sustainability

Data show a 42 percent drop in forest clearance from a year earlier, giving Lula a boost before the election run-off.

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1988, according to official figures that give a boost to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva days before a presidential run-off.

Brazil’s space research agency, Inpe, said on Friday that 3,335 square kilometres (1,288 square miles) of forest were cleared in the 12 months through July, about 42 percent less than the year before.

The previous record low was 4,571 sq km (1,765 sq miles) in 2011-12, while annual losses peaked at nearly 30,000 sq km (nearly 11,600 sq miles) in the mid-1990s, according to Inpe’s Prodes satellite programme, which measures from August to July because cloud cover is lower in mid-year.

“It’s an absolutely stratospheric drop…it’s like a dream,” Environment Minister Joao Paulo Capobianco said at a news conference in Brasilia.

Marcio Astrini of the climate advocacy group Observatorio do Clima called the figures “a historic achievement” and said they show that “with political will, it is possible to curb deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions”.

President Lula wrote on X: “Our goal is to achieve zero illegal deforestation by 2030.”

Lula took office in 2023 pledging to end illegal deforestation by 2030, after clearing soared to a 15-year high under his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. The Amazon lost about 11,600 sq km (about 4,480 sq miles) a year on average during Bolsonaro’s 2019-2022 term, almost 60 percent more than in the previous four years.

Deforestation has fallen every year since 2022 and is down 71.2 percent over four years. The AFP news agency attributes the drop to greater monitoring and stiffer penalties for illegal logging.

Lula faces Bolsonaro’s eldest son, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, in the election run-off on October 25, with polls showing them neck and neck.

Flavio pledged in his manifesto to strengthen environmental oversight in the Amazon, focus enforcement on organised crime rather than extractive workers and small farmers, and end “illegal deforestation” by 2029.

He has also praised his father, who is serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest for coup plotting, for opposing what he calls a “radical environmental agenda”.

Deforestation in the Cerrado savanna, south of the Amazon, also fell by about 24 percent, to 5,517 sq km (2,130 sq miles), the lowest since records began in 2001.

Prime Minister Balendra Shah told the UN that world leaders must act on climate change.

Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendra Shah has appealed for action to combat the rising threat of climate change, calling the flood that devastated his country last month “a warning to the world”.

Shah made the comments during his address to the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Thursday night. He told the gathering that the August disaster “was not just a local tragedy”, asking them the question, “Have you really heard that warning?”

Political leaders “have been negligent to translate those warnings in action at the speed and scale that the vulnerable people require,” he said.

At least 1,453 people died when a torrent of mud, rock and water struck northern Nepal and the China-Tibet border on August 26, triggered by a glacial collapse.

According to Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, 5,500 people were still missing and 13,795 had been rescued.

Researchers from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group said in a report released last week that the disaster was not caused by a single extreme weather event, but rather a “compound crisis” shaped by long-term warming, glacier retreat, permafrost thaw and geological instability.

Shah said climate change was hurting people not responsible for the crisis but who “are paying a colossal price for it”.

He said Nepal contributed less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the heat-trapping gases behind climate change. About 99 percent of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower, and many workers were trapped in tunnels by the flooding.

“Our glaciers are retreating, our mountain slopes are becoming unstable, our rivers are becoming less predictable, and every major disaster threatens to erase years of development,” Shah said.

Shah urged the international community to help bear the cost of helping Nepal adapt to climate change.

He proposed to create a ‘Himalaya Climate Resilience Mechanism’ which would include Nepal and neighbours India and China, and would allow them to share satellite data and expertise, monitor glacial lakes and strengthen joint early warning systems.

Nepal has asked the UN’s loss and damage fund for $20m in aid, the maximum allowed, but a tiny fraction of what it needs. A preliminary assessment by the government has placed the cost of the disaster at $5bn.

The fund, established in 2022 in the aftermath of catastrophic floods in Pakistan, has yet to make even its first disbursement, and observers see Nepal as a key test of its credibility.

Earlier this week, the United States pledged an additional $31m in new flood recovery support.

This year, AGRA, the donor-funded agricultural development initiative formerly known as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

AGRA’s slogan is “sustainably growing Africa’s food systems”, but for years, researchers and farmers have warned that the policies it promotes are having a negative impact on African agriculture.

Our new research provides more evidence to that effect. We have documented how AGRA’s Green Revolution, with its well-funded promotion of commercial seeds, fertilisers and other inputs, has failed to spur the “productivity revolution” promised by its founders.

Worse still, its promotion of monocultures, such as maize, has led to the massive expansion of land dedicated to them. At the same time, more resilient and nutritious local crops, such as millet, are losing ground.

Funding the loss of traditional crops

Hunger continues to increase in Africa, driven by climate change, desertification, conflict and disruptions to international supply lines from international conflicts like the Ukraine war. The Green Revolution promoted by AGRA does not seem to have made much of a difference.

In countries where AGRA has had significant presence, the number of undernourished people has increased by about 60 percent – roughly the same rate as the rest of the continent.

The United Nations is calling for greater attention to “affordable healthy diets”. For Africa’s small-scale farmers, who grow what their families and communities eat, that means more, not less, crop diversity, which is the opposite of what the Green Revolution has produced.

In countries that have participated in AGRA projects, crops such as maize are promoted and funded with billions of dollars in subsidies and investment. Despite that, yields for maize have grown only modestly, just 40 percent over 18 years, well below the 100 percent improvement promised by AGRA.

Some countries, like Malawi and Ethiopia, have seen stronger yield growth for maize, but some, such as Kenya – where AGRA’s headquarters are located – have seen yields decline.

Maize production has soared across participant countries, driven mainly by the massive expansion of plantings as subsidies drive farmers to plant maize on new land.

In contrast, our research shows that traditional African staples such as sorghum, cassava, and groundnuts have lost land and investment. Since AGRA was launched in 2006, 13 countries that have participated have seen a decline in productivity of 21 percent for cassava and 10 percent for groundnuts in total.

But millet – a climate-resilient, nutritious grain – is the crop that has suffered the most. Before 2006, millet was as prevalent as maize in these countries. Since 2006, millet production has fallen 27 percent, while maize production has more than doubled. Millet yields have fallen 17 percent with the lack of investment. And as land allocated to maize production increased 71 percent, land for millet fell 12 percent.

Millet is not some backward crop waiting to be replaced by maize. For generations, it has fed communities across some of Africa’s driest regions. It can withstand heat and drought, grow with relatively few external inputs, and provide nutritious food where other crops struggle.

In 2023, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) celebrated the “Year of Millets”, highlighting the multiple benefits of the crop to the environment and social welfare.

The same is true of many of Africa’s traditional crops – sorghum, fonio, cowpeas, cassava, indigenous vegetables and many others. They are part of the biological diversity of African farming, but also of our cuisines, knowledge and cultures.

At a time of climate change, pushing such crops aside makes particularly little sense. Farmers need more options in their fields, not fewer. A diverse farm spreads risk: when one crop suffers from drought, pests or disease, another may survive. Rotation and diversity of crops help keep soils more fertile.

Valuing diversity

Rhetorically, AGRA now professes to value the very crops that its Green Revolution helped push to the margins. It speaks of diverse, nutritious and climate-adapted crops, and its seed programmes include millet, sorghum, cowpea, groundnut and others.

We welcome serious investment in these crops. It is overdue. But there is no indication that AGRA and other Green Revolution proponents will abandon their chosen monocrops, such as maize. AGRA’s current seed strategy still emphasises improved varieties, certified seeds, faster variety turnover, commercialisation and market-oriented seed systems.

Investment needs to support farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange and develop their seeds, protect crop diversity and indigenous knowledge, and ensure that farmers and communities – not seed markets alone – determine which varieties survive and spread.

African farmers do not need saving, but their crops – millet, sorghum, cowpea, fonio, and other traditional crops need to be rescued from Green Revolution crop-breeders.

When a traditional crop disappears from farmers’ fields, we can lose locally adapted seed varieties, knowledge about how to grow and prepare them and foods that are central to local diets and identities.

This is why the decline of millet should concern us far beyond the millet field. Africa is already dangerously exposed to climate shocks and volatile international food and fertiliser markets. Diversity is one of our greatest protections against those risks. Yet we are subsidising its disappearance.

It is not enough for the UN to call for greater access for all to nutritious diets. For the majority of Africa’s rural populations, who are also among its least food-secure, crop diversity is key to diet diversity. It is time for AGRA, the African Development Bank, foreign donors and African governments to stop subsidising and promoting the crops that are driving the loss of such diversity.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.