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) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - To view the Sierra Club List Terms & Conditions, see: http://www.sierraclub.org/lists/terms.asp