[rodolphoarruda]

As a Brazilian, I'm trying to imagine the logistical costs of running any type of large scale export oriented agriculture business in the Amazon. There is no railroad, no paved roads, no electricity, no workforce (human density is lower than 1 per square Km, let alone work aged humans), nothing. There's a lot of dense forest and water. Feeding cattle in large scale must be a huge expensive challenge in the Amazon region. Processing meat and moving it to ports, an insanely expensive work due to the lack of basic infrastructure. On the flip side, there are other regions in the country with at least 3 decades of accumulated expertise in animal protein production for the international market, good infrastructure, including proximity to sea ports. I don't see how a serious globally competitive animal protein group could make the decision to run business in such an isolated infra deprived area. It would be like someone from the Silicon Valley deciding to run a tech business in Antarctica for the sole reason the datacenter could be kept cooler at a lower cost using what nature has to offer in abundance in that region: cold weather. Amazon offers cheap land and water (period), but that is not enough to make a profitable animal protein business.

[acqq]

You don't have to "imagine" there are the pictures from the satellites which can be compared with the older:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HusBCLws0Q

https://youtu.be/L9zWDtDKDS8?t=45

[rodolphoarruda]

Interesting. Do you have videos showing cattle, warehouses, trucks etc.? With so much devastation, it must be easy to land helicopters anywhere out there and film the whole thing from close distance.

[acqq]

> Do you have videos showing cattle, warehouses, trucks etc.?

No. And I surely agree with you that the explanations are probably broad generalizations. I have no idea how those that do it earn money in any specific case, but deforestation is really happening across the globe and definitely in Amazon forests too.

https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/maps/amazon_deforesta...

Here is one description:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/Deforestat...

"This pattern follows one of the most common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon. Legal and illegal roads penetrate a remote part of the forest, and small farmers migrate to the area. They claim land along the road and clear some of it for crops. Within a few years, heavy rains and erosion deplete the soil, and crop yields fall. Farmers then convert the degraded land to cattle pasture, and clear more forest for crops. Eventually the small land holders, having cleared much of their land, sell it or abandon it to large cattle holders, who consolidate the plots into large areas of pasture."

As the name of the area depicted is stated in this case: "The state of Rondônia in western Brazil — once home to 208,000 square kilometers of forest (about 51.4 million acres), an area slightly smaller than the state of Kansas — has become one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon" you can do your own research starting from there.

Also:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

"The Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest, but in the last 40 years at least 20% of it has been destroyed. The Amazon basin covers nine countries in South America, with 60% of it in Brazil, and for a decade local photographer Rodrigo Baleia has documented the beauty and destruction of the region from above"