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  3. Smallholder farmers resettled to rainforests by the Brazilian government have played an unrecognised role in deforestation there

Smallholder farmers resettled to rainforests by the Brazilian government have played an unrecognised role in deforestation there

admin2016-10-18  16
问题     Smallholder farmers resettled to rainforests by the Brazilian government have played an unrecognised role in deforestation there—something researchers’ worry is continuing unabated.
    Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff boasted last month that her government had reduced annual forest loss by two-thirds in the past decade, and would end it altogether by 2030. Yet while overall deforestation has fallen, Brazilian researchers reveal that the country’s officials are still organising the large-scale migration of poor farmers who have been wrecking(破坏)the rainforest. While the government has clamped down on illegal forest clearance by big landowners running cattle ranches and soya farms, its social resettlement schemes to allocate land to the rural poor are doing more damage than previously estimated.
    The researchers looked at four decades of satellite images of forest cover around the homes of more than a million migrants in some 1,900 Amazon settlements established by the government’s National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform(INCRA)since 3970. They found "irrefutable evidence of rapid deforestation" after the settlers arrived. Within the settlement areas, which cover roughly the size of the UK, half the trees have been lost, says a Brazilian researcher.
    The resettlement areas cover 5. 3 percent of the Brazilian Amazon, but have been responsible for 13.5 percent of deforestation since 1970. "Agrarian settlements have been widely hailed(受欢迎)as a socially responsible strategy to allocate land to the rural poor," says Schneider. "But INCRA’s policy of giving settlers just a few hectares forces them to convert every inch of land to agriculture. Our research shows that the result is severe deforestation at the taxpayer’s expense. "
    INCRA officials, who were unavailable for comment ahead of the paper’s publication, have often argued that deforestation occurs before settlers arrive. But Schneider says the findings refute this. Charles Clement of Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, says, "INCRA abandons the settlers as soon as they arrive. They seldom get guidance about how to manage Amazonian forests, so they try to practise the farming methods they grew up with. But they soon discover that the soils cannot sustain these methods, which leads them to carry out more deforestation. "
    Overall, Amazon deforestation is much reduced from a decade ago, says Schneider. But he worries that the deforestation from resettled smallholder farmers will go on unabated. Even though INCRA launched a green settlement programme aimed at curbing illegal deforestation by settlers in 2012, its effectiveness is yet to be assessed, Schneider says. To really address the problem, he adds, the government should stop moving people into forested areas. One solution would be to switch settlement schemes from existing forests to former forests that are now degraded pastures.
According to the author, forest loss in Brazil______.
选项 A、is caused by resettling smallholder farmers according to official data
B、has been reduced by two-thirds annually in the past decade
C、is partly contributed by big landowners running farms and ranches
D、is mainly caused by landowners rather than poor farmers
答案C
解析 推理判断题。定位句指出“虽然政府禁止经营养牛场和大豆农场的大地主非法采伐森林，但是政府的社会安置计划将土地分给贫穷农民，对森林的破坏比此前预计的更大。”由此可知大农场主也是巴西森林砍伐的原因之一，C)选项表述“巴西有部分森林减少是由经营农场和牧场的大农场主引起的”符合原文，所以C)选项正确。
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