agriculture

In a new photo essay, rice farming in southern China is put under the spotlight to show how traditional methods are still working well without any tinkering from the GM industry.

Huge areas in the Amazon rainforest are illegally logged to clear land for soya plantations © Greenpeace/Beltra

Some good news just in from Brazil, where soya traders have reinforced their commitment to boycott soya grown in newly deforested areas of the Amazon.

Clearing-cutting to make space for new soya plantations has been one of the main causes of rainforest destruction in recent years, which is why we campaigned successfully for a moratorium (temporary ban) three years ago.

Fish? No thanks, I'm vegetarian... © CC Michelle Lyles

Sometimes, you are a bit dumbfounded by stories that make the news. Seriously, you couldn't make some of it up, could you? I couldn't let this one pass (so to speak) without comment.

Today's belter is the new study suggesting that feeding fish to cows will help climate change. Yes, you read that right. The theory is something like this – cows, which we farm for milk, meat and leather, produce methane. Most of this is by burping, not flatulence as the comics would prefer. Methane is a bad, nasty, evil greenhouse gas. And we want to cut those down, don't we?

Eucalyptus plantations surround an area of rainforest in the Amazon: one of Daniel's winning images ©Greenpeace/Beltrá

Photographs illustrating the environmental problems we're facing provide one of the most powerful tools we have for our campaign work. Whether it's an image of the beauty that still remains or one of the havoc we humans so often create, sometimes one photo really can explain it all.

For about three years now, we've been working on curbing the impacts of the soya industry on the Amazon rainforest in Brazil which, before the current moratorium was put into place, was replacing the forest with plantations on a massive scale.

However, there's another agricultural sector cutting deep into the forest which we're also going to tackle: cattle ranching. To assess the scale of the problem, Greenpeace researchers in Brazil have produced a new set of maps showing how the Amazon region has suffered.

The challenges of monitoring the effects of deforestation on the Amazon are immense. The vast areas which need to be covered means it's difficult to keep tabs on what's happening on the remote fringes of the rainforest and news of illegal logging and other environmental damage can take a long time to reach the authorities, if they find out at all.

To help solve this problem, the Greenpeace team in Brazil has been training local people to map the impacts of the soya industry in the Santarém region of the forest, the heart of soya production in the Amazon. It's a collaborative project with Brazilian organisations Projeto Saude e Alegria (Health and Happiness Project) and the Rural Workers Unions of Santarém and nearby Belterra, training people to use GPS technology to pinpoint the damage caused by intensive agriculture, empowering them to help defend their land and the rainforest.

It's currently the dry season in the Amazon and, as the live webcast last week demonstrated, fires have been decimating large areas. The video crew weren't the only ones documenting the fires and last week we received images from another Greenpeace team who took to the air to photograph them and the devastated areas they leave behind. We've put together some of the most striking (not to say depressing) images into the slideshow below.