Pascale TROUILLAUD -
Brazil is home to more than half of the world’s plant and animal species, but its ecological paradises are facing growing threats from agriculture and mining lobbies who have found a champion in far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, experts say.
Brazil’s rich biodiversity is under attack from multiple fronts, including landowners who cut down multi-storyed trees to make way for soya bean crops, clandestine miners who pollute rivers used by indigenous people, and timber traffickers who decimate valuable species.
Bolsonaro, a climate-change sceptic who was swept to power in last October’s elections by the support of powerful farming and mining lobby groups, is on their side.
“It sends a message to farmers and especially organised crime mafias who invade the land to occupy it,” said Emilio La Rovere, head of the environmental studies laboratory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
The rate of deforestation in the Amazon, which slowed dramatically from 2004 to 2012, resurged in January, the month Bolsonaro took power, according to conservation group Imazon.
It rose 54 per cent to 108 square kilometres compared with 70 kilometres a year earlier. Although the rate declined in February (-57 per cent) and March (-77 per cent), 268 square kilometres of Amazon rainforest disappeared in the first-quarter.
Over the past 12 months, deforestation is up 24 per cent. “Before, we took our food directly from the trees, but now it is necessary to plant crops,” elderly indigenous man Mojtidi Arara said on a recent trip to the Amazon.
Mojtidi has to walk for one hour into the forest to fetch bananas. “Troubling bills have been tabled in parliament,” said Andrea Mello of the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund (Funbio). One of them “would remove all natural reserves” if passed, an area Mello estimates would be equivalent to three times the size of the northeastern state of Bahia.
Often described as the “lungs of the planet,” the Amazon has an impressive number of species: 40,000 plants, 3,000 freshwater fish, nearly 1,300 birds, and 370 reptiles.
It is one of the last refuges of the king of Latin American forests, the jaguar, but also pink dolphins, which are at risk of extinction.
And it is still giving up its secrets — in the past 20 years, 2,200 new species of plants and vertebrates have been discovered there.
Yet the amount of Amazon rainforest disappearing every day is calculated in “football fields.” Some 80 per cent of these deforested areas have been turned into pastures, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Deforestation contaminates aquatic ecosystems and contributes to climate change by releasing carbon into the atmosphere. — AFP
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