Photo: Public domain photograph of the Amazon Rainforest, created by NASA
By Allegra Simpkins
Media was set ablaze with commentary last month, as news of wildfires in the Amazon rainforest and other areas of South America sparked controversy among environmentalists around the world. The initial panic has calmed down, but the aftermath has many people confused about global policies surrounding wildfires, indigenous protection, and the protection of one of the world’s most coveted resources.
The country of Brazil holds about 60% of the Amazon rainforest, making its policies on preservation crucial to help slow down the devastating effects of climate change. Unfortunately, Brazil’s current agricultural policies are not in favor of land conservation. The neoliberal stance that climate change is a secondary issue behind economic and agricultural development has made its way into government policy throughout the world, but Brazil has a unique position due to the Amazon rainforest’s undeniable benefit for the planet.
In an Aug. 31 Time Magazine article, Carley Petesch wrote that The European Space Agency (ESA) has stated that 25-35% of climate changing greenhouse gas emissions come from biomass burning, like forest fires. According to the U.S. Forest Service website, controlled or “prescribed” burning of crops, by farmers, is a common agricultural practice that is responsible for a significant percentage of fire-related emissions. Prescribed burning has a long history of being the preferred method farmers use to clear land prior to planting crops or acquiring new livestock. Generally done on a day with high humidity and low winds, the fires are easy enough to direct and control and put out when needed.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website also recognizes that in the United States, farmers work with government agencies and fire departments when planning controlled burns in case the fires spread and get out of hand. According to the American Forest Foundation website, mylandplan.org, the fires burn up whatever is residing on the land currently, and as it falls to the earth it is absorbed, creating nutrient rich soil perfect for germination. When done in the forest, fires burn up older, mature trees that no longer absorb much carbon from our atmosphere, dropping seeds into the newly nourished soil and planting a new generation of trees that absorb much more carbon than their predecessors. So, fires are not always a bad thing.
In the Amazon, the fires themselves were not necessarily the problem. Data from Brazil’s Socio-Environmental Institute claims that as much as two thirds of the land burned in the recent Amazonian fires was on privately owned property. However, major issues arose when it was discovered that nearly one third of what burned was not private land, but on protected indigenous territories. Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, acknowledges on their website that these territories are supposed to be protected by Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) who is responsible for the overseeing of the country’s Native interests. That responsibility, however, shifted after Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s 2016 presidential election.
After Jair Bolsonaro came into presidency in 2016, the responsibility of conservation once held by FUNAI became the job of Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture. Bolsonaro, who is heavily backed by agricultural lobbyists, ran his campaign by promising corporate farmers that he would lift land protections and open the Amazon up for farming, logging, and mining. Once he lifted these bans, he then shifted responsibility of indigenous land protection back to FUNAI and appointed Marcelo Xavier da Silva as the National Indian Foundation’s president. Silva has also been known to take a right-wing stance on developing indigenous territories and has historically worked against the interests of the native people of Brazil.
Bolsonaro declared during his 2016 campaign that marking specific territories out for Amazonian peoples only serves to separate them, and argued during an in-depth one-hour conversation with foreign journalists in July that indigenous people no longer want to live “like prehistoric men with no access to technology, science, information, and the wonders of modernity.” Ironically, indigenous groups like the Tembe, refute this statement and are actively defending their land from illegal loggers as explained in Louis Andres Henao’s Sep. 17 Associated Press article.
Bolsonaro’s rhetoric is right in time with the right-wing governments coming to power in other resource-rich parts of the world and has emboldened his supporters to act in extreme ways. All of this lead up to Aug. 10 of this year, when farmers and ranchers in Brazil who support Bolsonaro’s position of agricultural development organized a “Day of Fire” through the messenger application Whatsapp. During this “day of fire”, first reported by the Folha do Progresso, a southern publication based in Pará, farmers took it upon themselves to clear their own land in hopes of commodifying it.
There has also been some concern around the growing number of fires across the countries of Angola, Zambia, Mozambique, and Madagascar that can be seen from FIRMS, NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System, which allows you to browse active fires around the world in real time. However, the impact of these fires are not the same as those in the Amazon.
With Africa being home to at least 70% of the world’s fires on an average August day, as reported by Petesch’s TIME article, the fires coming out of these countries are mostly farmland, and not threatening indigenous people’s way of life like the Amazon fires. Africa also has a lack of access to global markets, which drives large scale agricultural expansion elsewhere, like the Amazon. Supply and demand is the name of capitalism’s game and Brazil’s growing economy under Bolsonaro has fueled these fires, while their opposition remains in the hands of those whose interests are more humane than monetary.
