As the levels of carbon dioxide within the atmosphere rise, scientists and climate experts are increasingly more concerned with areas that can store and sequester carbon naturally. Whether in the rainforests of Southeast Asia or South America, deforestation has increased steadily in recent years. According to Greenpeace, approximately 80% of deforestation has been caused by agricultural production.
Current systems of agriculture are unsustainable and require the overaccumulation of land. However, the unsustainable nature of current agriculture presented itself far before the current crisis of deforestation that has occurred over the past 30 years. The plantation model of crop production used during the early 17th century until the mid-19th century created distinctly unsustainable and unethical forms of production that paved the way for current models of global production.
Plantations have historically rested on the cornerstone of exploitative labor. After the abolition of slavery in the US, the model of the plantation shifted its labor practices to more legal forms of worker exploitation. For example, sharecropping became a popular model of plantation-style crop production in the early 1900s to maintain the yields that were produced during the legalization of slavery in the US. Within this system, individuals, mainly formerly enslaved people, acted as tenant farmers, living and working on plantations in exchange for living accommodations and a share of the profits made from the harvest's sale.
However, again, labor practices shifted within the modern plantation system with the invention of mechanized farming. For approximately 50 years, from the 1940s to the 1990s, plantation models of crop production were not profitable and consequently not popular. However, through processes of globalization in the 1990s, many nations in the Global South became the sites of modern plantations. In Indonesia, the palm oil industry has cleared thousands of acres of natural landscape to set up industrial farming operations across the country.
While many current solutions seek to work through legal pathways to halt the process of deforestation, boycotting and consumer demands may be more effective. Many countries attempt to protect their natural landscapes through legal classifications, making certain areas protected sanctuaries. Although this does deter some efforts of purchasing land, the strong profit incentive driving most corporations leads them to explore legal loopholes to purchase these protected lands. For example, while the Amazon Rainforest has been under protected status with the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program, land purchase and deforestation have occurred steadily for decades.