Chocolate forests: Can cocoa help restore the Amazon? | PLACE
▻http://www.thisisplace.org/i/?id=03e9b550-6fb1-4dab-8392-64e5e61f73f6
Facchi illustrates a trend that is turning damaged parts of the Amazon basin green again and creating an usual alliance between the agriculture industry and conservationists. Brazil’s cattle ranchers are planting cocoa on their used-up pasture, with financial support from international environmental groups.
That’s a big change. For decades, ranchers have been the engine of clear-cutting in the Amazon rainforest that has rendered an area nearly the size of Spain treeless. Environmentalists have argued the practice destroys wildlife habitat and undermines the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide that causes global warming.
“Besides being a means of avoiding deforestation, cocoa plantations favor the local, regional and national economy,” the international environmental group The Nature Conservancy said on its website.
The young trees will also bring change to global cocoa markets. Brazil’s National Association of the Cocoa Processing Industry (AIPC) expects the surge in planting to help double the country’s output of the raw material in chocolate by 2028 to 400,000 tonnes a year. That increase would raise global output by about 5 percent.
#élevage #cacao #plantation #Brésil