Dramatic new images have shown fires in vast areas of the Brazilian Amazon nearly a year after fires across the region sparked an international crisis for President Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right government.
The video footage and photos were filmed during a Greenpeace flight over a wide area of forest in the southern Amazon state of Mato Grosso on July 9. Filmed just as the Amazon dry season began, fears are mounting that this year’s fires may be as devastating and perhaps worse than 2019’s.
“It was shocking to see the size of this deforestation and the fires, at a time when the government is dismantling environmental protection,” said Rômulo Batista, Amazon’s leading activist for Greenpeace, who spent days flying over a wide area. “It is the beginning of the dry season and we saw fires and areas prepared for deforestation.”
Some images showed hot spots in areas near the cities of Nova Canaã do Norte, Porto dos Gaúchos, Itanhangá and Nova Maringá, as well as areas recently converted to pasture, the biggest cause of deforestation in the Amazon. Other photos showed felled trees stacked for burning and fires near Juara, known as the capital of cattle.
Farmers traditionally burn open areas in the Amazon during the dry season. The number of fires last year was the highest since 2010.
“They fell the forest and left it to dry in the sun. When it’s dry they put everything together and set it on fire, ”said Batista. The land is then turned over to livestock or agriculture. But Batista also saw signs that fire was being used to clear the forest once the valuable forests had been removed. The images show fires in intact forests near Alta Floresta. “We are seeing that fire is used to deforest more and more,” Batista said.
Meanwhile, the Bolsonaro government has dismantled environmental protection agencies. – It fired key officials and reduced the amount of fines imposed for environmental crimes by the environmental agency IBAMA last year to the lowest level in 24 years, the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper reported. Last year, he fired the head of Brazil’s space research institute after calling official figures showing the increase in deforestation “lies.”
However, he has promised to deal with the fires. On Thursday Bolsonaro banned farm and forest fires for 120 days. Its vice president, Hamilton Mourão, is in charge of the country’s Amazon council, and an army operation called Green Brazil was launched on May 11, which is targeting illegal deforestation and fires for the second year in a row.
“We started fighting these fires early and we are confident that we will reduce this illegal activity for the second half of the year,” Mourão told the Brazilian Senate on Tuesday. The northern state of Mato Grosso was one of the four areas that suffered from high deforestation, he said, along with the states of Pará and Rondônia and the southern state of Amazonas. Mourão’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Greenpeace’s disclosures.
But official data shows that the Brazilian government’s efforts so far this year have failed. Brazil saw more fires in the Amazon in June than in any other year since 2007. Brazil’s space research agency INPE detected 2,248, compared to 1,880 in June last year. Preliminary data showed that deforestation from January to June, with 3,069 km2, increased by 25% compared to the same period last year.
The Brazilian government is under increasing pressure from international investors and Brazilian companies.
On June 23, international investors who managed trillions of dollars in assets warned Brazil about increasing deforestation and the “dismantling” of policies to protect the environment and indigenous communities. On July 7, the CEOs of 39 companies, including Microsoft, Ambev, Shell and leading banks such as Santander, expressed concern about “the impact on business of the current negative perception that Brazil has abroad in relation to the problems Socio-environmental in the Amazon “.
But Mourão has said that to control deforestation, Brazil needs to regulate the chaotic ownership of land in the Amazon. The government plans a decree that allows 97,000 land titles to be remotely regularized, which according to environmentalists means rewarding land grabbers with legal titles.
In May, more than 40 British companies, including major supermarkets, wrote to Brazilian lawmakers to express concerns about fires and deforestation, and an earlier version of the same decree. Greenpeace said British consumers must demonstrate that they disagree with the destruction of Amazon.
“Supermarkets will be judged on how they respond to this developing crisis. They all sell large volumes of industrial meat, much of which is related to deforestation in forests such as the Amazon, ”said Anna Jones, director of forests for Greenpeace, UK. “It is time for supermarkets to dump forest destroyers and replace industrial meat with plant-based options.”
While Mourão has reached a more moderate tone, Bolsonaro has doubled himself with the same burning rhetoric that last year saw him accuse actor Leonardo DiCaprio of paying for the fires without providing any evidence, and publicly fighting with French President Emmanuel Macron. . During Thursday night’s Facebook Live weekly, he said the attacks on Amazon’s crumbling protection in Brazil were motivated by business rivalry.
“Brazil is an agribusiness power and Europe is an environmental sect. They don’t keep anything, “he said,” and they shoot us unfairly all the time. Why? It is a commercial battle. “
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