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Brazil
Amazon rainforest fires: Brazil to reject
$20m pledged by G7
Senior official says funds should be spent on reforesting Europe
and not on ‘colonialist practices’

 Amazon fires: what is happening and is there anything we can do?

Jonathan Watts Global environment editor, and agencies

@jonathanwatts
 Tue 27 Aug 2019 08.23 BSTFirst published on Tue 27 Aug 2019 06.25 BST





A Brazilian farmer walks through a burned area of the Amazon rainforest,

near Porto Velho, Rondonia state. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty
Images

A senior Brazilian official has told Emmanuel Macron to take care of “his
home and his colonies” as Brazil rejected an offer from G7 countries of $20m
(£16m) to help fight fires in the Amazon.

“We appreciate [the offer], but maybe those resources are more relevant to
reforest Europe,” Onyx Lorenzoni, the chief of staff to President Jair
Bolsonaro, told the G1 news website.

Leaders of the G7 countries made the aid offer at a weekend summit in the
French city of Biarritz hosted by the French president, who had put the fires
high on the agenda. Environmental campaigners have dismissed the sum as
“chump change”.

“Macron cannot even avoid a foreseeable fire in a church that is a world

heritage site,” Lorenzoni said in a reference to the blaze that devastated the
Notre Dame cathedral in April. “What does he intend to teach our country?

“Brazil is a democratic, free nation that never had colonialist and imperialist
practices, as perhaps is the objective of the Frenchman Macron.”

The Brazilian presidency later confirmed the comments to Agence France-

Presse.
Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, had earlier told reporters that
his country welcomed the G7 funding, but after a meeting between Bolsonaro
and his ministers, the Brazilian government changed course.

Play Video
1:58
Amazon fires: the tribes fighting to save their dying rainforest – video

The announcement of the $20m assistance package was the most concrete
outcome of the three-day G7 summit of major industrialised democracies in
Biarritz and aimed to give money to Amazonian nations such as Brazil and
Bolivia, primarily to pay for more firefighting planes.

Tensions have risen between France and Brazil after Macron tweeted that the
fires burning in the Amazon basin amounted to an international crisis and
should be discussed as a top priority at the G7 summit. Bolsonaro reacted by
accusing Macron of having a “colonialist mentality”.

Speaking on French TV on Monday night, Macron reiterated that the Amazon

was a global issue and intensified his criticism of Bolsonaro.

“We respect your sovereignty. It’s your country,” Macron said. But the trees in
the Amazon are “the lungs of the planet”, he added.

“The Amazon forest is a subject for the whole planet. We can help you reforest.
We can find the means for your economic development that respects the
natural balance. But we cannot allow you to destroy everything.”

He also acknowledged that Europe, by importing soya from Brazil, was not
without blame for the agricultural pressure on the rainforest, saying: “We are
partly complicit.”

Play Video
0:53
Drone footage reveals devastation from Amazon fires – video

The diplomatic row between the leaders had escalated earlier in the day,
when Macron condemned Bolsonaro for what he called “extraordinarily rude”
comments made about his wife, Brigitte, after the Brazilian president
expressed approval online for a Facebook post implying that Brigitte
Macron was not as good-looking as his own wife, Michelle.
“He has made some extraordinarily rude comments about my wife,” Macron
said at a press conference in Biarritz when asked to react to statements about
him by the Brazilian government. “What can I say? It’s sad. It’s sad for him
firstly, and for Brazilians,” he added.

Macron said he hoped for the sake of the Brazilian people “that they will very
soon have a president who behaves in the right way”.

Play Video
2:15
Macron and Bolsonaro's war of words over Amazon fires, aid and their wives
– video report

The US president, Donald Trump, skipped the summit session aimed at

finding solutions to global heating through tree planting and shifting from
fossil fuels to wind energy. In a press conference after the summit, he was
dismissive of efforts to change direction.

“I feel the US has tremendous wealth … I’m not going to lose that wealth on
dreams, on windmills – which, frankly, aren’t working too well,” he said. “I
think I know more about the environment than most.”

Environmental groups said G7’s emergency fire aid was insufficient and failed
to address the trade and consumption drivers of deforestation.

“The offer of $20m is chump change, especially as the crisis in the Amazon is
directly linked to overconsumption of meat and dairy in the UK and
other G7 countries,” said Richard George, the head of forests for Greenpeace
UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/27/amazon-fires-brazil-to-reject-20m-pledged-by-g7

Amid Outrage Over Rainforest Fires,

Many in the Amazon Remain Defiant
 Image

Forest burning near Porto Velho, a city in Brazil’s Amazon.CreditCreditVictor Moriyama for
The New York Times

By Manuela Andreoni and Ernesto Londoño

 Published Aug. 26, 2019Updated Aug. 30, 2019

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Leer en español

RIO DE JANEIRO — Seeing the global panic over thousands of forest fires in the
Amazon last week, and hearing the calls to boycott Brazilian products, Agamenon da
Silva Menezes wondered if the world had gone mad.

Mr. da Silva is a farmers’ union leader in Novo Progresso, a community in a heavily

deforested state in northern Brazil, and he considers the fires burning in the region a
normal part of life. It’s how some farmers clear land to make a living, and a natural
result of the dry season.
“We’re going to continue producing here in the Amazon and we’re going to continue
feeding the world,” Mr. da Silva said in an interview. “There’s no need for all this
outrage.”

In Novo Progresso, as in many parts of Brazil, there is strong support for President Jair
Bolsonaro’s policy on the Amazon, which prioritizes economic development over
environmental protections. These Brazilians argue that fire and deforestation are
essential to keep small farmers and large ranches that export beef and soy to the world
in business, and that the damage they do to the world’s largest rainforest is modest.

[The Amazon forest is vanishing at breakneck speed. It’s not just in Brazil.]

Further, they are indignant at what they see as a colonialist attitude by outsiders trying
to decide how Brazilians should steward their own land.

Mr. Bolsonaro himself said on Monday that Brazil would not accept demands to “save
the Amazon, as though we were a colony or no man’s land.” Earlier this month, a group
of farmers, loggers and business owners in Novo Progresso and elsewhere announced
they would be setting coordinated fires as a show of force by industries that resent
enforcement of environmental laws.
Image

Men trying to harvest burnt eucalyptus.CreditVictor Moriyama for The New York Times
The global outrage has been set off by the more than 26,000 forest fires recorded in the
Amazon so far this month — the highest number in a decade. And it has found a target
in Brazil’s contentious leader, Mr. Bolsonaro, who has vowed to make it easier for
industries to gain access to protected lands.

The Amazon fires were a prime concern of G7 leaders who gathered in Biarritz, France,
this weekend. Spurred by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who last week warned
that “our house is burning,” G7 countries pledged to earmark $20 million to help Brazil
contain the fires. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio also announced that Earth Alliance, an
environmental organization he helps lead, had pledged $5 million in funding to protect
the Amazon.

[Mr. Macron and others shared images of a forest in flames widely, but some photos were not
what they appeared to be.]

Agriculture has long been a mainstay of Brazil’s economy — and farming and fires here
often go hand in hand. Most are controlled blazes intended to clear land for crops and
cattle grazing.

But deforestation has been surging in Brazil as Mr. Bolsonaro has relaxed enforcement
of environmental laws and land grabbing has risen. The fires tearing through vast
swaths of the Amazon region this year are one result, experts say.

As the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon is home to a fifth of the earth’s supply of
fresh water. And it serves as an important “carbon sink,” soaking up carbon dioxide and
helping keep global temperatures from rising.

That has led many world leaders and environmentalists to see the Amazon as an
invaluable piece of world heritage that must be zealously conserved.
Image

Deforestation has been surging in Brazil amid a relaxation of environmental law enforcement
and a rise in land grabbing.CreditVictor Moriyama for The New York Times

But that claim has long bothered many residents of the Amazon, and enraged nationalist
politicians like Mr. Bolsonaro, a far-right former Army captain who bristled at the idea
that protecting the rainforest is a global imperative.

Andre Pagliarini, a Brazilian historian, said that international pressure to conserve the
Amazon may backfire if it stokes fears that wealthier nations want to keep the Amazon
pristine to stymie Brazil’s growth — or to appropriate its wealth for themselves. That
view was prevalent when the country’s military rulers set in motion an ambitious
development plan for the rainforest during the 1960s and 1970s.

“All this talk of foreign collaboration in preserving the Amazon may be well-intentioned,
it may be genuine, but it touches a raw nerve in Brazil: the notion that wealthier
foreigners want to chip away at Brazil’s authority over the Amazon,” said Mr. Pagliarini,
who will be lecturing at Dartmouth College next fall.
Gelson Dill, the deputy mayor of Novo Progresso, traces his roots in the area to the
1970s, when his family was among thousands that heeded the call of military leaders to
settle in the Amazon and develop the land by cutting down forest.

“We have to remember that the people who came here from the South, the Northeast,
the Southeast, were brought here by the federal government, which called on people to
come occupy this region,” Mr. Dill said. “Then it abandoned the people here and now it
wants to call these people criminals.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, the Amazon began shrinking gradually as farmers, miners
and loggers cleared swaths of land to grow crops, raise cattle or sell property. It was a
way to make money in a region with high rates of unemployment, tremendous poverty
and little presence of the state.

“What’s the scheme? You appropriate land and sell it,” said Maurício Torres, a professor
at the Federal University of Pará, a northern state that includes Novo Progresso. “The
land is made 50, 100, 200 times as valuable once it has been deforested. It’s an excellent
business. You’re selling public land, right, so it’s all profit.”
Image

Farmland is also being damaged by the fires raging in the Amazon region.CreditVictor
Moriyama for The New York Times

But as Brazil created a vast patchwork of national reserves and indigenous territories
starting in the 1980s, it became harder to appropriate land.

During the 2000s, as deforestation soared, the Brazilian government set in motion an
ambitious plan to slow down the rate at which the rainforest was being destroyed. But
that effort, which relied heavily on aggressive law enforcement operations, has lost
traction in recent years.

A languishing economy pushed thousands of unemployed people deep into the forest. As
a deep recession dragged on, the country’s reliance on the powerful agricultural sector
grew, as did that sector’s political muscle in Congress. Gradually, the government eased
pressure on lawbreakers.

Many in the Amazon — and their representatives in Brasília, the capital — believe that
strict rules to protect the forest are holding the country, and the local economy, back.
With his pledges to curb environmental protection, Mr. Bolsonaro won 52 percent of the
vote in the northern states that encompass the Amazon.

“The abandonment of the people in these regions pushed them to a relationship of

dependence with land grabbers and illegal loggers,” said Mr. Torres. “They end up
serving as a social shield to local criminal organizations.”

Hélio Dias, the head of the Agriculture Federation in Rondônia, one of the states that
was hit hardest by the fires, said Brazil has designated too much of its territory as
protected lands.
“If we were to designate 40 percent of land for production and conserved 60 percent,
that would be ideal for producers,” he said. “That would represent an equilibrium
between man and the forest.”
Image

A rancher from the Amazon region gesturing at the destruction in the state of Rondônia,
Brazil.CreditVictor Moriyama for The New York Times

Mr. Dias said this year’s fires have been unusually widespread, which he said has caused
property damage and other problems for growers. But he attributes the fires mainly to
drought, and scoffed at the notion that it justifies a boycott of Brazilian products.

“It is completely misguided,” he said. Living in the Amazon is hard, he said. Mobility is
difficult and expensive, access to health care is scarce and there are few options for
leisure.

“We just try to produce so that our families get by,” he said.

Some residents in fire-scarred areas expressed alarm. José Macedo de Silva, a cattle
farmer near Porto Velho, the capital city of Rondônia, said most of the fires in his area
were started by people involved in land disputes.

“I’m against illegal deforestation, against invading environmental protection areas,” he

said, as he stood by a patch of his own land that had been scorched. “People who do that
need to be punished. Brazil is going to pay the price over our incompetence in dealing
with these people.”

Environmental groups and indigenous activists say that land grabbing and deforestation
have become increasingly brazen since Mr. Bolsonaro came into office.

When a prosecutor warned the main federal environmental agency earlier this month
that a group of men were planning to set a series of blazes along a main road in the
Amazon to intimidate environmental enforcement personnel, the agency’s officials
replied that they lacked the resources to stop it.

Image
Listen to ‘The Daily’: Why the Amazon Is Burning
The number of fires raging in the Amazon rainforest this month is the highest in a decade, putting the
environmental policies of Brazil’s president in the global spotlight.
TRANSCRIPT
0:00/25:13

Listen to ‘The Daily’: Why the

Amazon Is Burning
Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Clare Toeniskoetter and Michael Simon Johnson,
and edited by Lisa Chow and Lisa Tobin
The number of fires raging in the Amazon rainforest this month is the highest in a decade,
putting the environmental policies of Brazil’s president in the global spotlight.
Michael Barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today:
More than 26,000 fires have been recorded inside the Amazon rainforest in
August alone, triggering global calls for action. So why is Brazil’s government
telling the rest of the world to mind its own business? It’s Wednesday, August
28.

Ernesto Londoño
Through the prism of Twitter or Facebook, I think a lot of people last week,
understandably, engaged in this communal panic about the fate of the world’s
largest rainforest.

Michael Barbaro
Ernesto Londoño covers Brazil for The Times.

Archived Recording
Urgent pleas to save the rainforest as the Amazon burns.

[Music]
Archived Recording 1
 Forest fires are raging in the rainforest. There have been nearly 73,000 fires
this year already, a more than 80 percent increase compared to last year.

Archived Recording 2
[CHANTING]

Archived Recording 3
With international protests —

Archived Recording 4
Action for the Amazon!

Archived Recording 5
— the world is demanding action.

Archived Recording 6
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has described the fires as an
international emergency.

Ernesto Londoño
You were seeing presidents, you were seeing celebrities.

Archived Recording
And actor Leonardo DiCaprio working to help combat the wildfires in the
Amazon rainforest. The climate change —

Ernesto Londoño
You were seeing these really alarming posts and these photographs of patches
of the rainforest on fire.

Archived Recording
The smoke is traveling far and wide.
Ernesto Londoño
And I think many people, understandably, were left with the impression that,
within a few days, the Amazon was going to be reduced to a pile of ashes.

Archived Recording
The Amazon rainforest, the so-called lungs of the world, are now filling with
smoke. The forest —

Ernesto Londoño
I think, in many people’s minds, there was a clear villain in all of this —

Archived Recording
Directly blaming the record fires in the Amazon on Brazilian President Jair —

Ernesto Londoño
— the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who has shifted his government’s
approach on the environment in a really dramatic way.

Archived Recording
And scientists warn this could be a devastating blow to the fight against climate
change. There have been more —

Ernesto Londoño
And this is certainly a story about climate change. And it’s a story about
President Bolsonaro. But it’s a far more complicated story than we’ve been
hearing.

Michael Barbaro
So where should we start this story?

Ernesto Londoño
I mean, I think it’s important to think about the history of the Amazon.
Archived Recording
The great Amazon River of South America is so deep and so wide that the
people of Brazil call it the “river sea.”

Ernesto Londoño
I think for decades, the Amazon captured people’s imagination in a way that
few places on Earth did.

Archived Recording
The tropical rainforest biome is a complex community exceedingly rich in many
forms of plant and animal life, a showplace of natural history.

Ernesto Londoño
It was this mysterious and dangerous place that drew adventurers and scientists
and botanists.

Archived Recording
Through ceaseless evolution, a display of flora and fauna has developed here
unequaled anywhere else on land.

Ernesto Londoño
And you know, for many, many years, it was these images of this raw wildlife
and the mystique that laid under the canopy that people were fascinated by.

Archived Recording
Moist, always-green forests still cover one-tenth of the Earth’s land surface
and comprise a large part of the total forest area of the world.

Ernesto Londoño
It contains the largest supply of freshwater in the world, and it’s just teeming
with biodiversity. But in the 1970s, the Brazilian government, which was then
led by military rulers, decided it was time to settle this vast rainforest.
Archived Recording
The conquest of Western Brazil began in 1970 with the construction of the
Trans-Amazonian Highway.

Ernesto Londoño
And it created a road that cut through the Amazon and started encouraging
people to move there and to start making a living there.

Archived Recording
The dense bush gave way to large buildings, where mining equipment is kept,
and to silos, which today hold a harvest of mineral plenty.

Ernesto Londoño
Their view was that the Amazon contained tons of resources — minerals, land
that could be converted into farmland — and that it was time to turn it into an
economic engine for Brazil.

Archived Recording
The dream of gold — a heady prospect, which has set men’s hearts on fire
since ancient times. In modern-day Brazil, they’ve torn the earth asunder for it.

Ernesto Londoño
When it starts happening initially, people realize that things are changing. But
there was no real alarm until a few years later, when things get really out of
control.

Archived Recording
All that glitters may indeed be gold and beautiful once it’s cleaned. But any
short-term profits come not without a price to be paid.

Ernesto Londoño
Where trees start getting chopped down at a really staggering rate —
Archived Recording
And that price is turning out to be high for humans and animals alike.

Ernesto Londoño
— and people start realizing that the world’s largest rainforest is being
destroyed, is atrophying at an astonishing speed.

Archived Recording
These are some Indian friends of mine in the Amazon. Their lives today are in
great danger. Their beautiful home in the rainforest is being destroyed by
logging, mining and ranching.

Ernesto Londoño
This sparks worldwide consternation. And people start asking whether the
Amazon might cease to exist one day if it continues to be destroyed at this rate.

Archived Recording
And this is the rainforest in 30 years if present trends continue. It’s all gone.
The lungs of the earth destroyed.

Ernesto Londoño
You know, you had politicians, you had artists, you had songs about this.

Archived Recording
(SINGING) All that beauty is the rainforest, the tropical rainforest.

Ernesto Londoño
It really became a cultural moment.

Archived Recording
(RAPPING) Where the balance of nature’s like a delicate lace. We should have
some compassion and show some concern, ‘cause the forest depends on what
we learn.
Ernesto Londoño
People became very invested in this idea that everybody had a role to play in
saving the Amazon.

Archived Recording
(RAPPING) That means horrors — bulldozers and axes clearing the forest. So
many species we’ll never understand, ‘cause we’re taking their homes by
destroying their land.

Michael Barbaro
Right. This is the “Save the Rainforest” campaign.

Ernesto Londoño
Yeah.

Michael Barbaro
And does this movement have an effect in Brazil?

Ernesto Londoño
It does. But I think it’s important to note that it is greeted with very deep
skepticism and, to an extent, paranoia, in some circles. I think there’s long been
a view among conservative nationalist Brazilians that all this outcry about the
fate of the rainforest was really a veiled attempt to keep Brazil from developing
its God-given potential. I think many Brazilians saw these calls to preserve the
Amazon as infringing its sovereignty. And for many years, they were pretty
dismissive about this. And they said that the fate of the Amazon was only for
Brazil and its neighbors to think about, debate about, and decide on.

Michael Barbaro
Hmm. So what happens to this development of the Amazon?

Ernesto Londoño
 During the 1990s and the early 2000s, we see deforestation reaching really
staggering levels. Concern around the world, I think, reaches a point where the
Brazilians can no longer ignore what people outside of the country were saying
about this. So when President Lula, a leftist, is in office in the early 2000s, he
appoints a woman who was from the rainforest to serve as his minister of the
environment. Her name is Marina Silva. And she came up with a really bold
and ambitious plan to rein in deforestation and create more conservation areas.
She was somebody who was lauded across the world for doing something that
people thought was almost impossible, to stop these loggers and these miners
and these farmers from reaching deeper and deeper into the Amazon year after
year after year. And for a while, Brazil was pretty successful.

Michael Barbaro
So all of this outcry leads Brazil to begin regulating and slowing this
development.

Ernesto Londoño
That’s right. Another thing the government did was it started issuing some
pretty stiff fines for deforestation and other environmental crimes. And for a
while, this had the intended effect. And one of the reasons Brazil was
successful in reining in deforestation during this era is the economy was doing
pretty well. So there were plenty of jobs in the city. And people were less
tempted to venture deep into the jungle, where they faced the risk of fines.
However, the good days came to an end. And in 2014, the country plunged into
a brutal recession. And what this meant was tens of thousands of men were
suddenly unemployed. And many of them were lured back into the jungle.
Why? Because there was money to be made. These were dangerous jobs. These
were risky ventures. But for many people, it was the only way to put food on
the table.

[Music]
Michael Barbaro
 And so the deforestation started all over again?

Ernesto Londoño
Deforestation starts climbing again.

Michael Barbaro
We’ll be right back. Ernesto, so, a recession hits and deforestation is back on
the rise. What does this mean for Brazilians?

Ernesto Londoño
So around this time, many people who were being fined for violating
environmental laws were refusing to pay and sensed that they could get away
with it. And among them was a then-congressman, Jair Bolsonaro, who was
allegedly busted fishing in a wildlife reserve. He refused to identify himself
when the agents saw him. But the agent recognized him, took his picture,
documented that he was in a wildlife reserve, and issued him a citation.
Bolsonaro never bothered to pay his fine. And then, last year, when he’s
running for president and when he becomes a front-runner, Mr. Bolsonaro said
that the fines that were issued by this agency amounted to a racket. He called it
an industry that needed to be shut down.

Michael Barbaro
So Bolsonaro, when he campaigns for president, does so by kind of flagrantly
disregarding the environmental protections of the Amazon, and, it seems like,
by tapping into this longstanding nationalist view that the Amazon is a
Brazilian resource that Brazilians should be tapping into, and any effort to stop
that is a globalist intervention, and it will hurt Brazil.

Ernesto Londoño
That’s right, Michael. But he wasn’t only angry about environmental fines. He
was also very frustrated with indigenous territories. These are territories that
now cover about 13 percent of Brazil’s land mass. And Mr. Bolsonaro spoke in
 unusually hostile terms about indigenous people. He essentially said, you have
these small indigenous communities sitting on land that could be extremely
profitable. And they should be allowed to bring in outsiders to set up mining
camps, to develop farmland, to start producing wealth.

Michael Barbaro
And so his solution, it sounds like, is to develop more and more of the Amazon.

Ernesto Londoño
Absolutely. And when he wins, he wastes no time on delivering on his
campaign promises on this front. One of his first steps in office was to give the
ministry of agriculture control over the process of adjudicating any new
indigenous territories. It was essentially giving the people who had an interest
in developing these territories and changing their nature entirely the keys to the
kingdom. You know? Environmentalists and indigenous activists were
appalled. And they braced for a bruising fight.

Michael Barbaro
So what happens when Bolsonaro starts making these changes across the
government and allowing for more development of the Amazon?

Ernesto Londoño
Well, even before any new laws or regulations came to fruition, I think people
out in the countryside felt emboldened. And we started hearing anecdotes of
miners and of loggers striding into indigenous territories and other protected
areas in a way that was more visible and bolder than they had before. What we
also see is a sharp rise in deforestation. During the first six months of the
Bolsonaro era, deforestation increased by roughly 40 percent. And historically,
the rate of deforestation has been closely linked to the prevalence of forest
fires.

Michael Barbaro
 Right. So this is what we’re seeing in all these photos online. The Amazon is
on fire. And it’s rampant deforestation under Bolsonaro that has caused it.

Ernesto Londoño
That’s right. And there were, literally, thousands of fires burning across the
Amazon. But I think what many people didn’t quite understand was that this
happens every year. Around this time, when it tends to be cooler and drier
across the Amazon, there’s a slash-and-burn cycle that happens, where farmers
and people who have logged patches of the Amazon clear the bush and set it on
fire. And most of these fires tend to be relatively small and relatively contained.
But something was different this year. The number was unusually high. So far
this month, there’s been more than 26,000 fires detected through satellite
imagery. That’s more than twice the number of fires registered last year. But
this was, by no means, an all-time high. You know, we’ve seen other periods in
years past when there were far more fires burning across the Amazon. I think
what was different this year is you had all these alarming and widely shared
posts on social media, some of which were using pictures that were many,
many years old that weren’t really an accurate reflection of what was
happening on the ground this year.

Michael Barbaro
So what do you make of that, this response, which has been so enormous, and
the history and reality of this situation in Brazil?

Ernesto Londoño
Clearly, it has put a spotlight on a problem that is very real and very serious.
The Amazon is shrinking at a rate that many scientists call unsustainable. They
fear that it’s approaching a so-called tipping point, where large sections turn
into savanna and where it might be impossible to turn it back into lush, thick
rainforest. However, I think the way this story got off the ground may have
 been counterproductive for the international community to engage the Brazilian
government and its very impulsive leader in a constructive debate.

Archived Recording
The European leaders threatened to scrap a major trade deal with —

Ernesto Londoño
Brazil, last week, faced the prospect that a trade deal that Brazil and a few
neighboring countries reached with the European Union could be nixed.

Archived Recording
I think there’s going to be an international reaction to boycott Brazilian food
just to protest —

Ernesto Londoño
There were calls to boycott Brazilian products.

Archived Recording
French President Emmanuel Macron is now calling the fires an international
crisis that should be on the agenda at the G7 summit this weekend in France.

Ernesto Londoño
And the G7 leaders, who were about to have their conference in France, said
that this was going to be a last-minute high-profile item added to the agenda.
Brazil, I think understandably, said, wait a minute. How are you going to
discuss the fate of the Amazon when we’re not at the table? This makes no
sense.

Archived Recording
G7 leaders agreeing to a $20 million financial aid package to help Brazil fight
the fires in the Amazon.
Ernesto Londoño
And even as pledges of emergency aid started being dangled by European
leaders and by organizations that wanted to take some immediate and urgent
action on these fires, the Brazilian government wasn’t ready to say, sure, we’ll
take the help.

Michael Barbaro
So all this outrage, all these online photos, all these alarmed messages, and this
sense from Europe that this is a crisis that it can help solve, how is that looking
and feeling to people inside Brazil?

Ernesto Londoño
I think many Brazilians are deeply concerned about the fate of the Amazon.
And they very much want their country to do more to rein in deforestation and
to pay attention to the messages that we’re hearing from across the world.
However, this is a very bitterly polarized society. And on the flip side of that, I
think many people resent the idea that European powers would bark down
orders to a former colony and tell it how it needs to administer its affairs. And
that’s certainly the approach the president has taken. He recently said that if the
Europeans had many million dollars to spend on conservation efforts, that they
should plant some trees in their own countries.

Michael Barbaro
So in Bolsonaro’s mind, this is a Brazilian issue, and the rest of the world
should, essentially, mind its own business.

Ernesto Londoño
Absolutely. He says the Amazon is ours, and we’re not going to entertain
criticism or prescriptions from countries that, many years ago, razed down their
own forests and grew their economies in doing so. So that’s been his position,
and it’s hard to see him backing down.
Michael Barbaro
It’s interesting, Ernesto. As we’re talking about this, I’m realizing that as
horrifying as the development of the rainforest might feel to people watching
from the outside, and as scary as these fires are, it does seem unusual for other
countries to tell a country what it can and can’t do with its resources. If the
U.S., theoretically, wants to blow up the Grand Canyon or log entire national
parks, those might be insane ideas. But no one can stop the United States from
doing that. If we want to frack in West Virginia, it’s up to us. It’s our land.

Ernesto Londoño
Absolutely. Many Brazilians say, hey, this is our territory. This is our land.
Don’t mess with our sovereignty. But on the other hand, the Amazon is a
unique and special and irreplaceable place. And if we contemplate the
possibility that some 50 years from now it will disappear or become a fraction
of itself, the consequences are very significant.

[Music]
Ernesto Londoño

The Amazon is a repository of carbon. So if it vanishes, there will be lots of

carbon that will be released back into the atmosphere, which will warm the
planet. And if, as the rainforest diminishes, more of its land becomes cattle-
grazing pastures, that also would contribute to warming, because cattle grazing
is one of the top emitters of greenhouse gas.

Michael Barbaro
And so the rest of the world does have a stake in this fight.

Ernesto Londoño
Absolutely. I think right now, the Brazilian government is in no mood to open
the door for this debate and to have a global discussion about the fate of the
Amazon. But it’s facing the real possibility of a boycott of its products, which
people have been warning about on social media, and of a core trade deal that
 may now be on thin ice. And if we see this debate going on for months, Brazil
might be forced to come to the negotiating table and have this moment of
reckoning with others across the world.

Michael Barbaro
Ernesto, thank you very much.

Ernesto Londoño
My pleasure, Michael.

Michael Barbaro
On Tuesday, after initially rejecting $22 million in aid from the countries of the
G7 to fight the fires in the Amazon, Brazil’s government said it might accept
the aid under certain conditions. President Bolsonaro said he would take the
money if France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, apologized for remarks about
Brazil and its environmental record that Bolsonaro said he found offensive.
We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today.

Archived Recording
Repeat a little bit of what you said in court —

Archived Recording (Teala Davies)

All I’m going to say is today is a day of power and strength.

Michael Barbaro
During an emotional hearing in Manhattan on Wednesday, more than a dozen
victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse told their stories to a federal
judge and assailed a criminal justice system that they said had failed them.

Archived Recording (Chauntae Davies)

 It makes me sick to my stomach that there’s perpetrators out there that
obviously helped him in many ways for a very long time, and they’re still out
there with no punishment.

Michael Barbaro
The hearing was held to officially dismiss the charges against Epstein
following his suicide, which leaves prosecutors with no defendant to try. But it
gave his accusers a rare chance to speak out. Several of the women in the
courtroom addressed their remarks to the prosecutors, urging them to keep
investigating Epstein’s employees and associates, who they said acted as his
accomplices.

Archived Recording (Virginia Giuffre)

I was recruited at a very young age from Mar-a-Lago and entrapped in a world
that I didn’t understand. And I’ve been fighting that very world to this day. And
I won’t stop fighting. I will never be silenced until these people are brought to
justice.

Michael Barbaro
That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

Mr. da Silva, the farmer leader in Novo Progresso, believes Mr. Bolsonaro should stay the
course, and not bow to pressure from European leaders or give in to threats of boycotting
Brazilian goods.

“We’re not going to surrender control of the Amazon and that’s a fact,” he said. “We have cheap,
good quality products to sell. If they don’t want to buy them, we’ll sell to China and other
places.”

Victor Moriyama contributed reporting from Porto Velho, Brazil.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the
headline: Despite World’s Outrage, Farmers in Amazon Remain Defiant. Order
Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe


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Related Coverage

Under Brazil’s Far-Right Leader, Amazon Protections Slashed and

Forests Fall
July 28, 2019
Image

Brazil’s Rainforest Fires Prompt Alarm and Anger in Europe

Aug. 23, 2019
Image

As Amazon Burns, Fires in Next-Door Bolivia Also Wreak Havoc

Aug. 25, 2019
Image

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/world/americas/brazil-amazon-rainforest-fire.html

Climate Change
Aug 21

The Brazilian Amazon is on fire—here’s why

that’s bad news for the planet
Forest fires have soared in the Brazilian Amazon this year, sharpening
concerns about rising deforestation and climate emissions under the nation’s
new far-right president.
The news: More than 70,000 forest fires have broken out throughout the rain
forest so far this year, the largest number in at least five years and a more
than 80% increase over the same period last year, according to the National
Institute for Space Research (INPE). On Monday, smoke from the
fires, coupled with clouds and a powerful cold front, darkened the city of São
Paulo, some 1,700 miles (2,700 kilometers) away.
What’s driving the increase? Several factors are likely at play. Researchers
have warned that climate change is making the Amazon rain forest more
susceptible to wildfires “by increasing the intensity and frequency of droughts.”
But local reports say farmers in some areas are deliberately setting fires to
clear land for crops or cattle ranching.
Environmental groups say these farmers have been emboldened by President
Jair Bolsonaro, who during his campaign pledged to open up the rain forest
for more farming and mining. Ever since, his administration has worked to
weaken environmental guardrails.
Bolsonaro recently fired the director of INPE, MIT-trained physicist Ricardo
Galvão, following the publication of statistics that highlighted rising
deforestation in Brazil. On Wednesday, in a bold bit of nonsense, he
said nongovernmental organizations could be setting the fires “to bring shame
on his government after he cut their funding.”
Why does it matter? The Amazon proper, which spans nine nations, is one
of the world’s largest carbon sinks. It accounts for around 17% of the world’s
carbon trapped in vegetation on land. (It’s also, of course, a rich source of
biodiversity and the oxygen we breath.)
Wildfires alone, not the fires deliberately set for deforestation, can pump out
billions of tons of carbon dioxide during drought years, recent research found.
Amazon deforestation rates had been tumbling for years, largely thanks to the
“Save the Rain Forest” movement and stronger land-use regulations. But
they’ve risen significantly in Brazil this year: an area rain forest “roughly the
size of a football pitch” disappears every minute.
(See “Brazil's presidential election could mean billions of tons of additional
greenhouse gases.”)
Share

Link

Author

James Temple
ImageNASA Earth Observatory

https://www.technologyreview.com/f/614206/the-brazilian-amazon-is-on-fireheres-why-thats-bad-
news-for-the-planet/

BY ZOE SULLIVAN
AUGUST 26, 2019
On the afternoon of Aug. 19, the sky over São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city,
went dark. A cold front combined with ash from forest fires in the Amazon
rainforest and formed ominous clouds that blocked out the sun. Photos of
the blackened sky began to pop on Twitter, and soon the world was paying
attention to the blazes rampaging across the forest called “the lungs of the
world.” Many blame President Jair Bolsonaro’s rhetoric as the central factor
in the crisis. Less obvious are the ways the conflagration ste ms from years of
slashing government budgets for the environment and dismantling support
for indigenous and traditional subsistence communities.

For example, Bolsonaro’s predecessor, Michel Temer, reorganized the

government and wielded his budget scissors liberally. Temer downgraded a
ministry focused on supporting sustainable family farms and chopped funds
for environmental protections and science. In 2017, Temer cut the federal
science budget by 44% and took nearly the same amount from
the discretionary budget of IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency. In April
2019, Bolsonaro continued the trend, cutting IBAMA’s budget by 24%.
Those cuts left the agency unable to cover its fixed costs and left it without
resources for patrolling and enforcement.

A spokesperson for IBAMA says that its budget has been reinstated to what
it was prior to the April cuts. Nonetheless, thus far in 2019, IBAMA has
issued only one third of the fines it did over the same period last year,
according to Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest newspapers. The
drop is likely a result of both a lack of funding and political will. Earlier this
year, Bolsonaro had IBAMA fire an agent, who happened to have fined
Bolsonaro years ago for illegal fishing.

In a similar vein, after the Brazilian space agency, called INPE, released new
satellite data showing a 278% increase in deforestation in July compared to
the same period last year, Bolsonaro fired the agency’s head, suggesting that
the data were trumped up in order to tarnish the country’s image.

Brazil’s strong agriculture sector has ratcheted up pressure on forests.

Agriculture has been the strongest performing sector of Brazil’s economy in
recent years, and the US-China trade war has positioned Brazil well to
replace the US as the global leader in soybean exports. The demand for
soybeans has created pressure to rapidly clear forests and plant. Jair
Bolsonaro’s oldest son, Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator, has introduced a bill
that would eliminate a requirement that rural properties in the Amaz on
maintain 80% of their native vegetation.

"No country in the world has the moral right to

talk about the Amazon. You destroyed your
own ecosystems.”

Meanwhile, the president has regularly challenged criticism about his

government’s environmental policies in a way some see as condoning
deforestation. “The Amazon is ours,” Bolsonaro told journalists in mid -July.
“We preserve more [rainforest] than anyone. No country in the world has
the moral right to talk about the Amazon. You destroyed your own
ecosystems.”

Fabiano Lopez da Silva, head of Fundação Vitoria Amazonica, an

environmental non-governmental organization based in Manaús, says such
rhetoric stimulates illegal deforestation. “[Farmers and illegal loggers] can
go forward with illegal fires. There won’t be any sort of [fiscal enforcement]
or monitoring or fines for this kind of activity,” says Lopez da Silva.
There are indications that these latest fires may have at least in part been
the result of political acts. According to the Folha do Progresso, a
publication from the southern part of the Amazonian state of Pará, farmers
and ranchers in the region organized what they called “a day of fire” for
Aug. 10, where they would set forests aflame to clear land for pasture and
planting. Their goal, according to the outlet, was to show Bolsonaro they
wanted to work, and burning down trees was the way to do that. In the
following 48 hours, forest fires spread rapidly in the region. The New
York Times reports that farmers set the bulk of these fires, but that they
targeted land already cleared for agriculture, not old-growth forest.

Similarly, the environment secretary for the state of Amazonas, Eduardo

Taveira, told TIME that in the southern part of the state, the agency has
seen an unusually large number of fires in areas where man-made forest
fires are an annual issue. Taveira and Lopez da Silva both noted that forest
fires in the Amazon are almost never the result of natural causes.

Meanwhile, by reorganizing the government and cutting budgets, the

Bolsonaro administration has undercut environmental policing power. For
the last few years, during the dry season (which runs from June to
December) IBAMA has maintained an enforcement base in Novo Progresso,
a city in the state of Pará at the epicenter of the current forest fires. When
IBAMA agents patrol the countryside looking for illegal logging and other
violations, military police generally accompany them to ensure their safety,
since Brazil ranks as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for
environmental activists. But this year, shortly after demonstrations near
Novo Progresso where farmers burned bridges and tires to protest IBAMA’s
enforcement actions, the state military police were removed from this detail.
Though the police respond to the state government, it’s hard not to see
removing police protection as tacit permission to break the law.
Bolsanaro’s administration declined to respond to emailed questions from
TIME.

On Aug. 23, Bolsonaro made a televised speech to announce “zero tolerance”

for environmental crimes, and said Brazil would deploy its armed forces to
cope with the forest fires. In the same speech, however, he reaffirmed the
need to provide economic opportunity to the Amazon region’s population,
and there’s little indication that Bolsonaro will pull back his support for
expanding mining operations and large-scale farming in the region.

That’s just more bad news for the Amazon’s indigenous people, whose lands
are some of the best preserved in the region. One of Bolsonaro’s first official
acts as president in early 2019 was to transfer the agency charged with
supporting indigenous people, FUNAI, under the Ministry of Agriculture.
Analysts say this weakens the agency’s ability to protect indigenous
territories. Along with suggesting that indigenous territory could be opened
up for mining, Bolsonaro has also threatened to halt the certification of any
new indigenous settlements.

Obviously, this is devastating for indigenous people. But it’s also potentially
catastrophic for the environment. According to a recent United Nations
report, strong land rights for indigenous communities help form a bulwark
against climate change. In Brazil, for example, indigenous territories are
constitutionally protected. This helps maintain the forest by discouraging
encroachment by farmers, miners and loggers.

But, according to Joenia Wapichana, a member of the Sustainability

Network (a political party established by former Minister of the
Environment Marina Silva) and the first indigenous woman elected to
Brazil’s senate, the Bolsonaro government has “persecuted” indigenous
people by attempting to halt the processes that define the boundaries of
indigenous territories. The FUNAI website lists 440 fully recognized
indigenous territories in Brazil. Another 127 have crossed the first hurdle in
the demarcation process while a further 115 have yet to move past the initial
study required to begin applying for recognition.

Once these boundaries are established, non-indigenous Brazilians are

barred from using the land, creating buffer zones against deforestation.

Wildfire in the Amazon rainforest, near Abuna, in the Brazilian state of Rondonia on Aug.
24, 2019.
Carl de Souza—AFP/Getty Images

Brazil’s traditional subsistence communities and settlements established by

the descendants of formerly enslaved people represent another shield
against deforestation. Traditional communities are generally the
descendants of European settlers who practice small-scale agriculture as
well as producing goods from materials that can be harvested sustainably
from the forest. For example, in Montanha e Mangabal, a governm ent-
certified “traditional community” with approximately 250 residents in Pará,
many of the community’s residents support themselves by producing oils
from native plants, fishing, and raising yucca roots to make flour. The
community’s presence deters deforestation, says its president, Ageu Lobo
Perreira. “[Traditional] communities are always there watching,” he says.
“You can’t come here and attack the environment, take lumber.”

Unfortunately, these communities are at risk thanks, Lobo Perreira says, to

federal defunding of environmental protection, public education, and public
healthcare. “Families are leaving because they want their children to have a
secondary-school education,” Lobo Perreira says. Community members
must travel more than 140 miles to the city of Itaituba for any serious health
issues.

Further, these places on the frontlines of deforestation have become flash

points of violence. Indigenous and traditional subsistence communities
regularly report physical violence in confrontations resulting from
incursions onto their land. Last year, for example, after Lobo Perreira
publicly challenged miners prospecting illegally on the community’s land,
he received death threats that forced him to leave Montanha e Mangabal for
a few months.
 "These are places where the state’s power,
judicial power doesn’t reach.”

“When you enter these more remote areas,” says André Cutrim, a professor
of environmental resource management at the Federal University of Pará,
“these are places where the state’s power, judicial power doesn’t reach.” The
result, he says, is that it’s easier to cut down trees or to start fires illegally —
and harder for an already hamstrung environmental agency to operate in
the face of violence and lawlessness. This enables land grabbers to deforest
and farm regardless of what the law permits.

Cutrim says the Bolsonaro government is stoking passions with its rhetoric.
“The message of the current government isn’t conciliatory. It’s a message of
confrontation,” he says. This, Cutrim sustains, makes Bolsonaro’s
supporters feel authorized to pursue their own interests, even if that means
setting fire to one of the country’s treasures.

The Real Reason the Amazon Is On Fire

https://time.com/5661162/why-the-amazon-is-on-fire/

Brazil military begins

operations to fight Amazon
rainforest fires



 AUGUST 24, 2019 / 2: 48 PM / CBS/AP
Backed by military aircraft, Brazilian troops on Saturday prepared to deploy in
the Amazon rainforest to fight fires that have swept the region and prompted anti-
government protests as well as an international outcry.

Some 44,000 troops will be available for "unprecedented" operations to put out the
fires, and forces are heading to six Brazilian states that asked for federal help to contain
the blazes, Defense Minister Fernando Azevedo said. The states are Roraima, Rondonia,
Tocantins, Para, Acre and Mato Grosso.

The military's first mission will be the deployment of 700 troops to the area around
Porto Velho, capital of Rondonia, Azevedo said. He added that the military will use two
C-130 Hercules aircraft capable of dumping up to 3,170 gallons of water on fires.
Trending News
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 Company pledges to clean up oil from facility damaged by Dorian
 Outcry as Turkey set to flood one of the world's oldest cities
 Smoke plumes from Amazon rainforest fires spotted from space

An Associated Press journalist flying over the Porto Velho region Saturday morning
reported hazy conditions and low visibility. On Friday, the reporter saw many already
deforested areas that were burned, apparently by people clearing farmland, as well as a
large column of smoke billowing from one fire.

The Brazilian military operations came after widespread criticism of President Jair
Bolsonaro's handling of the crisis. The president Friday authorized the armed forces to
get involved in putting out the fires, saying he is committed to protecting the Amazon
region.

"It shows the concern of Bolsonaro's government about this issue," Azevedo said. "It was
a very fast response."

The defense minister noted U.S. President Trump's offer in a tweet to help Brazil fight
the fires, and said there had been no further contact on the matter. Bolsonaro has
previously described rainforest protections as an obstacle to Brazil's economic
development, sparring with critics who say the Amazon absorbs vast amounts of
greenhouse gasses and is crucial for efforts to contain climate change.

The Amazon fires have become a global issue, escalating tensions between Brazil and
European countries who believe Bolsonaro has neglected commitments to protect
biodiversity. Protesters gathered outside Brazilian diplomatic missions in European and
Latin American cities Friday, and demonstrators also marched in Brazil.
Conservationist Paul Rosolie told "CBS This Morning" that military action isn't enough
and said the Amazon is at risk of "collapsing."

"The Amazon is a loop. It's producing the moisture that creates all that rain that makes
it a rainforest," said Rosolie, who wrote about his experiences in the jungle in his 2014
book, "Mother of God."

"As we chop more of the rainforest down – and this has been going on for decades, this
is not an isolated issue — as we chop more of the rainforest, what we're risking is
reaching a tipping point, where that moisture system might be too dry to produce the
rain. And then you have a serious problem on your hands, because you're talking about
the entire Amazon sort of collapsing."

The dispute spilled into the economic arena when French President Emmanuel Macron
threatened to block a European Union trade deal with Brazil and several other South
American countries. He wants G-7 leaders meeting at a summit in France this weekend
to discuss the Amazon crisis.

"First, we need to help Brazil and other countries put out these fires," Macron said
Saturday.

Pictures from the Amazon rainforest fires3 0 PHOTOS

The goal is to "preserve this forest that we all need because it is a treasure of our
biodiversity and our climate thanks to the oxygen that it emits and thanks to the carbon
it absorbs," he said.
 Bolivia and Paraguay have also struggled to contain fires that swept through woods and
fields, in many cases set to clear land for farming. A U.S.-based aircraft, the B747-400
SuperTanker, is flying over devastated areas in Bolivia to help put out the fires and
protect forests.

Fires are common in Brazil in the annual dry season, but they are much more
widespread this year. Brazilian state experts reported nearly 77,000 wildfires across the
country so far this year, up 85% over the same period in 2018.
First published on August 24, 2019 / 2:48 PM
© 2019 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast,
rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-rainforest-fires-brazil-military-begins-operations-to-fight-
2019-08-24/

Children in Brazil are having

trouble breathing because of
the Amazon fires




BY C AITLIN O'K ANE

AU GUST 28, 2019 / 2: 27 PM / CBS NEWS
Smoke from the Amazon rainforest fires is being blamed for an increase in respiratory
problems in Brazil — health problems that are particularly affecting children and the
elderly.

The number of patients being treated for respiratory issues at Cosme e Damia Children's
hospital has sharply increased as the fires continue to rage, the Associated Press reports.

Elane Diaz, a nurse from Porto Velho, said her kids have been coughing a lot. "They
have problems breathing. I'm concerned because it affects their health," Diaz told the AP
as she was bringing her 5-year-old son, Eduardo, to a doctor's appointment.
Trending News
 Forbes: World's top 20 billionaires
 Company pledges to clean up oil from facility damaged by Dorian
 Outcry as Turkey set to flood one of the world's oldest cities
 Smoke plumes from Amazon rainforest fires spotted from space

The dry weather and lingering smoke is causing several complications like pneumonia,
coughing and secretion, pediatrician Daniel Pires told a local newspaper. Pires, who
works for Cosme e Damia Children's hospital, said the number of cases has more than
doubled since earlier this month.

Pictures from the Amazon rainforest fires3 0 PHOTOS

In addition to the health of the people, the health of the country's ecosystem is also
deteriorating due to the fires. CBS News correspondent Manuel Bojorquez reported
about 15% of the Earth's fresh water is in the Amazon, which contains so much moisture
scientists say it actually helps cool the entire planet.

With the fires burning a lot of that away, there's fear it could eventually cause
irreversible damage to the world's climate. The indigenous people who live in the
Amazon also fear what the fires and deforestation could mean for their way of life.

Chief Tashka Yawanawa of the Yawanawa people told CBS News this dry season has
been particularly bad. "Each one of us needs to be responsible economically,
environmentally, culturally because otherwise the humanity is just gonna disappear like
dinosaurs," he said.
Members of the Kayapo indigenous group attend a meeting to discuss community issues in in Brazil's
Amazon, Aug. 27, 2019. The fire is very close to Kayapo indigenous land located on the Bau indigenous
reserve.L E O C O R R E A / A P

The fires are largely blamed on humans — particularly farmers and ranchers,
emboldened by the Brazilian government to set flames to the rainforest to clear the way
for pastures.

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro, a climate-change skeptic, has faced criticism over
policies and his delayed response to the fires.

G-7 countries made an offer of $20 million in aid to fight the fires at their recent summit
hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, who insisted the issue should be
discussed as a top priority.

While Bolsonaro initially demanded an apology for criticism of his handling of the fires,
he later shifted and said he is open to accepting international aid for firefighting efforts.
First published on August 28, 2019 / 2:27 PM
© 2019 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-rainforest-fires-children-in-brazil-respiratory-problems-
health-death-are-having-trouble-breathing/
 Brazil has angrily attacked offers to help it put
out the huge fires in the Amazon — here's why
it is pushing back against global outrage
SinéadBaker

Aug.27,2019,11:04AM

A tract of the Amazon jungle burning as it is cleared by loggers and farmers on August
23. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino

 The record number of fires consuming Brazil's Amazon rainforest has prompted demands
from around the world for drastic action.
 But Brazil's leaders have pushed back, both downplaying the seriousness of the fires and
insisting that it is an issue for Brazil alone to manage.
 Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, said world leaders were showing a "colonialist
mentality" in trying to offer funds to help.
 Brazil has in the past worried that other countries may try to seize it and deny it the use of
its resources — a narrative Bolsonaro has used and is evoking once more.
 Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The record number of fires raging across the Amazon has sparked an international outcry as
world leaders express concern for the future of the world's largest rainforest.

But in Brazil, politicians are defiant, downplaying the extent of the fires and calling international
warnings "sensationalist." Their response has been to tell other countries to stop telling Brazil
what to do.

Sixty percent of the Amazon is within Brazil's borders. Using it for industry was part of the
platform that propelled President Jair Bolsonaro to victory, after a campaign that
repeatedly characterized the Amazon as a resource to be exploited.

He is now rebuking international calls for action over the fires, accusing leaders like French
President Emmanuel Macron of having a "colonialist mentality" by offering money to help.
Burned areas of the Amazon rainforest near Porto Velho in Brazil on August 24. CARLOS
FABAL/AFP/Getty Images

Responses to Macron reveal an attitude among some Brazilians that other countries should stay
out of a domestic issue.

On social media, Brazil-linked accounts told Macron that "the Amazon is ours, let us take care of
it" and that "the Amazon rainforest belongs to the Brazilian people and it is under our
sovereignty."

Emmanuel Macron

✔@EmmanuelMacron
· Aug 23, 2019

Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest - the lungs which produces 20% of our
planet’s oxygen - is on fire. It is an international crisis. Members of the G7 Summit, let's discuss this
emergency first order in two days! #ActForTheAmazon
Cássio Neves ‫@לואיז‬cassionevesc

The Amazon is ours, let us take care of it. Use your time to take care of your
Islamization country, France will fall and it will not be long.

4,313
4:41 AM - Aug 23, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

802 people are talking about this

Emmanuel Macron

✔@EmmanuelMacron

· Aug 23, 2019

Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest - the lungs which produces 20% of our
planet’s oxygen - is on fire. It is an international crisis. Members of the G7 Summit, let's discuss this
emergency first order in two days! #ActForTheAmazon
Manoel Gontijo@manoelmsgontijo

IT IS NOT YOUR'S HOME! The Amazon rainforest belongs to the Brazilian people and
it is under our sovereignty. Amazon is my people's house and it will always be. Europe
is destined to sucumb to infamy and shame while Brazil will enrich from Amazon's vast
natural resources.

2,772
7:43 AM - Aug 23, 2019

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1,234 people are talking about this

These ideas explain why Bolsonaro and many Brazilians have been
defensive amid outcry over harm to the Amazon.

Brazilians might see environmentalism as

a ploy to hold Brazil back
Most of the fires in the Amazon have been started by humans, either
accidentally or on purpose by logging and farming companies, which
have been emboldened by Bolsonaro's stance on development in the
region.

During his campaign, Bolsonaro pledged to build a highway through

the forest and power plants within it.
He has sought to reduce environmental protections and reallocate
land and resources pledged to indigenous tribes. He also threatened
to pull Brazil out of the Paris agreement on climate change. During his
campaign, he said environmental legislation was "suffocating" the
economy.

Read more: 24 photos show the Amazon rainforest before and after the
devastating wildfires

Anthony Pereira, the director of the Brazil Institute at King's College

London, told Business Insider that some people viewed a decision not
to develop parts of the Amazon as one that holds Brazil back.

"There are people, especially among the 20 million people who live in
the Amazon, who think: 'Environmentalism has gone too far, we need
to make a living, these regulations are too onerous, there's too much
land set aside for the indigenous, and we want to go in and deforest,
whether it's for land speculation, for agriculture, for pasture, or
logging,'" he said.
Members of Suriname indigenous tribes pray for the protection of the Amazon and Brazilian
indigenous tribes on August 9. REUTERS/Ranu Abhelakh

Bolsonaro, he said, might be of this mindset and could view attempts

at influence from other governments or from nongovernmental
organizations as attempts to hold Brazil back economically or interfere
with its sovereignty.

Read more: The Amazon rainforest is burning. Here's why there are so
many fires and what it all means for the planet.

"He's a product of the 1970s and the military regime, when that view
was very prevalent, and he could have that kind of view that people
are out to get Brazil, to stifle its agriculture," Pereira said.
Par Engstrom, a human-rights lecturer at University College London's
Institute of the Americas, told Business Insider that there was "ongoing
concern among Brazilian elites that the world is unfriendly and does
not have Brazil's interests at heart."

Bolsonaro's rhetoric is "actually not that extreme in Brazil's history,"

Engstrom said, and represents "quite a strong strand of Brazil's
thinking and Brazil's thoughts about its place in the world."

Bolsonaro's approach to foreign policy so far has centered on the idea

that "there is a globalist conspiracy against countries like Brazil,"
Engstrom said.

A tract of Amazon jungle burning in Canarana, Brazil. Reuters

However, opinion in Brazil is not united on the issue. Pereira said
Bolsonaro's view was likely not the majority position.

Read More: Striking photos show the devastation wreaked by record-

breaking fires in the Amazon rainforest

"We have to keep in mind: Most Brazilians live a long way from the
Amazon rainforest, and they are as appalled as everyone else," he said.

Pushback against Bolsonaro in Brazil has been clear. Former

environment ministers wrote an open letter in May denouncing
Bolsonaro's Amazon policies, and thousands of Brazilians
marched over the weekend to urge government action about the fires.

Protesters hold a Brazilian flag with "SOS" written on it during a demonstration in Sao Paulo on
August 23 to demand more protection for the Amazon rainforest. REUTERS/Nacho Doce
Pereira pointed to a survey this month in which 96% of respondents
said they agreed with the statement "President Jair Bolsonaro and the
federal government should increase enforcement measures to prevent
illegal deforestation in the Amazon."

The survey found the same result among Bolsonaro voters and
opposition voters.

"So we can say that Bolsonaro got a majority in his election in

October, but I think it's not right to say that, well, a majority approved
of his positions on the environment, because the environment wasn't
the main thing that he was running on," Pereira said.

Read more: Thousands of people marched in São Paulo to pressure the

Brazilian government to do something about the burning Amazon
Rainforest. Here's what it looked like on the ground.

He also said that the idea that Brazil "can only be a big agricultural
superpower if it destroys the Amazon is completely false."

He pointed to Brazil's dramatic reduction in deforestation from 2004

to 2012, as the country's "agribusiness exports were booming."
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. EVARISTO SA/AFP/Getty Images

"Also, a lot of the agriculture that gets done in the Amazon is very
unproductive," he said. "It's pasture that lasts for a few years and then
is exhausted."

Brazil's Embassy in the UK told Business Insider in a statement that

protecting the Amazon "is a priority both for the Brazilian people and
for the Brazilian Government."
Read more: Brazil has seen 100,000 fire alerts in 10 days, but it's not
just the Amazon — one map shows how much of South America is
burning

"It is our view that there is no necessary opposition between economic

development and preservation of the environment," the statement
said.

Brazil is also defending its policies about the

Amazon as an issue of national sovereignty
While arguing that the fires should not be a topic of discussion during
the G7 summit, Bolsonaro accused other countries of "interfering with
our sovereignty."

His officials continued to emphasize the country's independence over

the weekend and as they rejected the offer of $20 million from G7
countries, a figure that environmental campaigners called "chump
change."

Engstrom said it was "not surprising" that Brazil rejected the money —
especially given that it was a decision made in Europe, without Brazil's
input, and a pretty small sum.

"Why on earth would a major economy like Brazil accept that?" he

said.

If anything, he said, the G7's response "played into Bolsonaro's hands,"

ignoring the pressure that many Latin American countries face to
develop their forests and acting in a way that many Brazilians could
see as "hypocritical."
Onyx Lorenzoni, Bolsonaro's chief of staff, also accused France of
having a colonial attitude about the offer.

"Brazil is a democratic, free nation that never had colonialist and

imperialist practices, as perhaps is the objective of the Frenchman
Macron," he said.

He also pointed to the fire that devastated Paris' Notre-Dame

Cathedral this year, saying, "Macron cannot even avoid a foreseeable
fire in a church that is a World Heritage site."

The rhetoric forced Macron to acknowledge Brazil's independence

while still emphasizing the importance of the Amazon, the majority of
which is in Brazil, to the planet.

Read more: Earth is a spaceship, and the Amazon is a crucial part of

our life-support system, creating up to 20% of our oxygen. Here's why
we need the world's largest rainforest.

Eduardo Villas Boas, the former head of Brazil's army, described the
offers as "direct attacks on Brazilian sovereignty."

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Andreza De Souza Santos, the director of Oxford University's Brazilian

Studies Program, told Business Insider that Brazil's former status as a
Portuguese colony framed how it sees autonomy today.

Speaking via phone from the Amazon, she said that "Brazil has framed
its national identity by emphasizing its status as a former colony, sort
of creating a Brazilianness" that managed to include indigenous tribes
with different languages, ethnic backgrounds, and traditions.
This idea has been leveraged, she said, to suggest that international
concern for the Amazon "hurts Brazil's autonomy," an argument also
used in Brazil to argue against international aid.

Read more: Fires in the Amazon could be part of a doomsday scenario

that sees the rainforest spewing carbon into the atmosphere and
speeding up climate change even more

Engstrom said that "there has been a long-running concern in Brazil,

and in the military in particular, over international efforts to exert
control over the Amazon."

As an extreme example, Brazil's military held exercises in 2014 to

simulate a foreign takeover, and the US has previously had to
deny that it would try to invade the rainforest.

A 2011 government survey found that 50% of Brazilians believed

another country would invade Brazil and try to take the rainforest's
resources.

Brazil has also rankled at taking advice from Western countries that
have over centuries depleted their own forests.

Read more: Here's what you can do to help the burning, ravaged
Amazon rainforest

Of the $20 million offer from the G7 countries, Lorenzoni said that
"maybe those resources are more relevant to reforest Europe."

Pereira said that "there's some truth when they say things like two-
thirds of Brazil's original forest cover still exists and most European
countries have deforested more than that over the years."
Brazilian military firefighters boarding a plane to Rondonia to help fight fires in the Amazon
rainforest. ERGIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images
"They have preserved a lot of the rainforest, and there's a lot of pride
in Brazil about the fact that the Brazilian Amazon is the largest
rainforest in the world," he added.

Brazil's Embassy in the UK said that Brazil was "proud to have 66% of
our large territory — a territory that is 35 times the size of the UK —
covered with native vegetation."

"We have managed to both preserve our native vegetation and at the
same time become an agricultural powerhouse," it said. "In sum, we do
believe economic activities can be developed, including in the
Amazon, in a manner that does not harm the environment."