The Amazon's Texan saviour

摘要

At the helm of a second-hand Cessna aircraft, John Cain Carter is as preoccupied with the Earth below as he is with the clouds ahead. An expanse of pasture the size of a small principality "used to be all forest," he points out, banking right. And the flood plain between the Rio Araguaia and the Rio das Mortes was once "stirrup-high in water. Today you can drive a jeep out there in the rainy season," he concludes, ruefully. Mr Carter attributes the unnatural dryness to landowners who cut down trees to make way for pasture, shutting off the supply of moisture from tree to cloud. Watching it happen "is a nightmare." These comments are given extra credibility by the fact that Mr Carter is himself a rancher, with 8,100 hectares (20,000 acres) on the denuded eastern edge of the Xingu river basin in Mato Grosso, a vast Amazonian state. But he is convinced that landowners, now widely reviled as enemies of the rainforest, could become its saviours. That will require incentives, which can only come from the increasingly globalised markets for Brazilian beef and soya, now the main threats to the rainforest. Mr Carter, an irrepressible Texan, has ambitious plans for encouraging consumers to provide such incentives and producers to accept them.