Nearly 2 million acres — 3,100 square miles — of forested land were cleared for agriculture in the Brazilian Amazon in the year ending July 2016, while Bolivia has cut down 865,000 acres, equal to 1,351 square miles, annually, says The New York Times. “A decade after the ‘Save the Rainforest’ movement forced changes that dramatically slowed deforestation across the Amazon basin, activity is roaring back in some of the biggest expanses of forests in the world,” said the newspaper.
Brazil saw its first increase in deforestation in nearly a decade in 2015-16, said the Times, based on figures from a Brazilian agency, the National Institute of Space Research. The pace of land-clearing has risen since the 1990s in Bolivia, where the government has set a goal of food self-sufficiency. “The land-locked country has declared that it expects to clear almost 14 million more acres of forest by 2025, to convert into farmland.”
The U.S.-based environmental group Mighty Earth says two of the world’s largest grain traders and food processors, Cargill and Bunge, are the only known agricultural traders active in regions of Brazil seeing deforestation. The Times says it spoke to Bolivian growers involved in deforestation who sold soybeans to Cargill. “Both Cargill and Bunge said the report seemed to inflate its role in the deforestation,” said the Times.