 
Paolinelli  said. "It would take many, many years to pay off."

In the Cerrado, he  said, trees are not being cut down to make farmland.

"You don't cut one  tree," he said. "We're recovering the pastures in the 
Cerrado."

McClung,  who did pioneering soil research in the Cerrado in the 1950s, said 
cover crops  have been planted in the Cerrado to prevent soil erosion.

"There's no  evidence of degradation," McClung said.

Lobato, who built on McClung's  soil research, said there was some soil 
erosion when the Cerrado was first  farmed extensively but said that has been 
corrected.

Brazilian farmers  are required to keep 20 percent of their land in natural  
habitat.

Conservation International, a Washington-based group, is working  to get 
farmers to comply with the set-aside law.

"We need agriculture,"  John Buchanan, the group's director of agriculture 
and fisheries, has said. "We  don't intend to stop it in Brazil, but we need 
smarter and better  agriculture."

Lobato said that if a farmer is profitable, he or she is  more apt to pay 
attention to protecting the environment.

"A farmer's  first concern is to pay his bills," Lobato said.

Ed Schuh, a professor at  the University of Minnesota and an expert on 
international trade, cited research  showing that the opening of the Cerrado has 
slowed the cutting of the Amazonian  rain forest.

"The flow of people to the Amazon in the north is coming  primarily from 
people living in the highly populated regions in Brazil's south,"  said Schuh, who 
is married to a Brazilian and owns a 1,300-acre farm in the  Cerrado.

"Development of the Cerrado in the center of the country is  cutting off some 
of that migration, and people are settling in the Cerrado and  not going on 
the Amazon."
***  




Cindy Hildebrand
[log in to unmask]
Ames, IA  50010

"The autumns of Iowa are somewhat peculiar in their beauty and  serenity. The 
oppressive summer heat is over by the last of August, and from  that time 
until the middle of November, the mellow softness of the climate, the  beauty and 
grandeur of the foliage, the dry and natural roads that cross our  prairies, 
the balmy fragrance of the atmosphere, the serene sky, all combined,  present 
to the eye of the traveller a picture calculated to excite emotions of  wonder 
and delight." (John B. Newhall,  1841)

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