Helicopter flight with an armed team of law enforcement officers from IBAMA (the Brazilian federal anti-logging police). We took off from the frontier town of Feliz Natal with a local enforcement team and went out looking for illegal logging operations in the forest nearby. The forest here is rapidly being cleared for farming soybeans and corn, and the ownership of the land and the legality of clearing it are both murky and difficult to enforce.
This area of the Amazon is known as the Cerrrado or "closed" in Portuguese and is a transition zone from tropical rain forest to savannah that is rapidly being converted into large scale farms that harvest soybeans in Jan/Feb and corn in May/June. The double harvest is possible due to fertile soil that requires no irrigation, and it has led to a rapid conversion of virgin forest to farmland.
