[OC] Sugarcane was first introduced to Brazil in 1532. Half a millennium later, the country produces over 700M tonnes yearly (roughly the same amount as all of Asia, and 7x the amount produced by Africa)thecapent t1_j828u2z wrote
Reply to comment by Fun-Management-7027 in [OC] Sugarcane was first introduced to Brazil in 1532. Half a millennium later, the country produces over 700M tonnes yearly (roughly the same amount as all of Asia, and 7x the amount produced by Africa) by latinometrics
Actually, not even soybeans are produced on Amazonian deforested areas in significant quantities (around 5% of the total yield I think).
Instead, the bulk of soybean production is done on the tropical savanna region of Brazil (the so called "Cerrado").
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtCmnj1XYAAaxyk.jpg
Also, the soil are quite bad in the areas covered by the Amazon forest (kind counter intuitive given the massive forest on top of it, but it is. The soil is too acid for soy and most comercial crops.)
You can see how the map of soybean production yields above correlates with the Cerrado area:
The real villains of Amazonian deforestation are:
1 - Wood extraction
2 - Illegal mining (mostly surface gold mining, one of few areas in the world left where gold can be mined manually with low technical knowledge).
3 - Cattle raising, this single one being responsible for 65% of all mapped deforested area.
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