The traditional home of 200,000 indigenous Amazon peoples, a carbon sink 50 times greater than US annual emissions, and a unique treasure of biodiversity is under threat.

Clearing for grazing was highlighted in a recent Greenpeace report Amazon Cattle Footprint. Land for grazing is the cause of 80% of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.

A common misunderstanding is that vegetarians contribute to Amazonian deforestation by replacing meat in their diets with soy deivatives. Soy makes up a smaller part of the problem, production having increased exponentially since a soybean suited to the region was developed in the 1990s, mostly in wooded grasslands and fringes.

Around 80% of soya stocks in the world are used to feed animals, especially cows for meat and milk so it is apparent that animal production and consumption is the root of the problem even when the land being cleared is not for grazing.

An estimated 80-120 billion tones of carbon is stored in the Amazon. If this is destroyed, roughly 50 times the annual greenhouse gas emissions from the US will be emitted. As is, deforestation is responsible for more than half of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions and 20% of the world’s.

Cattle ranches in Brazil are reported to be one of the world’s last out holdings of slavery. Workers are lured into the remote jungle with promises of good wages and housing, later to be told they are in constant debt because of costs like transportation and working gear. The Pastoral Land Commission estimates that 25,000 Brazilians are subjective to forced labor. President Lula, when elected in 2002, promised to abolish these near-slave conditions in his own country. The task is difficult and in 2004 slave inspectors were ambushed and killed. In 2008 A total of 5,266 were freed from slavery conditions related to sugarcane ethanol production and livestock farming.

As UK Energy Minister Ed Milliband told Amazon tribes people, there is no solution to climate change without deforestation. It is also clear that there is no solution to deforestation without changing diets.