News: the Amazon on fire
The burning of the largest rainforest on Earth caused anger and consternation across the world. But how did it all start?
Brazil’s forest ablaze
The Amazon’s blessing is also its curse. A fertile biome with an abundance of water, sun and life-giving soils, the environmental conditions that make it a region of unparalleled biodiversity are the same ones desired by farmers and loggers, the biggest drivers of its deforestation.
In August this year, all eyes turned to the Amazon as thousands of fires ravaged massive swathes of the region. But what caused them?
Slicing up the land
To exploit nature’s bounty, new roads are carved into the forest, which brings the land grabbers. Their job is to illegally cut down the forest to make way for cattle grazing, though beef is not the main commodity they desire. The land grabbers use ranching to stake claim on the land to sell on for a profit.
Tiago Reis, a global trade researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain explains: “Land grabbers first remove the valuable trees, sell them to illegal markets, then clear a whole area and pile the wood into a corner of the plot. In the dry season they set fire to the pyres. Then they spread pastureland and cattle in an unproductive and inefficient way.” He continues: “They are not cattle ranchers. They are land speculators whose objective is to claim ownership of the land and sell it for a very high price to real farmers and ranchers.”
But this was not the only cause of the 2019 fires. Farmers who have already laid claim to the fringes of the Amazon also burn fields in order to clear the ground for the next planting season. Some of
these fires likely got out of control this year and scorched nearby forest. Many environmentalists argue that farmers also intentionally burn neighbouring forest to make way for more agricultural land. In what becomes a vicious circle, felling trees changes the microclimate of the area, making the land hotter and drier, so more vulnerable to burning in future.
Every dry season, fires are used to clear plant debris in the Amazon. But with an 80 per cent increase in the number of fires compared with 2018, this year was different. What caused this spike?
Politics of destruction
On 1 January 2019, Jair Bolsonaro became the 38th president of Brazil. With bold visions of increasing economic development in the country, he viewed the Amazon as a cash cow to be exploited. According to Auricélia Arapium, an indigenous leader from Pará State in Brazil, “Both the environment and indigenous peoples have been called ‘barriers to development’ by the current government.”
Since taking office, the president has systematically cut funding for the country’s wildlife conservation work and weakened its environmental legislation while sacking staff that work in environment departments. “What changed this year was the public discourse of the president defending land grabbers and all types of criminals who felt free to commit crimes,” reflects Reis.
Numerous indigenous communities live within the Amazon and many concur that the burning has been caused by commercial farmers spurred on by Brazil’s president. Florêncio Almeida Vaz Filho of the Maytapu indigenous people in Brazil explains that “It is not the poor peasants who burn the forest. It is because of the rich owners of cattle farms and soy monocultures. And they act without fear and are stimulated by the words of President Bolsonaro.”
Blame game
It is no coincidence that this year has seen a rise in both deforestation and in fires. The Amazon Environmental Institute of Research calculated that the sites with the most fires were the same places that suffered the most deforestation.
In a strange response to the ecological disaster, Bolsonaro blamed local environmental organisations for starting
It is no coincidence that this year has seen a rise in both deforestation and in fires.
the burns, suggesting it was because these charities wanted to shine a negative light onto Brazil’s government. Many others, though, believe that the fires were orchestrated by those who want to cut down the rainforest to make way for extractive industries like agribusinesses.
The fires not only affected wildlife in the area but the indigenous peoples who live there. Native communities have complained that the fires are impacting their health, including smoke affecting the eyes of their children. At the height of the fires, breathing in the air was equivalent to smoking 600 cigarettes a day. Tragically, a number of firefighters have succumbed to smoke inhalation and died. Arapium reflects that “For many indigenous peoples, attacks on nature and on forests are attacks on their lives. Today, most of the fires are criminal fires, to burn our forest, to burn our principal means of living, to burn our territories, to burn Mother Earth, to put an end to Mother Earth, to put an end to nature.” Over the border in Bolivia, colossal crowds – including indigenous people who travelled there on foot – gathered in Santa Cruz to demand that President Evo Morales end ‘controlled burning’ and declare the situation a national emergency.
World outcry
Once the international media got hold of the travesty happening in the Amazon, some of the countries that had provided funding for conserving the rainforest declared that they would halt donations. Others, like France, offered additional funds to help extinguish the fires. Bolsonaro declined their help, saying that he thought the money would be better spent protecting their own forests. Reis suggests that Bolsonaro’s refusal of help was a political move “to justify anti-colonialist
and anti-globalist messages. In the end, these things just helped him to gather support from nationalists.”
Under mounting global pressure, by 23 August – many weeks after the fires had started and wreaked havoc in the rainforest – Bolsonaro finally sent army troops to help fight the fires. However, because of the funding cuts to environmental protection, many felt this was too little too late. When asked what else has been done to stop the fires, Mary Menton, an environmental justice fellow from University of Sussex replies “Honestly, not nearly enough. The government does not have the political will to address them and, even if it did, the firefighting infrastructure and resources are not in place.”
By mid-September, fires were still raging in parts of the Amazon. International aid that Bolsonaro did accept included sending in planes and firefighters. However, without addressing the fundamental causes of the fires – including the stifled Brazilian government’s environmental department and a push to ‘develop’ the Amazon – it is likely that next year will see similar burns take place.
The changing political situation in Brazil does not make it easy to undertake the crucial conservation work that would otherwise help protect the Amazon.
According to Alexander Lees, senior lecturer in conservation biology at Manchester Metropolitan University, “Brazil has one of the highest murder rates of environmental activists. Even the environmental police are not safe at the frontiers.” What can be done to reverse this problem? “We need to stop evaluating development schemes solely in terms of the profits they could generate,” says Lees. He argues that Brazil does not need more of the Amazon to be converted to agriculture. There is already a huge amount of abandoned and degraded farmland that can be used, as well as improving the productivity of cattle ranching. This can be done, says Lees, by “better use of this land, intensifying production in places to spare land that can be returned to forest in others, while empowering indigenous communities rather than systematically undermining them”.
It remains to be seen what Bolsonaro’s next move is when it comes to protecting the Amazon. Some countries have suggested implementing a ban on any imports from Brazil that could be contributing to the deforestation and fires. By using the world’s largest rainforest as a pawn in a complicated global political game of chess, the future of the Amazon hangs in the balance.