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Comment by MaximumYComb | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone surprised? It's easy to be upset over this but most readers here live relatively privileged lives. The poor farmer lighting a fire is doing his best to improve his life by clearing more land.

I don't know to improve the situation but I feel like we also need to have empathy and understanding.

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I can be proven wrong, but I don't think it's poor farmers who are responsible for the deforestation of the Amazon. It's mostly big latifund owners with lots of lobbying power.

Gonna scream that one here: mining, look at norwegian and international companies mining in the middle of the forest. Plus previous administrations actions, like a giant power plant that will divert one of the biggest rivers over there.

mining only equates for roughly 10% of the deforestation of the amazon rainforest, we should be looking at the meat industry, it equates for roughly 75% - 80% of deforestation.

The poor farmer lighting a fire is doing his best to improve his life by clearing more land.

Ah yes, the "think of the poor" argument. Deforestation at this scale isn't done by individual poor, it's done by wealthy organizations.

AFAICT this is not a matter of small farmers clearing a bit of land in order to survive. It's a matter of huge cattle producers and industrial soy farms burning clear vast swathes of the Amazon jungle, for profit.

And producing soy in Brazil has become even more profitable now that the US vs China trade war is in full swing and the Chinese have stopped purchasing US soy. There’s no easy solution for this in an world as inter-connected as ours, apart from breaking all said connections (for example the Chinese reverting to only eating things that they actually grow in their land, which will most probably create a mass famine or two) or somehow for us to consume a lot less things, which hasn’t been the case for at least 200 years (since the Industrial Revolution started).

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