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The International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE), a non-governmental scientific organization established in 1989, with affiliated regional societies on all continents, including Latin America, protests the recent increase in deforestation and burning in the Brazilian Amazon region! The Amazon rainforest is the most diverse biome on Earth. It provides essential ecosystem services to the region and to the entire planet. It is also the Earth’s largest terrestrial carbon sink and crucial for regional and global climate regulation.

Deforestation to expand cash crops and beef cattle is short sighted and undermines the ecosystem services that forests provide. It also undermines all agricultural production in the long run by disrupting water and soil management. Hundreds of thousands of indigenous and traditional forest peoples rely on the stability of the Amazon for their livelihoods, while over 30 million urban and rural residents in the region depend on the forest’s services for water and climate stability; today they are vulnerable to respiratory ailments from smoke and exposure to agrochemicals sprayed from the air on their communities as “externalities” of regional agribusiness. These issues provide tangible awareness of the adverse impact of reliance on market forces alone to attribute value to resources and people and highlight the need to incorporate a more holistic assessment of economic development which includes ecosystem balance and inter-temporal impacts on equíty.

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