Angry Brazilian Letter

Humanities Coursework

Dear Angry Brazilian

I am writing this letter as a response to the letter you sent to my magazine saying that the world (England I particular) should keep out of the affairs of Brazil. Saying that the deforestation of the Amazon has nothing to do with the rest of the world. Well I would like to inform you that you are completely ignorant of the facts if you believe this to be true. In this letter I will inform you of all the things you have wrong and explain that you can't justify what is happening in the Amazon.

First of all I will explain exactly what's going on in the Amazon. The Amazon rainforest is the largest forest in the entire world, it accounts for over half of the worlds remaining trees and covers over 5.5million square kilometres. Only 60% of the rainforest is in Brazil but they are arguably the worst abusers of it.

The main cause of the deforestation is human settlement and land development. In just nine years an area of land twice the size of Portugal was cleared of trees most of the land was transformed into pastures for cattle. 30% of this deforestation is caused by farmers who don't have any other way of making money. Instead of using lands already cleared of trees the farmers abuse there plots of land until they are infertile and they are unable to use the land. Then they move to a new plot of land and cut down more trees abuse the land again and move on to a another plot of land. Instead of doing this I think that they should take better care of the land that they are given and that the government should take time to repair the damaged land and house people on the land that has already been cleared of trees to reduce the amount of deforestation caused by farmers. Also every time a tree is cut down another two should be planted in another location.

Another large amount of the deforestation is caused by the building of super highways through the middle of the Amazon, the Brazilian government says that they are essential to the economic development to Brazil but the thing is it causes wide spread deforestation and the roads bring more settlers spreading the clearance of trees all around the roads.

A third cause is the mining of gold and other metals, you say this is fine that Brazil should not be forced to leave there wealth in the ground but there is much better ways to go about it then how they mine the resources as they just move from spot to spot burning down the trees. Trees that could be used