Riding herd on development in famed Brazilian wetlands

The Pantanal, a flat wetland region of Brazil, is more than 98 percent owned by cattle ranchers

January 9, 2001
Web posted at: 3:17 p.m. EST (2017 GMT)

In this story: Cattle, macaws and capybaras cohabit Incentives to conserve vs. external threats RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Gary Strieker
CNN Environment Correspondent

THE PANTANAL, Brazil (CNN) -- After pulling a strap tight, Luis Carlos Dos Santos belted a thick woolly sheepskin over the old saddle. He glanced at me and grinned again. He still can't believe his luck.

Luis Carlos is a pantaneiro, or cowboy, on the Fazenda Rio Negro, a cattle ranch converted to a private wildlife reserve in Brazil's famed wetland region, the Pantanal.

IMAGE GALLERY Click here to see more animals native to the Pantanal    ALSO Read more of Gary Strieker's columns and stories

After more than 20 years of backbreaking work on the ranch, he now guides tourists around to see wildlife. He was grinning at me because he had shared his secret: He works far less but makes much more money as a tour guide than he ever did punching cows.

I watched him ride away on his squat buckskin mare, leading American and British tourists to an adventure down by the river. Maybe he would show them the new tracks of the jaguar that prowls there every night. And he could count on showing them the family of capybaras, giant rodents grazing in the reed marsh.

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The Pantanal in southwestern Brazil is magnificent cattle country. Scanning the flat panorama of grasslands and marshes, one can see countless white Brahma grazing in the shimmering heat.

More than 98 percent of the Pantanal is privately owned, divided among hundreds of cattle ranches. But surprisingly, more than 150 years after the first ranchers settled here, the Pantanal also holds the richest concentration of wildlife in South America.

Estimates vary, but the Pantanal is generally accepted as a region stretching across some 175,000 square kilometers (108,500 square miles), more than twice the size of Austria. The Pantanal is the Earth's largest freshwater wetland, an abundant source of food for a dazzling variety of birds and a wide range of reptiles and mammals. It's a critical habitat for endangered species such as the jaguar, hyacinth macaw and giant river otter, and a stronghold for more common wildlife such as caimans, capybaras, tapirs and peccaries.

Traveling the length of the Pantanal from north to south, I found it the closest thing I've seen in South America to the wildlife spectacle of East Africa's Serengeti plains. It's fascinating to observe how compatible the profusion of wildlife seems to be with cattle ranches.

This cohabitation is possible because of the seasonal flooding of the Paraguay river system that transforms the Pantanal into a vast interior delta, a "wetscape" of swamps, lakes and channels that isolates the Pantanal from the rest of Brazil from November to March annually.

The floods have kept the Pantanal in a virtual "time warp," holding back the kind of intensive agricultural development that has destroyed natural resources elsewhere in the world.

For people who own the ranches and work here, the isolation gives them a proud appreciation.

"We don't hunt wildlife around here, not like they do in other places," said rancher Belkiss Rondon. She keeps nearly 100,000 acres, her share of land staked out by her grandfather, a pioneer rancher. Because cattle supply enough meat to eat, she said, locals do not find it necessary to hunt wildlife.

Rondon believes those who live in the Pantanal feel a special closeness to the land and the animals they share it with. Conservationists are eager to capitalize on this kind of goodwill.

With money from donors such as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, organizations including Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy are buying ranches to convert them into nature reserves.

Activists are also working to convince ranchers to set aside some land as reserves, noting they can get tax breaks and tourist income for doing so. Those are real incentives: cattle do not bring in the profits they used to, and ranches, divided among succeeding generations, are shrinking. Many ranchers are looking for new ways to squeeze more income from their holdings.

Some ranchers are clear-cutting the forest to increase pasture area, but environmentalists warn this might disrupt the wetlands' ecosystem

One way some ranchers resort to is clear-cutting forested areas for new cattle pastures. But environmentalists say small fragments of forest in the Pantanal provide critical food and habitat for many species, and that forested areas along streams and rivers help to stabilize soils and control runoff.

And some ranchers are now introducing African grasses to their pastures, hoping for more productive forage for cattle. But scientists worry that non-native plants could have catastrophic effects on native plant species adapted to the wet and dry cycles of the Pantanal.

The Pantanal faces more external threats. In the headwater areas on its borders, deforestation has caused massive siltation in some rivers that could threaten fish stocks downstream in the Pantanal itself.

In agricultural areas on the plateau above the Pantanal basin -- mainly on large, highly mechanized soybean farms -- intensive use of pesticides and fertilizers is causing increasing chemical contamination of water that eventually reaches the Pantanal.

The greatest threat to the Pantanal, according to scientists I've interviewed in Brazil and elsewhere, is the proposed Hidrovia waterway, a plan to improve navigation on the Parana and Paraguay rivers. The project would straighten out many bends and curves in the rivers. This would make it possible for huge barges to navigate even at night, allowing a major expansion of river traffic.

The Hidrovia would almost certainly cause a radical change in the Pantanal's flood cycle. The waterway would drain the Pantanal's floodwaters much more quickly than they drain naturally, causing irreversible damage to the entire ecosystem, according to experts. Much of the Pantanal, they warn, could be turned into a desert.

Brazilian economists hope preserving more natural lands will encourage the growth of an ecotourism industry

Two years ago, after a campaign by local and international environmental groups to stop the Hidrovia, the Brazilian government decided to reject any part of it that would modify the Pantanal's water cycle. But the Hidrovia is an international project, extending into Bolivia and Paraguay, where there's continuing support for it. It appears to be stalled for now, but its opponents worry a future Brazilian government might reverse course.

More Brazilians are having second thoughts about economic development that causes disastrous loss of their natural heritage. Many now realize there are tangible benefits from wildlife conservation, including an infant ecotourism industry now consisting of a few dozen small ventures catering to Brazilian and international clients. Some ranchers believe ecotourism could eventually replace cattle ranching as the main source of jobs and earnings here.

Anyone with doubts about the future of ecotourism can talk to the grinning pantaneiro, Luis Carlos. A few years ago he never would have believed anyone would pay him good money to ride around on a horse, showing tourists some jaguar tracks and the families of capybara down by the river.

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Wildlife Conservation Society
Conservation International Foundation
The Nature Conservancy
IRN's Parana-Paraguay River Campaign
Hidrovia (in Spanish)

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