Whatever: Trumpsonaro Issues Ban On Amazon Fires - Fires That Come After Clearcutting
On July 15, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro decreed a ban on fires in the Amazon for 120 days. While this is ostensibly positive—a message to the world that Brazil’s government prioritizes protecting the rainforest—it is a remedy that at best addresses a symptom rather than the underlying disease. The decree does nothing to stop a root cause of the fires—deforestation.
The 2019 fires that overwhelmed the Amazon did not spontaneously generate: they happened largely in areas that had already been deforested and then were set ablaze to finish the conversion process to pasture for livestock and agriculture. The extensive fires were a culmination of the destruction that preceded it, a process that takes place insidiously and relentlessly, driven by both landowners and landgrabbers, and recently emboldened by the current administration’s outspoken criticism of environmental protection laws and policies.
IPAM estimates that 450,000 hectares deforested between January 2019 and April 2020 are now primed for burning; the other 550,000 hectares felled during that period have already been burned. Burned or not, over 1 million hectares of Brazilian rainforest were degraded over 16 months —175 Manhattans cleared to the ground. If Bolsonaro’s government is genuinely committed to enforcing this recently announced ban, the fires should be significantly less than those of 2019. Nevertheless, the systematic destruction of the rainforest continues. Former effective policies to safeguard the environment have been weakened or abolished; protection agencies are starved of funding; and indigenous and other traditional communities are abandoned. Overall, an ethos of the individual’s dominion over natural resources is being promoted in Brazil, in direct opposition to its constitutional principles that define the environment as “of collective interest”.
A letter from 38 business executives, many of whom lead multi-national corporations, was sent in early July to vice president Mourão insisting on the “need to make the right choices now and start redirecting investments to address and recover the Brazilian economy in a circular, low-carbon, and inclusive economic model, in which there is no controversy between producing and preserving.” Some signatories of the letter such as soy traders Cargill and Amaggi and slaughterhouse Marfrig in the Cerrado risk deforestation in their supply chains, as suggested by thousands of fire alerts in the vicinity of their silos and potential buying zones in 2019. Another signatory, mining giant Vale operates the largest iron ore mine in the world in Carajás in the Amazon, where mineworkers were “deemed essential workers by the government” and required to continue working during the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in an outbreak. Vale has refused to disclose the number of employees infected, but Parauapebas, a small city of 200,000 driven by the mining economy, has had 16,972 confirmed cases as of July 29—an incidence rate nearly six times higher than the national average at the time. Notably, 90% of Vale’s 236 registered applications for exploration in the Amazon are on indigenous lands.
Blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah
EDIT
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/08/before-burning-comes-felling-brazils-half-measure-fire-ban-commentary/