Eastern Par News Today

Environmental advocates routinely oppose mining and hydrocarbon-development projects because they believe that remote areas of the Amazon should remain pristine. Typically, they organize their opposition during the environmental review process with campaigns that focus on issues that are local (water quality), regional (biodiversity) and global (climate change). Occasionally, they succeed in stopping a project, but […]

New roads open wilderness landscapes to development, and commodity markets drive the expansion of the agricultural frontier. These two causes of deforestation are at the centre of deforestation policy discussions. A third factor – land values and their tendency to appreciate over time – is a synergistic product of these two phenomena. Understanding the dynamics […]

The most important production system in the Pan Amazon when measured by GDP is the cultivation of annual crops: particularly soy, but also maize, rice, sorghum, wheat and cotton. In Brazil and Bolivia, annual cropping is organized around soy, because export markets provide the potential for a very substantial return on investment. Industrial-scale farming is […]

The Pan Amazon spans approximately 825 million hectares, of which approximately ninety million hectares have been lost to deforestation; this corresponds to ~13% of the original forest cover. At first glance, this percentage value might not seem alarming, particularly in the context of the total extant forest cover. However, cleared land is embedded within landscape […]