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n
How Humans are Exploiting the Amazon
1. Peasant Farming
Deforestation
by a peasant farmer is often
done to raise crops for self-subsistence.
They use
slash and burn technique to clear land,
typically just a few acres
2. Commercial Farming
Uses
slash and burn process on a much larger
scale, sometimes deforesting
several square miles at a time.
nLivestock
farmings
clear large acres of land
then reseed land with grass for cattle. This
has caused a total of 500,000 acres of
rainforest in Brazil destroyed.
Commercial agriculture farming is
used to
make a profit by
growing profitable crops like cocoa.
Once the land has no more
nutrients they move onto another
patch of land.
n
3.
Commercial Logging
n Can
either be selective or clear-cutting.
Mostly selective
because not all the wood is profitable.
Commercial
logging uses heavy machinery,
such as bulldozers, road graders, and
log skidders, to remove cut trees and build roads,
which cause more damage
4. Mining
There are large deposits
of gold, bauxite, iron ore, tin ore and
diamonds in the Amazon Basin. In
order to extract these minerals, large
areas of the forest have to be cleared.
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