Amid the international outrage caused by the wave of fires raving the Amazon, Brazil’s environment minister Ricardo Salles proposed a solution.
He said that to stop the deforestation of the largest tropical forest on the planet – more than 60% of which is in Brazil – the Amazon must be “monetized”, driving commercial development in new areas of the forest.
“We have to recognize that there are real subjects living in the Amazon,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times.
“We have to give them a concrete answer, not just say they can’t do anything.”
This apparent tension between the conservation of the Amazon – considered indispensable for the ecological and climatic balance of the planet – and the economic development of the area, its more than 20 million inhabitants and the whole country is not new.
But perhaps never in recent times was it as evident as at this time, with a Brazilian president -Jair Bolsonaro- openly in favour of the trade opening of protected areas, while the world watches with horror the fires and the rise of deforestation of the jungle.
In July alone, more than 1,864 square kilometers of rainforest would have been deforested, more than three times as many as in July of the previous year, according to preliminary data from brazil’s National Institute of Space Research (Inpe), whose director was fired by Bolsonaro after the publication of the figures.
And while the fires are seasonal, experts point to a clear relationship between this year’s fires and deforestation.
Suspicions about the intentionality of the fires were heightened when it was known that the Federal Police and Prosecutor’s Office are investigating whether on 10 August there was an alleged coordinated action by rural producers in the northern state of Pará to burn down the forest, christened like “Day of Fogo.”
The first news of it was published on August 5 by the newspaper Folha do Progresso.
“We need to show the president that we want to work and the only way is to take down. To make and clean up our pastures is with fire,” a local rural leader told the journalist of this newspaper.
The action – which was denied by local leaders – would have been coordinated by WhatsApp among trade unionists, farmers, traders and grileiros (land hoarders by criminal methods).
Land rights
Livestock is one of the activities that occurs in the Amazon.
“The main cause of deforestation is land search,” Carlos Eduardo Young, professor at the University of Rio de Janeiro’s Institute of Economics, tells BBC Mundo.
“The traditional way to get a right on land is to occupy it economically, transforming it for cattle or crop pasture. Burn the forest, put there cattle and then sell the land.”
Claudia Azevedo-Ramos, researcher at the Center for High AmazonIan Studies at the Federal University of Pará, calls this cycle a “speculative strategy”.
“Capitalized actors buy the land from smallholders, increasing their production area and land concentration,” He says to BBC Mundo.
This policy of exploration and occupation of the Amazon was established by the military government (1964-1985), with its policy of “Integrate not to deliver”, aimed at protecting the jungle from its internationalization.
Much of the areas reserved for Indigenous Brazilians are in the Amazon.
The National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) moved migrants from different states to the banks of the Trans-Amazon highway and the government granted tax incentives for large agricultural projects.
These settlements were responsible for 13.5% of all deforestation in the Legal Amazon (which includes the states of Amazonas, Roraima, Rond-nia, Pará, Amapá, Acre, Tocantins, Mato Grosso and part of Maranhao), although they occupy only 5.3% of the region, according to a study submitted to the Brazilian National Congress in 2016.
Land policies are an important factor in understanding the economic and criminal dynamics of the Amazon.
In 2017, the government of Michel Temer passed a law that allowed people who had illegally or irregularly occupied state land up to 2,500 hectares until 2011 to obtain a title of ownership.
Livestock and agricultural production
Indeed, 40% of the Amazon is either private property or “undesignated” territory, i.e. government property but without a certain established use.
The production of aaí has increased greatly in recent years.
And these areas “can potentially be subject to appropriations,” Britaldo Soares Filho, professor in the Department of Cartography at the University of Minas Gerais, tells the BBC Mundo Britaldo Soares Filho.
The remaining 60% are protected lands, either in the form of “conservation units” or as indigenous reserves.
Conservation units can be strictly protected ecological reserves or land for sustainable use, such as community tourism or the production of Amazonian or acai walnuts, a fruit that has become popular around the world and is typically produced through family farming.
The production of aaí in the Brazilian Amazonian states, in fact, increased by 90% between 2009 and 2017, and generated revenues of R$545 million (US$130 million), according to the 2018 activity report of the Amazon Fund.
Amazon nut production generated revenue in the same period of R$95 million (US$22.7 million).
“Amazonic walnut and aaí are very important products that can be grown in the forest without deforesting it,” says Soares Filho.
Sustainable forest exploitation is also permitted in some areas for timber, although illegal exploitation is a serious problem.
For example, in the state of Pará between 2015 and 2016, 44% of all tropical timber was obtained illegally, and it is the state with the highest timber production of the Brazilian Amazon.
The ruralist bench
The density of cattle heads is very low in the Amazon.
Once de-strengthened, the land is usually occupied for livestock pasture, although it is not the most economically profitable activity.
“The average density (in the Amazon) is 0.6 cows per hectare. If you see a typical pasture, you probably won’t see any cows,” Mundo Toby Gardner, a researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, tells BBC.
“In the Amazon there are huge farms that have more than 100,000 hectares, owned by members of Congress, businessmen, etc… Then there are millions of smallholder producers, dedicated to subsistence agriculture,” Gardner explains.
Although 80% of brazil’s beef is consumed domestically, the country remains the world’s largest exporter of this product.
In the Legal Amazon (which includes parts of the Cerrado or tropical savannah) there are about 86 million head of cattle, of which some 14.6 million are slaughtered a year.
But Brazil is also a great producer of sugar, chicken, coffee and soy, among others.
In the case of soybeans, it is the world’s largest producer, and 13% of the planted area is in the Amazon.
Brazil is the world’s leading producer of soybeans.
The cultivation of this legume caused the deforestation of 474 km2 of forest between 2008 and 2016-2017, a much smaller amount than in previous years – according to data from the Ministry of the Environment – thanks to a moratorium by which companies committed not to buy soy traders who obtain it from farmers who deforest, use slave labour or threaten indigenous lands.
This productive producer of Brazil makes the rural sector and the agricultural business important in congress and, in addition, now has a former ally, Bolsonaro, as president.
“This government is his,” the president said last July to the so-called “ruralist bench.”
Ruralists managed in 2012 to reduce protection in parts of the Amazon.
The Brazilian Forest Code requires that any property in this region must protect 80% of its territory as a legal reserve, but that year the percentage was reduced to 50% in states that have already protected at least 65% of its territory as conservation units or indigenous reserves.
Now, these politicians are trying to pass a law that completely overturns the obligation of private owners to preserve some of their property.
The author of the bill is precisely one of Bolsonaro’s sons, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro.
How much the Amazon contributes
But exploiting the Amazon economically in this way may not be as profitable from a broader perspective.
“The Amazon forest has a great impact on the ecosystem, inside but also outside the Amazon region,” says Soares Filho.
Numerous companies registered an interest in exploiting the Amazon’s mining resources.
“It’s a big water pump, the trees carry water from the ground into the atmosphere. If a large part of the Amazon is deforeted, this will have an impact, for example, on the profitability of soybean plantations in Mato Grosso.”
Soares Filho and colleagues published an article in the magazine Nature estimated the economic value of a number of ecosystem services provided by the Brazilian Amazon rainforest: food production (Amazonian nut), raw materials (rubber and wood), greenhouse gas mitigation (CO2) and (estimated losses in soybean, beef and hydropower production due to reduced rainfall).
According to its calculations, the Amazon contributes up to 8.2 billion reais annually (about US$1.9 billion) to the Brazilian economy, published the environmental news website Mongabay.
The pOak, however, is that of the 284 million hectares of public forest left in the Brazilian Amazon, about 60 million are not yet designated, according to data from the Brazilian Forest Service.
If deformed, this could cause losses of R$422 million (US$100 million) a year due to the reduction in rainfall it would cause.
But large producers are also pushing for large-scale agricultural and mining activities within indigenous territories, something Bolsonaro himself has been favorable about.
In the Amazon, 8% of strictly protected areas and 28% of indigenous lands are also areas of registered mining interest, i.e. where a company has officially registered its interest in carrying out mining activities before the Ministry of Mines and Energy.
There are also at least 453 illegal mines, according to a map presented by the Amazon Global Environmental Information Network in December last year.
The fires generated international protests against the Brazilian president.
In late July, dozens of gold miners invaded a remote indigenous reserve in the Amazon after a local leader was stabbed and the community fled.
Once the fire is extinguished, this tension that many perceive between economic development and the environmental protection of the Amazon is expected to continue.
In many parts of Brazil there are people who support Bolsonaro’s policies and who believe that the government should favor production in the Amazon.
“We will continue to produce here in the Amazon and we will continue to feed the world,” Agamenon da Silva Menezes of the Novo Progresso Rural Producers Union, the community in which the coordinated action of the Novo Progresso “Day of Fogo, ” something he denied.
