Brazil fiddles as Amazon burns
Former Brazilian environment minister and presidential candidate Marina Silva this week called wildfires raging in the Amazon rainforest a “crime against humanity” and blamed current government policies for fuelling the blazes.
A record number of wildfires have raged for weeks and are decimating the Brazilian Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest whose protection scientists say is critical to the fight against climate change. The blazes have nearly doubled this year compared with the same period in 2018, according to Brazilian officials, prompting a global outcry.
“The whole world is watching a situation that is out of control in terms of deforestation and fires in Brazil’s Amazon,” Silva told a conference in Bogotá, Colombia.
She and other environmentalists have blamed the Amazon’s plight on cuts to environmental protection under right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in January riding a wave of populist support for his anticorruption campaign. “It’s a situation I regard to be a crime against the homeland, a crime against humanity,” said Silva, a former senator.
“Throughout Brazil’s history we have had difficult situations, but this is the first time we have a situation that was practically and officially fuelled by the government,” she said.
The number of forest fires recorded in Brazil so far this year, more than half of them in the Amazon
— 76,720
Bolsonaro has railed against environmental fines for farmers and called for indigenous reserves and other protected areas to be opened up for development.
The environment ministry has set up a body with the power to pardon deforesters. Federal prosecutors in Brazil’s Amazon state of Pará said they would investigate the increase in deforestation and wildfires to determine whether there had been reduced monitoring and enforcement of environmental protections.
Environmentalists like Silva, a minister under former left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, say Bolsonaro’s push to open the Amazon to development is emboldening industry, illegal loggers and ranchers to clear land and exploit natural resources.
“The Bolsonaro government has broken down all the environmental policies that were created throughout the decades,” said Silva, who was born into a rubber-tapping community in the Amazon.
Earlier this month Norway and Germany suspended funding for projects to curb deforestation in Brazil after becoming alarmed by rising deforestation under Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro said this week that the government lacked the resources to fight the wildfires. He also said that while he could not prove that nongovernmental groups were lighting the fires, they were “the most likely suspects”.
The president said in a Facebook broadcast that countries that gave money to preserve the Amazon did it to “interfere with our sovereignty”, and not for charity. Indigenous groups who live in the Amazon rainforest and depend on it for survival said the wildfires in Brazil and eastern Bolivia were a tragedy.
“The lack of capacity of these governments and their lack of political will have caused the serious environmental tragedy that for weeks, and without precedent, already show irreversible environmental damage,” indigenous Amazon organisations said.South African Kumi Naidoo, secretary-general of rights group Amnesty International, said responsibility to stop the wildfires “lies squarely” with Brazil’s government, which “must change [its] disastrous policy of opening up the rainforest for destruction”.
— Thomson Reuters Foundation
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