We will be screening a 48-minute documentary on deforestation by cattle-ranching in the Brazilian Amazon produced by the environmental newspapers website OECO and the Brazilian NGO Imazon. The screening is in Portuguese, but English subtitles are available. It will be followed by an open discussion about the documentary for those who can stay a bit longer (since the documentary will already take up most of our meeting time).

Description: There are 85 million cows in the Brazilian Amazon; for each person living in the region, there are three cows grazing today an area that was once forest. Less than 50 years ago in the 1970s, the rainforest was intact. Since then, a portion the size of France has disappeared, 66% of which transformed into pastures. Much of this change is a consequence of government incentives that attracted thousands of farmers from southern lands. Cattle ranching became an economic and cultural banner of the Amazon, forging powerful politicians to defend it. In 2009, there was a game changer: The public prosecutor's office sued large slaughterhouses, forcing them to supervise cattle supplying farms.

Website: https://www.videocamp.com/en/movies/sob-a-pata-do-boi#

For those who are interested in going a little further on this topic, please contact CASEL members Paulo Massoca or Martin Delaroche who wrote about the zero-deforestation initiatives in the soybean and cattle-ranching sectors in Brazil, which was the product of a collaboration between CASEL members (2017).