Pantanal, Amazon Region Threaten Brazil’s Trade as Government Shuns Responsibility

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – While the Pantanal is burning and the Amazon region is recording growing degradation rates, Brazil’s economy is at risk of being shunted into the sidelines. In addition to the warnings already issued by Brazilian investment funds and banks and the threat that the trade agreement between the European Union and Mercosur will not be finalized, on Tuesday, September 15th, Vice-President Hamilton Mourão received a letter signed by the ambassadors of eight European countries – Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and Belgium.

The message in the letter is clear: while the issue of deforestation and preservation are the focus of the governments and companies on the continent, “Brazil is making it increasingly difficult for companies and investors to meet their environmental, social and governance criteria.”

The international pressure is added to an unprecedented reaction of more than 200 organizations, including NGOs, agribusiness companies and the financial sector, which sent a message to the government on Tuesday demanding measures to reduce deforestation in the Amazon. “Not only because of the advance of the social and environmental losses involved, but also because of the threat that forest destruction in the region poses to national economic issues. There is a clear and growing concern from several sectors of national and international society about the advancing deforestation,” says the text, signed by the so-called Brazil Climate, Forests and Agriculture Coalition. The group has partnered with NGOs such as WWF, and companies such as JBS, Marfrig, Basf and Bayer. Among the group’s proposals are greater transparency in actions and inspection in the forests.

However, the pressure has not changed the Bolsonaro Government’s response, even though hard facts show that its management is short of what is needed. “The behavior we observe in the environmental crisis reflects the government’s stance in the Covid-19 pandemic. It denies that it is a big problem, it denies its severity and feeds the narrative through statements with no scientific substantiation,” says Romulo Batista, one of Greenpeace’s spokespeople.

Vice-President Hamilton Mourão, in charge of the Council for the Amazon, rejects that the Government is wrong, and talks about “selectivity in the disclosure of data” in relation to deforestation. “When the data is negative, he goes and discloses it. When it is positive, he doesn’t disclose it, see?”, accused the vice-president in a statement to the press on Tuesday afternoon. Asked about who this would be, Mourão answered: “I don’t know, I’m not the INPE’s director”. What the vice-president is not saying is that the data are public. One only needs to access the INPE website to learn how many hot spots occurred in each biome in real time.

Mourão argues that one of the ways to fight fires is to keep the military in constant operation in the forest until 2022 and decree a fire moratorium, which has been in force since July, a strategy that has already been challenged in the Supreme Court by the Green Party.

The vice-president and the Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, have started a campaign to discredit the statements of environmentalists and their supporters. Using excerpts from an unauthorized Greenpeace video, the vice-president says on Twitter: “Whose side are you on? For whom are you really preserving or for whom are you manipulating your feelings? Brazil is the country that most preserves its native forests in the world. That’s the truth. We take care of it”. The video was a reaction to another post by the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil. In the piece, the organization says that “the Amazon is the heart of Brazil. Whoever sets fire to it is an enemy of the country.” It also urges that the Brazilian President should stop being financed in the defense of the Amazon.

“Today we discuss issues that we should not be discussing, that had already been overcome. We have to prove that fire exists, that the data are facts, not ideology. We have to fight against tales that fire is for subsistence and that it was criminal, not caused by lightning,” says the ICV’s deputy director, Alice Thuault.

Reality imposes itself

While the government struggles with the facts, reality continues to impose itself in the Pantanal. Earlier this week, the Federal Police launched Operation Matá, which served ten search and seizure warrants in Mato Grosso do Sul. According to the institution, investigations point out that the fire in the region was deliberately started to turn the native forest into cattle grazing land. Moreover, in the current drought period in the region – which only ends in November – lightning rarely strikes the pasture. Therefore, there is a clear indication that the fires were caused by human interference.

Impunity combined with Bolsonaro’s policy of reducing the number of infractions are also factors that contribute to the increase in fires. Despite the record number of patch burns, there was a 48 percent drop in violations enforced by the Brazilian Institute of the Environment in Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, the two Pantanal states. Data published by the BBC, and confirmed by EL PAÍS, show that from January to September 14th, IBAMA enforced 223 infractions in the two states this year, against 425 over the same period in 2019.

When analyzing INPE and NASA satellite imagery, the ICV also found that until August nine sites alone accounted for 67 percent of the fire outbreaks in the whole Mato Grosso Pantanal. In five of them, the property where the fire started was private and registered in the rural environmental registry (CAR). In other words, whoever should be preserving the area can be established and, having failed to do so, could be held criminally liable. Another three points were unregistered areas, with yet another in an indigenous land. “The state fines paid in Mato Grosso are around two percent of the amount of fines imposed. The cycle of liability does not close. This impunity ensures the continuity of fires year after year,” says Thuault.

Destruction

In 33 days, the fires in the Pantanal virtually ravaged the Encontro das Águas State Park, on the border between Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul. Satellite imagery analyzed by experts from the NGO Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV) shows that, on August 9th, some fire outbreaks originated only from the northern part of the park, known as an ecotourism point in the region. On September 13th, however, the fire was coming from all directions, covering 85 percent of its 108,000 hectares.

The flames became routine given a clear lack of planning by environmental bodies, particularly at the federal level. The assessment was made by representatives of four civil society organizations that work mainly in the environmental area: ICV, Greenpeace, WWF and the Climate Observatory. Since the start of the year it was known that the region would be facing its greatest drought in almost five decades, that one of the main rivers in the region, the Paraguay, would have its flow considerably reduced, and that the lack of action in the main neighboring biome, the cerrado, would have a direct impact on the Pantanal.

Yet, the government took almost three months to mobilize the fire brigades and reduced the firefighting budget by up to 48 percent. “This situation in the Pantanal is repeating itself. We also experienced a great catastrophe in 2019, which burned more than in the past ten years. It was an indication that planning was required. But nothing was done,” said Cássio Bernardino, conservation analyst at WWF-Brazil.

Up to September 15th, the Pantanal had already recorded 15,453 hotspots, according to the INPE. It is the highest rate since official records began in 1998. Over 15 percent of the entire Pantanal territory has been destroyed. In the Amazon, the figures are not encouraging either. Over the same period, the Amazon biome exceeded the total number of outbreaks recorded in the whole month of September 2019. A total of 20,486 fire outbreaks have been recorded, an 86 percent increase over the same period last year.

Drop in resources

Among the criticism made of the Salles-Mourão-Bolsonaro administration is the reduction of prevention and environmental inspection resources. The two main federal bodies working in this area are IBAMA and ICMBIO (Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation). Between 2019 and 2020, IBAMA’s environmental control section lost almost 35 percent of its budget (down from R$102.8 million per year to R$66.2 million). The forest fire prevention and control section dropped by 16 percent in the same period, from R$45.9 million per year to R$38.6 million. At ICMBIO, the proportional drop was greater. The area of environmental inspection and forest fire prevention and control lost 48.6 percent of its budget. It was R$37.1 million in 2019. Now, it is R$19 million.

In early 2019, at the behest of President Bolsonaro, Minister Salles dismissed the board of the Amazon Fund, which managed international resources used in the environmental area throughout the country. Its main donors are the governments of Norway and Germany. Today there are R$1.5 billion frozen in an account that cannot be used by anyone because there is no one to manage these funds. “While we are faced with budget cuts, we have international money frozen that could be used for fire prevention and firefighting,” says Suely Araújo, a senior public policy expert with the Climate Observatory and former president of IBAMA.

The government’s solution is to invest in the militarization of fire fighting. Operation Verde Brasil 2, commanded by Mourão, is the main one. It costs approximately R$60 million per month and mobilizes some 4,000 military personnel. “With two months of this operation we pay the salaries of a thousand IBAMA inspectors for one year,” says Araújo. According to her, the issue is not necessarily the lack of resources, but rather the lack of political will to employ them.

This week, the governors of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul declared states of calamity and emergency, respectively. Through these decrees, bureaucracy can be simplified for the use of resources in fighting the fires. However, for the next few weeks, the shocking pictures of charred dead animals will still be in evidence.

Source: El País