History

Ranch expansion in the Amazon has been driven by the steady increase of beef consumption, the point of production is not the only driving force in the destruction of the rainforest- the consumers carry much of the blame.

Cattle ranching in Brazil began around the time of Portuguese colonization, taking over Indigenous agricultural practices and replacing them with the continuous cycle of deforestation. Forcing cattle ranching and other European farming practices onto locals, the Portuguese shifted the trajectory of farming in Brazil. In the 1960's, the Brazilian government began to rapidly expand colonization in the Amazon, paving roads and clearing miles of forest to extract as many resources as possible. The amount of cattle in the Amazon has increased about 15 times since the 1960s, many locals have turned to cattle ranching to make a living. Moving further into the rainforest as new roads were paved, cattle ranches began to saturate the landscape, clearing acres of trees and leaving trails of infertile land behind them. Cattle ranchers have depended on unsustainable farming, and now that they are being asked/forced to stop these practices without having much choice in how they achieve sustainability.

There are many activist groups working to combat deforestation, but many of them do not make the farmer's voices and agency the center of their activism. Shareholder activism, taking over farms for extended amounts of time to install technologies and reform practices, and efforts to change public policy are popular forms of activism in the Amazon, but they do not prioritize the agency of individual farmers.