Soy: food, feed, and land use change - new Foodsource resource, please share in your networks
Walter Fraanje
The piece is part of our Building Block series. It considers the great increase in the production of soy globally and the impacts this has on native vegetation in the Brazilian Amazon and elsewhere. The Building Block asks how far deforestation and land use change are attributable to the growth in demand for soy based foods for direct human consumption, and how far they are a consequence of our rising demand for soy-fed animal products. It also looks at the measures that have been put in place to try and halt further land use change and the limitations of these approaches, and concludes by considering how discussions about soy map onto wider debates around livestock and food system sustainability.
Ray Kowalchuk
Part of your conclusion is that the cheap soy oil consumed by humans and the more valuable soy cake "originate from the same bean, there is a mutual and economically convenient dependency between their uses." Isn't the cheapness of soy oil because it is a byproduct of the animal feed production? It's a bit like saying that gummy bears and sirloins are both responsible for the carbon impact of cows -- if not for the please-take-our-wastes nature of the slaughterhouse in its production of steaks, the candy manufacturer (a few blocks away from its source of bones, at least where I am in Toronto) would have switched to a plant-based source of gelatin. While you identify the soy cake with highly desirable characteristics, soybean oil has no charms amongst oilseeds alternatives (other than carving a few cents off of production).
"A common pattern, however, is that land is first cleared for cattle ranching and shortly afterwards sold or rented out at a higher price for more lucrative soy production."
Though "Soy" is the first word in your paper's title, I see other three-letter words, "cow" and "pig" indicted for deforestation throughout, whether it's ranched Brazilian beef or soy cake for export to Asian CAFOs.
Ray
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Simon Ward
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Jude Capper
On 4 Feb 2020, at 17:38, Ray Kowalchuk <editor...@gmail.com> wrote:
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Jude Capper
On 4 Feb 2020, at 18:13, Simon Ward <simon...@increment.co.uk> wrote:
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Walter Fraanje
Many thanks for your comments. Ray, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the role of soy oil is insignificant as it still accounts for around 1/3 of the overall value of a volume of crushed soybeans. I haven’t looked up any figures, but I assume that bone/gelatine accounts for a much smaller part of the overall value of a slaughtered cow.
There’s some controversy over the extent to which soy production would be driven by the demand for soy oil or soy cake. I believe this to be mainly the result of the difference in the value of a kg soy cake and a kg soy oil: 1 kg soy oil is about twice the value of 1 kg soy cake. This has brought some people to the conclusion that, because a kg oil is more valuable, soy production must be driven by the demand for oil in the first place.
However, as we wrote in the building block, about 80% of the weight of a volume of crushed soybeans consists of soy cake and only 20% of soy oil. If you calculate the value of the oil and the cake as a portion of the overall value of a volume of crushed soybeans, you see that 1/3 of the overall value is covered by the oil and 2/3 by the cake.
For this reason, I wouldn’t agree that soy oil is insignificant as a driver of soy production. Neither would I say that soy crushing would mainly be done for oil extraction, as the value of the cake (as a portion of the overall value of a kg crushed soybeans) is significantly higher and because soy cake is a valuable source of protein for the feed industry. (Simon, I agree that this might be different for other oilseeds.)
Hence our conclusion that it is likely that the growth in soy production has primarily been driven by the demand of soy cake for feed, but that this growth is accommodated by the demand for soy oil.
Perhaps another way of saying this is that I wonder if soy production would have grown to the extent it has, if the cake or the oil would have been of significantly less value to the feed and food&fuel industries respectively.
All the best,
Walter
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Simon Ward
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Ray Kowalchuk
If last year's burning freed up land for development, this year was much more lucrative, with a record number of forest fires that the citizens of the world agree was alarming and tragic. We can set aside, for the moment, the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and his overt statements and dogwhistle politics that led to the Day Of Fire, where 70 farmers and land grabbers coordinated a "Day of Fire," where they set areas along a highway ablaze as a gesture to their new president that they "are ready to work." There must be a solution to prevent ranchers from owning rainforest (the intent is there to burn it and grow cows or feed crops upon it) or to buy degraded land from developers, to interrupt the staged depletion of land (as a Livestock Sustainability Consultant, the repeated land change from forest to pasture to crop to depleted must be frustrating).
How do we stop this "land ownership issue" where landgrabbers who hold this irresponsible definition of "improvement" ("clearing the forest and growing something - the easiest thing being cattle on pasture.") As you point out, Dr. Capper, it's not cows, avocados, or quinoa, that are the "culprits," the problem is the enabling of opportunists, ranchers being only the most motivated and rewarded when successful.
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Ray Kowalchuk
Regarding the rainforests of South America and elsewhere, the right kind of agriculture with which to replace them of course does not exist. I've encountered this argument with the vilification of palm oil -- we can put a moratorium on it, boycott it, but it is a hydra -- cut off the most lucrative head and deforestation will resume for the next product, as long as land is seen as something that generates money instead of life, and the jungle as something that inhibits development, instead of promoting a thriving biosphere.
So is agriculture on former rainforest producing a mixed bag of products of equal sin? The systematic degradation of land draws attention to the land-grabbers as cash-grabbers, taking turns extracting nature's gifts never offered, no semblance of sustainability. The slash and burn modus operandi is further facilitated by climate change, in both the loss of the moisture regulation of the rainforest (which is, apparently, fireproof when healthy and uncompromised, and the source of "flying rivers" that are responsible for the successful irrigation of the rest of South America).
I subscribe to the notion that the Amazon Rainforest is a feature of Planet Earth, not a resource for Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro to monetize. He is not here, but I dare to play his blunt mouthpiece: What right do those in developed nations, once covered in forests yet denuded over hundreds of years in the construction of their economies, to say that Brazil cannot do the same? If forests are so precious, why is 40% of the contiguous USA dedicated to the production of cows alone? Why are they so well-fed, and watered, while a billion people are not? We have our own lessons about extractive land practices to ponder, as we preach. There is a global solution needed here, and an appetite for something other than destruction.
Ray
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Dr Jude L. Capper
Ray-
Apologies – I told you all that I knew in the email below, except that, although it seems to be trendy to blame everything on multinationals, I haven’t seen any evidence of them being responsible for any of the forest-cattle-crop land ownership issues.
However, this paper (https://oxfordre.com/environmentalscience/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.001.0001/acrefore-9780199389414-e-102) has some useful insights on the same topic that you might be interesting.
Cheers,
Jude
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Dr Jude L. Capper PhD ARAgS
Livestock Sustainability Consultancy
Simon Ward
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Ray Kowalchuk
My mention of multinationals was a speculation, a parenthetical with a question mark...my focus was on Brazilian national farmers, who hedge their bets that a pro-industrialist President isn't going to punish them for montetizing the Lungs of the Earth. More pointedly, I don't blame cows, I blame ranchers (and if we curb the appetite for the most lucrative products, beef and soy, attention shifts to any deforestation for the sake of avocados or palm oil.
You've referenced a 25-page, 14,000 word article without specifying what I "might find interesting." The author, Phillip Fearnside, is certainly credible. I'll give it more of a read later, but I decided to skip to the conclusion:
Is Brazil’s Amazonian Deforestation “Development”?
The term “development” implies a change with an effect that increases human well-being. This is not to be confused with “growth,” which refers to an increase in the throughput of matter and energy in a human society and may or may not benefit well-being (Daly, 1996). Fortunately, development does not necessarily require growth, which is subject to sever planetary limits (Steffen, Richardson, Rockstrom, Cornell, Fetzer, Bennett et al., 2015). Limiting factors within Amazonia restrain many types of use (Fearnside, 1986b, 1997c; Fearnside & Leal Filho, 2001). To be considered sustainable development, the productive systems must continue to yield their benefits for a very long time, theoretically indefinitely, the Brundtland Commission’s (1987) caveat regarding nonrenewable resources notwithstanding. Many of the most common land uses, such as extensive cattle pasture, are unsustainable (Fearnside, 1983). In the case of cattle pasture, which dominates deforested areas in most of Brazilian Amazonia (Fearnside, 1996; INPE, 2014b), the human population supported per unit area of deforestation is minimal: the productivity and financial benefit are small, and there is even less of a local benefit (Fearnside, 2005a, 2013a, 2016c). The question of who benefits is, of course, critical to defining what is development; this author has argued that the people living in Amazonia must be benefited in order for undertakings in the region to be considered “development” (Fearnside, 1997b).
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