Amazon Forest under threat from soya crops

theguardian.com reported….Celso Carlos has made a modest living for 10 years growing manioc and coconuts and rearing poultry on a few hectares of lowland in Brazil’s northern Amazon.

But three years ago, out of the blue, Carlos was told by an Amapá state judge that he had to move because his land had been bought by a businessman living more than 1,500 miles away in São Paulo. Within months, fences had been put up, and Carlos and other assentados, or settlers, had been forced off their land.

Carlos’s land – along with hundreds of thousands more hectares across Amapá state – is the new frontier of global agribusiness. It lies unused for now but will almost certainly be sold on and used for soya production. The ubiquitous crop, which is part of most western diets and feeds billions of animals, will most likely be shipped as animal feed to the UK from a new Amapá port. Read Article