Em matéria publicada neste 18 de outubro, o diário inglês faz um julgamento sem apelo em relação ao contexto social, higiênico e ambiental em que se produz no Brasil uma das carnes mais baratas do mundo. Não poupa, en passant, os criadores de gado ingleses, que estão há anos derrubando a sua própria base de sustentação, ao cobrar combustível barato e mamar subsídios da União Europeia. Em ambos os casos, o jornalista, caracteriza a produção de carne bovina como uma das mais ineficientes entre as atividades de conversão de alimento em carne.
Quanto ao Brasil, destaca o seguinte: até 1990 o Brasil produzia carne suficiente somente para abastecer seu mercado interno. De lá para cá seu rebanho cresceu em 50 milhões de cabeças, tornando o país o primeiro exportador mundial. A Grã-Bretanha é o quarto comprador. Uma região só do Brasil responde por 80% do crescimento registrado: a Amazônia. Os últimos 3 anos foram os mais destruidores da história da Amazônia brasileira. Em 2004, 26.000 km² de floresta se foram em cinzas. Este ano pode sair pior ainda. A criação de gado é o primeiro responsável. Segundo o Centro de Pesquisa Internacional sobre Floresta, os pastos nesta região respondem por 6 vezes mais deflorestamento do que a lavoura. Até a famosa soja – responsável por 5 milhões de hectares de desmatamento, ocupa somente a décima parte da superfície das pastagens. Os quatro estados que dominam na produção de carne são tambem os campeões na taxa de desmatamento. Ao continuar assim a criação de gado estará ameaçando 40% das florestas úmidas ainda existentes, as quais constituem não só um ecossistema de enorme diversidade como tambem a maior reserva de carbono em pé. Sua destruição poderia provocar um desastre hidrológico na América do Sul, já que as chuvas vão recuando junto com as árvores. Da próxima vez que você assistir a uma reportagem sobre queimadas na floresta, lembre que você é quem pagou por isso.
Muitos brasileiros, especialmente entre aqueles cujas terras são cobiçadas pelos fazendeiros, tentam barrar a destruição. Os criadores de gado têm um argumento eficaz: aos que se queixam, mandam matar. Em fevereiro passado, ouvimos um eco dessa matança que já custou 1200 vidas, quando foi assassinada a irmã americana Dorothy Stang – a mando, tudo indica, de criadores de gado. Como em toda a Amazônia, estes fazendeiros receberam proteção da polícia.
Pelo mesmo motivo e apesar dos esforços do presidente Lula, os fazendeiros empregam hoje em torno de 25.000 escravos nas suas fazendas. Gente que é transportada desde seu estado de origem para milhares de quilômetros afora, para em seguida, serem obrigados a comprar a preços inflacionados na cantina da fazenda, cairem no endividamento permanente. Devido à criação de gado, o trabalho escravo multiplicou por cinco nos últimos 10 anos no Brasil.
Somente um governo que – apesar de seus melhores esforços – fracassou em deter a escravidão, a matança e a catástrofe ambiental, pode ter a ilusão de nos fazer acreditar que suas normas de higiene animal recebem o mesmo rigor de aplicação que em qualquer outro país. Qualquer um que já andou na Amazônia sabe que ali não existe certidão que não possa ser comprada, e que são poucos os locais onde autoridades oficiais não estejam em conluio com quem elas tem por missão de inspecionar. Se a febre aftosa for endêmica na Amazônia brasileira – tida pelo governo como livre de infecção – os ministros em Brasília serão os últimos a sabê-lo.
Parlamento inglês debate limites do combate ao trabalho escravo no Brasil
Em debate ocorrido dia 13 de outubro na Câmara dos Lordes, no parlamento inglês, o Conde de Sandwich (Lord John Montague, membro do Conselho da venerada Anti Slavery International – a mais antiga entidade de combate ao trabalho escravo no mundo), parabeniza e ao mesmo tempo aponta limites no considerável esforço iniciado pelo Brasil para combater o trabalho escravo. "Felizmente o Governo do Presidente Lula adotou recentemente medidas de reforço da proteção ambiental que representam passos gigantes, mas a região é tão vasta e incontrolável, e os recursos tão limitados – em parte em função das limitações macroeconômicas e do endividamento nacional."
Segundo disse o lorde, o desmatamento, a criação de gado, a exportação de madeira e a lavoura de soja, e a continuada impunidade, pesam mais que as políticas governamentais – embora as mesmas tivessem sido reforçadas a partir de março de 2003 – para deter o aliciamento e a escravização de mão-de-obra praticadas no Brasil. Apesar do trabalho arriscado realizado por vários ativistas (entre eles, destacando a CPT), funcionários e magistrados (entre eles destacada atuação da justiça do trabalho, com suas varas itinerantes) para denunciar, investigar, libertar e punir, o cenário de impunidade continua, em decorrência da insuficiência das penas criminais previstas (e mesmo assim não aplicadas) e de uma atuação insuficiente da polícia federal. Com isso, a própria meta do governo federal – erradicar o trabalho escravo até 2006 – já está fora de alcanço na região amazônica e fora dela. "Após um início promissor em 2003 e notáveis mudanças, o Brasil está hoje demonstrando, por várias razões, uma falta de compromisso para por fim ao desmatamento ilegal e ao trabalho escravo. Para cumprir no futuro com suas obrigações junto à ONU, o país precisará receber da comunidade internacional muito mais encorajamento e suporte material."
Frisa ainda ele na matéria que, em ação recente, a Anti Slavery cobrou do Governo brasileiro um apoio maior aos vários atores da campanha contra o trabalho escravo, e a realização efetiva de seus próprios planos de reforma agrária, além das políticas sociais adequadas para prevenir os trabalhadores da recaída constante no ciclo da escravidão.
Lorde Sandwich conclui: "Peço ao Governo de Sua Majestade que faça o máximo para reforçar essas recomendações. Afinal, nosso país é um dos principais parceiros comerciais do Brasil, e um importador de sua madeira e de seus produtos agrópecuários."
Leia abaixo a íntegra, em inglês, da matéira do The Guardian:
Are You Paying to Burn the Rainforest?
If you're buying Brazilian beef, the answer is yes
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 18th October 2005
For the past five years I have been at war with Farmers for Action. These
are the neanderthals who have held up the traffic and blockaded the
refineries in the hope of persuading the government to reduce the price of
fuel. It doesn't matter how often you explain that cheap f
uel, which
allows the supermarkets to buy from wherever the price of meat or grain is
lowest, has destroyed British farming. They will stand in front of the
cameras and make us watch as they cut their own throats.
But through gritted teeth I must admit that they have got something right.
In January the caveman-in-chief, David Handley, warned that foot and mouth
disease had not been eliminated from Brazil, and that imports of meat from
that country risked bringing it back to Britain(1). The buyers brushed his
warning aside. In the first half of this year, beef imports from Brazil to
the UK rose by 70%, to 34,000 tonnes(2). Last week an outbreak was
confirmed in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul.
You would, of course, expect British producers to throw as much mud as
they can at cheap imports. You would expect them to question their
competitors' hygiene standards and social and environmental impacts, and
Mr Handley has done all of these things. But, to my intense annoyance, he
is on every count correct.
Unlike him, I do not believe that British beef farmers have a God-given
right to stay in business. We shouldn't be eating beef at all. Because the
conversion efficiency of feed to meat is so low in cattle, there is no
more wasteful kind of food production. British beef producers would be
extinct were it not for subsidies and European tariffs. Brazilian meat
threatens them only because it is so cheap that it can outcompete theirs
even after trade taxes have been paid. But if it's unethical to eat
British beef, it's 100 times worse to eat Brazilian.
Until 1990, Brazil produced only enough beef to feed itself. Since then
its cattle herd has grown by some 50 million, and the country has become,
according to some estimates, the world's biggest exporter: it now sells
1.9 million tonnes a year(3). The United Kingdom is its fourth largest
customer, after Russia, Egypt and Chile(4). One region is responsible for
80% of the growth in Brazilian beef production. It's the Amazon(5).
The last three years have been the most destructive in the Brazilian
Amazon's history. In 2004, 26,000 square kilometres of rainforest were
burnt: the second highest rate on record(6). This year could be worse. And
most of it is driven by cattle ranching.
According to the Center for International Forestry Research, cattle
pasture accounts for six times more cleared land in the Amazon than
cropland: even the notorious soya farmers, who have ploughed some five
million hectares of former rainforest, cover just one tenth of the ground
taken by the beef producers(7). The four Amazon states in which the most
beef is produced are the four with the highest deforestation rates.
Cattle ranching, if it keeps expanding in the Amazon, threatens two-fifths
of the world's remaining rainforest. This is not just the most diverse
ecosystem, but also the biggest reserve of standing carbon. Its clearance
could provoke a hydrological disaster in South America, as rainfall is
reduced as the trees come down. Next time you see footage of the forest
burning, remember that you might have paid for it.
Many Brazilians, especially those whose land is being grabbed by the
cattlemen, are trying to stop the destruction. The ranchers have an
effective argument: when people complain, they kill them. In February we
heard an echo of the massacre which has so far claimed 1200 lives(8), when
the American nun Dorothy Stang was murdered – almost certainly by beef
producers. The ranchers believed to have killed her were, like cattlemen
throughout the Amazon, protected by the police(9).
For the same reason, and despite the best efforts of President Lula, the
ranchers are now employing some 25,000 slaves on their estates(10). These
are people who are transported thousands of miles from their home states,
then – forced to buy their provisions from the ranch shop at inflated
prices – kept in permanent debt. Because of the expansion of beef
production in the Amazon, slavery in Brazil has quintupled in ten
years(11).
So a government which – despite its best efforts – has failed to stop
slavery, murder and environmental catastrophe, expects us to believe that
its farm hygiene standards are as rigorously enforced as those of any
other nation. Anyone who has worked in the Amazon knows that there is no
certificate which cannot be bought, and few local officials who aren't
working for the people they are meant to regulate. If foot and mouth
disease is endemic in the Brazilian Amazon – most of which is now
registered by the government as "safe" – the ministers in Brasilia will be
the last to know.
When the disease last hit the UK, in February 2001, it was blamed by the
British government on meat imported by Chinese restaurants. But in April
of that year, we discovered that the farm on which the outbreak started,
at Heddon-on-the-Wall in Northumberland, had been taking slops for its
pigs from the Whitburn army training camp near Sunderland(12). The army
had been importing some of its beef from Brazil and Uruguay, two of the
strongholds of the type O strain which infected our herds. The ministry of
defence insisted that it came from "disease-free regions" of South
America. One of them was Mato Grosso do Sul, the state in which foot and
mouth has just erupted.
So who, in this country, has been buying it? Tesco says that "well over
90%" of its beef comes from the UK. It has stopped buying Brazilian since
the outbreak last week, but can't tell me how much it bought before then,
because that's "commercially sensitive"(13). I went round one of its
stores and found that all the fresh beef was labelled "British" in big red
letters. But six of its own-brand processed meals (generally the cheaper
kinds) contained "South American beef", three contained "South American/EU
beef" and one just "beef". Most of the brands supplied by other companies
contained only "beef"(14).
Sainsbury's admitted to buying 5% from Brazil until the disease was
reported(15). The man from Asda told me his chain bought "less than 2%" of
its beef from Brazil this summer and nothing since(16). The main market,
he claimed, is restaurants and pub chains. I tried Mcdonalds and Burger
king: they both say they don't buy from Brazil. So does the pub company
Wetherspoons. Punch Taverns doesn't buy food, but its tenants are supplied
by catering companies such as Brake Brothers. Brake Brothers admits to
buying Brazilian beef, but the volume is, again, "competitively
sensitive"(17). This doesn't necessarily mean that any of these firms have
been buying beef from the Amazon: but buying beef from elsewhere in Brazil
creates a hole in the domestic market, which will be filled by the growing
production in the rainforest. So, given that we're importing tens of
thousands of tonnes a year, where has it gone? Where's the beef?
Perhaps the Guardian's readers could help me locate it. Unlike other meat,
fresh beef's country of origin must – because of BSE – be printed on the
packet. So, with a little detective work in shops and supermarkets and
round the back of pubs, schools, hospitals and barracks, it shouldn't be
too hard to trace. Once you've found it, I suggest you back away.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. No author, 5th January 2005. FFA calls for Brazilian import ban.
Farmers' Weekly.
2. The Meat and Livestock Commission, 12th Augus
t 2005. European Market
Survey 05/31.
3. Dan Buglass, 12th October 2005. Brazil on alert after foot and mouth
case. The Herald.
4. The Meat and Livestock Commission, ibid.
5. David Kaimowitz, Benoit Mertens, Sven Wunder and Pablo Pacheco, 2004.
Hamburger Connection Fuels Amazon Destruction: Cattle ranching and
deforestation in Brazil's Amazon. Center For International Forestry
Research
http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/publications/pdf_files/media/Amazon.pdf
6. William Laurence, 15th October 2005. Razing Amazonia. New Scientist.
7. ibid.
8. Gareth Chetwynd, 2nd April 2005. 'Broad conspiracy' behind nun's
killing in Brazil. The Guardian.
9. Ibid.
10. Larry Rohter, 25th March 2002. Brazil's Prized Exports Rely on Slaves
and Scorched Land. The New York Times.
11. ibid.
12. Joe Murphy, 29th April 2001. Army 'caused original foot and mouth
infection'. The Telegraph.
13. John Church, Tesco press officer, 17th October 2005.
14. Tesco, Cowley Road, Oxford, 17th October 2005.
15. Sainsbury's press office, 14th October 2005.
16. Asda press office, 14th October 2005.
17. Simon Henrick, Brake Brothers, 14th October 2005.
