6 ms·

How much would buying all the Brazilian rain forest cost the world, or even renting it from Brazil? We would need it to be slightly more than cattle farming to

How much would buying all the Brazilian rain forest cost the world, or even renting it from Brazil? We would need it to be slightly more than cattle farming to work... but I’d happily pay towards this.

faceplanted 6y ago
You wouldn't just need to buy them, you'd also need to police and monitor them constantly, if you bought them from abroad without further intervention unscrupulous people would just move in and start working the land anyway, and if you can figure out how to police it better than they can you might just be better off developing that.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
I read an article commenting on "microlending", which came to the conclusion that the concept doesn't really work. Your loan of $3.50 might really mean something to the peasant who receives it. But it means nothing to you, and so microloans end up with no one vetting the borrower for creditworthiness or hassling them to collect. This incentive mismatch ends up spoiling the project; there's no reason for someone not to take out a microloan, drink the money away, and default. There's a similar problem with your idea. You could buy a stretch of land in Brazil and bask in the glow of taking it off the market. But the problem you perceive with overuse of the Brazilian rainforest wouldn't be solved; that land was mostly not on the market anyway. How would you stop farmers from encroaching on your land? A "No Trespassing" sign won't do the job. Buying land to prevent development will work better in the US, mostly because there's no one in the US who lives off the land. You can't stop small farmers from moving on to your unsupervised land. But you can easily stop giant logging or mining companies from doing it.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  But they weren't suggesting individual purchases. A very large group doing a very large purchase can buy cost-effective security.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > A very large group doing a very large purchase can buy cost-effective security. That really depends on how much they want the security. People defend territory all the time. It's very, very expensive to do that -- have a look at some city walls -- but it's cost-effective because they are using the territory. But no, no matter how large the group, they cannot buy cost-effective security for their giant stretch of wilderness if their plan for it is "don't use it" and there are other people who do have a use for it. Compare American government efforts to stop people from using land to grow marijuana. Is the problem that the American government just isn't big enough?
    - namibj 6y ago
      If the area is large enough, they could actually make a literal border around it, and use change detection via satellites to notice potential settlements/activity on the inside. You probably need a watch tower about every 1~2 km, or even less if you'd use a strip of minefield to protect against hordes.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      > Compare American government efforts to stop people from using land to grow marijuana. Is the problem that the American government just isn't big enough? People are generally doing that in areas where people are allowed. Also the government has a stupendously large amount of land that it didn't pay for and a low budget for keeping anyone out. It's different if this is land you're purchasing in the modern age. If you're buying a million acres for over a hundred million dollars, then that's about 150 miles of border to patrol. If you hire 150 people for that, at above-median wages, that's 3 million a year. Add some overhead, some expense for equipment and buildings, it's affordable enough compared to the purchase price. If that's too expensive then go up to 10 million acres, which triples the land area per mile of border. Or 100 million acres.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > If you're buying a million acres for over a hundred million dollars, then that's about 150 miles of border to patrol. > If that's too expensive then go up to 10 million acres, which triples the land area per mile of border. Or 100 million acres. I don't really follow. The use case is that you want to prevent small farmers from encroaching on the jungle. This will only ever happen at the border between where the small farmers end and the jungle begins. If you buy land behind the border, that's nothing but a waste of your money (until the border is so thoroughly dejungled that your old hinterlands is the new border). In turn, this means that all of the land you're interested in is border. You can't rely on the fact that a circle has a high ratio of area to perimeter to claim cost-efficiency, because you're structurally constrained to owning maximally cost-inefficient strip shapes.
- Snoddas 6y ago
  I have about usd 100 rotating in different micro loans through https://www.kiva.org/ https://www.kiva.org/ In 11 years only one loan has defaulted.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    How many loans is that? I take it when one comes back you just make another loan?
    - kludgekraft 6y ago
      Yes, I do the same, only on https://www.zidisha.org/ https://www.zidisha.org/ 100 dollars have been used for 500+ loans, the last 8 years or so. While you can pick the recipients yourselves, I've opted for automatic re-lending on the platform.
  - dbrgn 6y ago
    Over the last ~10 years, I've put around 800$ into Kiva. From that, 188 loans for a total value of 5000$ were made. A bit more than 300$ went into Kiva donations (you can choose for every loan, to cover administrative costs). 20$ went to currency losses. 80$ went to default losses. The default losses are 10% of what I put in, or 1.6% of the total amount lent. And I explicitly chose a few loans that were explicitly marked as high-default-risk, because of the social situation of the recipients or due to the political/economic situation in the region. I cannot confirm that my money dried up in default losses. I still think it's quite a good model (but I haven't followed economic research about microloans in the last few years). Edit: I grew up in the amazon region, parents worked in an NGO. Giving people gifts/donations is worthless to most, since something gifted feels like it has no value. If you build a water well for free, it will be broken in a few months to years. If you make the village pay a part of the costs on the other hand, and if they must help building it, they'll value it more and keep care of it. It's a cultural thing. I could imagine that loans work the same way: You don't get a donation, you'll get a loan that you have to work for. In that culture, it will be valued more. (Of course, that applies to the region I grew up in, I don't want to over-generalize.)
dalbasal 6y ago
There have been/are efforts like this. I can't comment on successes/failures, but if you want to kick in... this one says $100 saves an acre: https://www.worldlandtrust.org/appeals/buy-an-acre/ https://www.worldlandtrust.org/appeals/buy-an-acre/ Shop around, not all organisations are equal. Also, there is probably similar programs in your area. A lot of good, well established wetland repurchase & conservation efforts in the US.
pelasaco 6y ago
well, in first place Brazil (or Peru, Suriname, etc) should be wanting to sell or rent it. Which they aren't. Second, it won't help to buy or rent it if there is no control in the region. Third, Europe together with China are the biggest market of illegal wood. France has a high military presence on the French Guyana, and they could definitely pass intelligence to some navy to catch the boats leaving Brazil/Suriname towards Europe. So it's not matter of who owns it but if all nations actually want to fight the black market around illegal wood and biopiracy, which they clearly don't want. References: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-biopiracy/brazil-to-step-up-crackdown-on-biopiracy-in-2011-idUSTRE6BL37820101222 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-biopiracy/brazil-t... https://www.dw.com/en/wood-laundering-brings-illegal-amazon-timber-to-europe-report/a-43065620 https://www.dw.com/en/wood-laundering-brings-illegal-amazon-... http://www.globaltimber.org.uk/ChinaIllegalImpExp.htm http://www.globaltimber.org.uk/ChinaIllegalImpExp.htm
- pelasaco 6y ago
  I remember when I served in the region, we did some exercises together with the 3rd regiment of the French Legion, and they had even a sea operation force that could definitely work on that if Macron could do more than Virtue Signaling on Twitter about this matter Reference: https://twitter.com/emmanuelmacron/status/1164617008962527232?lang=en https://twitter.com/emmanuelmacron/status/116461700896252723...
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  Everyone has a price... it’d just be interesting to calculate the total cost of purchasing and enforcement. Probably into the tens of billions per year? More? Once there is a figure people might think it’s worth doing or not.
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
Buying rain forest would mean nothing for illegal rare wood markets, or illegal gold mining, or illegal forest fires to stretch cattle grazing area. Most people grossly underestimate how wild and pretty much lawless inland rain-forest regions are in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. There are small pockets of settlements everywhere but except for Manaus there is very sparse infrastructure, Police will take days to get somewhere by boat, Healthcare deep in the forest is pretty much a death sentence if you happen to need urgent critical care. You have people that have never been registered with social security, etc. My point is that having a piece of paper saying that a specific rosewood tree belongs to IKEA or <NGO> would mean nothing, by the time you try to enforce this, the tree would have been fellen, cut, and shipped on a boat to the highest bidder. If you want actual change in the region you need to develop the local economy with jobs that allow these people to be productive in a way that is somehow more profitable than the existing illegal activities. But the practicalities of this are much harder to implement then simply blank buying forest land.
- amelius 6y ago
  > by the time you try to enforce this, the tree would have been fellen, cut, and shipped on a boat to the highest bidder. That could be true, but only holds for one tree (or a small number of trees). The problem starts when people build a business around trees. By the time their businesses are fully operational you can enforce laws. And this makes it unattractive to even start in this line of business.
  - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    You have entire gold mining illegal operations with heavy machinery deep in the forest without any law enforcement to halt them. Murder of indigenous locals in clashes with illegal miners is also not uncommon. Similarly to coca farming in Colombia they simply relocate to another unknown location periodically. Even assuming good faith from Brazilian law enforcement/military the remoteness and shear size of the rain forest makes it a huge challenge to enforce any rule of Law.
    - 6y ago
adrianN 6y ago
The most cost effective way is probably dropping a few hundred million anti personnel mines in the forest. They're very cheap to produce, very expensive to remove, and reliably keep people out of the area.
- ekzy 6y ago
  That's quite... clever. But what about the wildlife?
  - adrianN 6y ago
    My uninformed guess is that while the wildlife would be impacted, it would still fare better than when humans intrude in their habitat.
- glenneroo 6y ago
  There are also numerous indigenous human tribes and untold number of mammals which would likely set these off. And what if you ever want to use the area? We are still finding mines from WWII all over the world. If you absolutely have to take the macho-military-method, I'd personally recommend drones...
  - adrianN 6y ago
    The whole point is making the area unusable without the option of changing your mind after the next elections.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  This is a joke, right?
  - adrianN 6y ago
    I'm half-serious. It wouldn't be the first minefield that acts as a nature reserve, e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39821956 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39821956 or https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/06/living-in-minefield-wolves-northern-israel https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/06/living-i...
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
You'd have to buy Brazil first though; the rainforest and its conservation is as much a political issue as it is a financial one.
jeffreyrogers 6y ago
Isn't it a bit unfair to impose that on Brazil? Europe doesn't have much wood anymore because they used so much of it from the Romans on. The US exported a lot of wood to Europe early in its history (still does). Should we tell Brazilians, "Sorry, that worked for us, but now that we're rich we care about the environment, so tough luck?"

faceplanted 6y ago

You wouldn't just need to buy them, you'd also need to police and monitor them constantly, if you bought them from abroad without further intervention unscrupulous people would just move in and start working the land anyway, and if you can figure out how to police it better than they can you might just be better off developing that.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

I read an article commenting on "microlending", which came to the conclusion that the concept doesn't really work. Your loan of $3.50 might really mean something to the peasant who receives it. But it means nothing to you, and so microloans end up with no one vetting the borrower for creditworthiness or hassling them to collect. This incentive mismatch ends up spoiling the project; there's no reason for someone not to take out a microloan, drink the money away, and default. There's a similar problem with your idea. You could buy a stretch of land in Brazil and bask in the glow of taking it off the market. But the problem you perceive with overuse of the Brazilian rainforest wouldn't be solved; that land was mostly not on the market anyway. How would you stop farmers from encroaching on your land? A "No Trespassing" sign won't do the job. Buying land to prevent development will work better in the US, mostly because there's no one in the US who lives off the land. You can't stop small farmers from moving on to your unsupervised land. But you can easily stop giant logging or mining companies from doing it.

Dylan16807 6y ago
But they weren't suggesting individual purchases. A very large group doing a very large purchase can buy cost-effective security.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > A very large group doing a very large purchase can buy cost-effective security. That really depends on how much they want the security. People defend territory all the time. It's very, very expensive to do that -- have a look at some city walls -- but it's cost-effective because they are using the territory. But no, no matter how large the group, they cannot buy cost-effective security for their giant stretch of wilderness if their plan for it is "don't use it" and there are other people who do have a use for it. Compare American government efforts to stop people from using land to grow marijuana. Is the problem that the American government just isn't big enough?
  - namibj 6y ago
    If the area is large enough, they could actually make a literal border around it, and use change detection via satellites to notice potential settlements/activity on the inside. You probably need a watch tower about every 1~2 km, or even less if you'd use a strip of minefield to protect against hordes.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    > Compare American government efforts to stop people from using land to grow marijuana. Is the problem that the American government just isn't big enough? People are generally doing that in areas where people are allowed. Also the government has a stupendously large amount of land that it didn't pay for and a low budget for keeping anyone out. It's different if this is land you're purchasing in the modern age. If you're buying a million acres for over a hundred million dollars, then that's about 150 miles of border to patrol. If you hire 150 people for that, at above-median wages, that's 3 million a year. Add some overhead, some expense for equipment and buildings, it's affordable enough compared to the purchase price. If that's too expensive then go up to 10 million acres, which triples the land area per mile of border. Or 100 million acres.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > If you're buying a million acres for over a hundred million dollars, then that's about 150 miles of border to patrol. > If that's too expensive then go up to 10 million acres, which triples the land area per mile of border. Or 100 million acres. I don't really follow. The use case is that you want to prevent small farmers from encroaching on the jungle. This will only ever happen at the border between where the small farmers end and the jungle begins. If you buy land behind the border, that's nothing but a waste of your money (until the border is so thoroughly dejungled that your old hinterlands is the new border). In turn, this means that all of the land you're interested in is border. You can't rely on the fact that a circle has a high ratio of area to perimeter to claim cost-efficiency, because you're structurally constrained to owning maximally cost-inefficient strip shapes.
Snoddas 6y ago
I have about usd 100 rotating in different micro loans through https://www.kiva.org/ https://www.kiva.org/ In 11 years only one loan has defaulted.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  How many loans is that? I take it when one comes back you just make another loan?
  - kludgekraft 6y ago
    Yes, I do the same, only on https://www.zidisha.org/ https://www.zidisha.org/ 100 dollars have been used for 500+ loans, the last 8 years or so. While you can pick the recipients yourselves, I've opted for automatic re-lending on the platform.
- dbrgn 6y ago
  Over the last ~10 years, I've put around 800$ into Kiva. From that, 188 loans for a total value of 5000$ were made. A bit more than 300$ went into Kiva donations (you can choose for every loan, to cover administrative costs). 20$ went to currency losses. 80$ went to default losses. The default losses are 10% of what I put in, or 1.6% of the total amount lent. And I explicitly chose a few loans that were explicitly marked as high-default-risk, because of the social situation of the recipients or due to the political/economic situation in the region. I cannot confirm that my money dried up in default losses. I still think it's quite a good model (but I haven't followed economic research about microloans in the last few years). Edit: I grew up in the amazon region, parents worked in an NGO. Giving people gifts/donations is worthless to most, since something gifted feels like it has no value. If you build a water well for free, it will be broken in a few months to years. If you make the village pay a part of the costs on the other hand, and if they must help building it, they'll value it more and keep care of it. It's a cultural thing. I could imagine that loans work the same way: You don't get a donation, you'll get a loan that you have to work for. In that culture, it will be valued more. (Of course, that applies to the region I grew up in, I don't want to over-generalize.)

dalbasal 6y ago

There have been/are efforts like this. I can't comment on successes/failures, but if you want to kick in... this one says $100 saves an acre: https://www.worldlandtrust.org/appeals/buy-an-acre/ https://www.worldlandtrust.org/appeals/buy-an-acre/ Shop around, not all organisations are equal. Also, there is probably similar programs in your area. A lot of good, well established wetland repurchase & conservation efforts in the US.

pelasaco 6y ago

well, in first place Brazil (or Peru, Suriname, etc) should be wanting to sell or rent it. Which they aren't. Second, it won't help to buy or rent it if there is no control in the region. Third, Europe together with China are the biggest market of illegal wood. France has a high military presence on the French Guyana, and they could definitely pass intelligence to some navy to catch the boats leaving Brazil/Suriname towards Europe. So it's not matter of who owns it but if all nations actually want to fight the black market around illegal wood and biopiracy, which they clearly don't want. References: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-biopiracy/brazil-to-step-up-crackdown-on-biopiracy-in-2011-idUSTRE6BL37820101222 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-biopiracy/brazil-t... https://www.dw.com/en/wood-laundering-brings-illegal-amazon-timber-to-europe-report/a-43065620 https://www.dw.com/en/wood-laundering-brings-illegal-amazon-... http://www.globaltimber.org.uk/ChinaIllegalImpExp.htm http://www.globaltimber.org.uk/ChinaIllegalImpExp.htm

pelasaco 6y ago
I remember when I served in the region, we did some exercises together with the 3rd regiment of the French Legion, and they had even a sea operation force that could definitely work on that if Macron could do more than Virtue Signaling on Twitter about this matter Reference: https://twitter.com/emmanuelmacron/status/1164617008962527232?lang=en https://twitter.com/emmanuelmacron/status/116461700896252723...
andy_ppp 6y ago
Everyone has a price... it’d just be interesting to calculate the total cost of purchasing and enforcement. Probably into the tens of billions per year? More? Once there is a figure people might think it’s worth doing or not.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago

Buying rain forest would mean nothing for illegal rare wood markets, or illegal gold mining, or illegal forest fires to stretch cattle grazing area. Most people grossly underestimate how wild and pretty much lawless inland rain-forest regions are in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. There are small pockets of settlements everywhere but except for Manaus there is very sparse infrastructure, Police will take days to get somewhere by boat, Healthcare deep in the forest is pretty much a death sentence if you happen to need urgent critical care. You have people that have never been registered with social security, etc. My point is that having a piece of paper saying that a specific rosewood tree belongs to IKEA or <NGO> would mean nothing, by the time you try to enforce this, the tree would have been fellen, cut, and shipped on a boat to the highest bidder. If you want actual change in the region you need to develop the local economy with jobs that allow these people to be productive in a way that is somehow more profitable than the existing illegal activities. But the practicalities of this are much harder to implement then simply blank buying forest land.

amelius 6y ago
> by the time you try to enforce this, the tree would have been fellen, cut, and shipped on a boat to the highest bidder. That could be true, but only holds for one tree (or a small number of trees). The problem starts when people build a business around trees. By the time their businesses are fully operational you can enforce laws. And this makes it unattractive to even start in this line of business.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  You have entire gold mining illegal operations with heavy machinery deep in the forest without any law enforcement to halt them. Murder of indigenous locals in clashes with illegal miners is also not uncommon. Similarly to coca farming in Colombia they simply relocate to another unknown location periodically. Even assuming good faith from Brazilian law enforcement/military the remoteness and shear size of the rain forest makes it a huge challenge to enforce any rule of Law.
  - 6y ago

adrianN 6y ago

The most cost effective way is probably dropping a few hundred million anti personnel mines in the forest. They're very cheap to produce, very expensive to remove, and reliably keep people out of the area.

ekzy 6y ago
That's quite... clever. But what about the wildlife?
- adrianN 6y ago
  My uninformed guess is that while the wildlife would be impacted, it would still fare better than when humans intrude in their habitat.
glenneroo 6y ago
There are also numerous indigenous human tribes and untold number of mammals which would likely set these off. And what if you ever want to use the area? We are still finding mines from WWII all over the world. If you absolutely have to take the macho-military-method, I'd personally recommend drones...
- adrianN 6y ago
  The whole point is making the area unusable without the option of changing your mind after the next elections.
thehappypm 6y ago
This is a joke, right?
- adrianN 6y ago
  I'm half-serious. It wouldn't be the first minefield that acts as a nature reserve, e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39821956 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39821956 or https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/06/living-in-minefield-wolves-northern-israel https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/06/living-i...

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

You'd have to buy Brazil first though; the rainforest and its conservation is as much a political issue as it is a financial one.

jeffreyrogers 6y ago

Isn't it a bit unfair to impose that on Brazil? Europe doesn't have much wood anymore because they used so much of it from the Romans on. The US exported a lot of wood to Europe early in its history (still does). Should we tell Brazilians, "Sorry, that worked for us, but now that we're rich we care about the environment, so tough luck?"