Is Americas focus on corn-based ethanol causing the destruction of the Amazon rainforest?
This is simply nonsense. Brazilian soybean production expanded long before the US began producing corn-based ethanol. Brazil’s soybean expansion has occurred in the cerrado, or tropical savannah, not the Amazon, therefore the contention that US production of corn is driving Brazilian deforestation is simply untrue. The expansion into the cerrado was made possible by breakthroughs in managing lateritic tropical soils, research for which goes back over a quarter century, and by the development of tropical varieties of soybeans. Dr. Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, called the development of the cerrado, “one of the great achievements of agricultural science in the 20th century.” (See http://www.worldfoodprize.org/press_room/2006/June/2006Laureates.htm) Nor is soybean development in Brazil headed into the Amazon. With more than one million undeveloped acres in the cerrado, and the much better logistics of growing and shipping from the cerrado when compared to the Amazon, the
