It provides Brazil’s world-beating farmers with water, and keeps carbon locked up for the rest of us
|Belém|15 min read
Delegates to the UN’s annual COP climate-change conference, to be held this November in the city of Belém at the mouth of the Amazon, will not need to travel far to see the void where the rainforest used to be. Heading south on the BR-010 highway into the interior of the state of Pará, they will soon reach vast open spaces cut out of dense tropical forest. White zebu cattle with curved horns and humped backs huddle for shade under the few remaining trees, or forage in the scrubland.
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This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline “This gigantic green world”
From the October 25th 2025 edition
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