The Western demand for beef and leather is dictating the current trend in overranching in the Amazon forests of Brazil, thus causing persistent deforestation. So says a three-year survey conducted by Greenpeace. Cattle seems to produce a lot of lucrative products and by-products: meat for fresh and canned food, leather hide for fashion, fat for toothpaste, face creams, and soap, and bone and ligament gelatin for yoghurt and candy thickeners.  

The cattle ranching trade is usually done on illegally deforested lands in the Amazon. Greenpeace wants a boycott of produce coming from these companies that practice deforestation for the purpose of cattle ranching. Last year, a similar move was done against illegally grown Brazilian soya, bringing about a moratorium on soya grown on similarly deforested lands. 

A Brazilian law stipulates that ‘such farms inside the Amazon region must retain 80% of the original forest within their legal boundary.’ Apparently, the law is not implemented because overranching and deforestation still persist. Evidence can easily be retrieved through technological innovations like the GPS that can produce data and images. 

The Amazon deforestation is a showcase of man-made disaster. The region has lost at least one-fifth of its forests since the 1970s. This lost area approximates the size of the state of California. The three top culprits in Amazon deforestation are logging, cattle farming, and soy plantation. Greenpeace has a program to stop deforestation in the Amazon by 2015. It includes ‘financial incentives to promote forest protection; and increased support for agencies to monitor, control, and inspect commercial activities.’ The Brazilian government has not supported all these proposals. 

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Via guardian.co.uk

The destruction of animal and plant species in the rainforest has been rapid. The loss is permanent. According to the German environmental organization OroVerde, three different types of animal and plant life are made extinct every hour. The biggest killer of the rainforest is man. The ecosystem is disturbed and biodiversity destroyed with the incursion of man and his harmful and greedy activities and enterprises.

The rainforests exclusively contain around 40 to 75 percent of all species on Earth. 28 percent of the world’s oxygen is supplied by rainforests. Unfortunately, forest cover has been quickly depleting. The rainforest in West Africa has already lost 90 percent of its existence. Madagascar has lost 60 percent. Illegal logging is the killer culprit in the destruction of the rainforest. The rainforests in Indonesia would be lost to logging in 10 years, while Papua New Guinea in 13 to 16 years. Deforestation in the Amazon has escalated by 69 percent in 2008, as compared to 2007. According to the WWF, if present rate of logging continues, almost 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest could disappear by 2030.

OroVerde commissioned the Ogilvy branch in Frankfurt, Germany to come up with one of the most interesting graphic translations of the destruction of the rainforest in recent years. The intriguing print campaign came from the concept and execution of the ad agency’s creative team led by Delle Krause, Chief Creative Officer. Sonja Fritsch’s graphic design and Anke Vera Zink’s illustration are what brought the novel idea to life.

Via osocio