Brazil, home of the amazon rain forest, is a major source of soy beans. A major US corporation is exporting soy from Brazil to the United States and Europe, causing land prices there to increase almost 20%. Millions of acres of rain forest have been turned into soy fields. Since we don’t eat that much Chinese food in Europe and the US, who is consuming all this soy? It’s being fed to cattle and other livestock.
In the Independent, Andrew Gumbel writes that “an estimated 20% of the Amazon rainforest has already been destroyed, and about 6,500 square miles more was lost between 2005 and 2006.”
Gumbel writes about a 2006 Greenpeace report titled “Eating Up the Amazon,” which accuses the US corporation Cargill of being “directly or indirectly responsible for slave labor, illegal land grabs and deforestation at a rate of six football [fields] per minute.” This is a human-caused tragedy of a magnitude that is comparable to global warming, since there are a lot more important products than soy that we can get from that land. Another tragedy is that we can’t seem to figure out how to feed cattle without harming humans.
Art credit: gimp-savvy.com
Not everyone knows where Whitley first got the message to research global warming? do you? Please make sure we’ll still be here tomorrow: subscribe today to our new IMPROVED subscriber section! Use the coupon “reup” and get 10% off your first subscription period.
NOTE: This news story, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.
Subscribers, to watch the subscriber version of the video, first log in then click on Dreamland Subscriber-Only Video Podcast link.