Minister Silva: Fires are a sign of resistance to environmental policy
With 85 inquiries set up to investigate unprecedented forest fires across Brazil, the probes point to environmental crime. According to Humberto Freire de Barros, the Federal Police commissioner in charge of the cases, people may have had a range of motivations across the country to start the blazes that are causing the major losses in the wealth and health, as well as reducing the ability of human beings to live where they do.
Brazil’s Minister for the Environment and Climate Change Marina Silva also believes there is resistance to the return of a public environmental policy.
“We’ve managed to resume the creation of conservation units, the demarcation of indigenous land, the fight against illegal mining, and we’ve made a huge effort to slash deforestation last year by 50 percent. This year, we’ve already reduced it by 45 percent, and now we’re faced with a combination of an extreme climate event that’s devastating not only Brazil but the planet on one side, and criminals setting fires in the country on the other,” she stated.
With less than ten days to go until the end of September, Brazil has recorded almost 200 thousand fires this year. More than half of these started in the Amazon.
Land grabbing
According to researcher Mauricio Torres, from the Amazon Institute for Family Farming (INEAF) at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), who studies territorial conflicts in the Amazon, fire has historically been part of a broader process of appropriating public land pending allocation. Despite its wide rage of uses in the countryside—including pest control in pasture areas and the elimination of solid waste—fire also serves to complete the tree felling process.
“A recently cleared forest leaves a huge volume of branches and trunks, and if you don’t set fire to them, you can’t do anything, you can’t even walk in. You can’t form pastures, you can’t do anything. So they wait for it to dry out, they set it on fire, and the soil is left exposed.”
These clearings are often aimed at land grabbing—an attempt to seize public territories that have not yet been given a function, such as indigenous or conservation units, Torres explained. Land grabbing, he said, is always discussed in terms of the successive amnesties granted to invaders. The first amnesty covered invasions until 2004, and the second extended the benefit until 2008, as well as determining other criteria, such as new area limits and occupation types.
In Torres’ view, deforestation occupies a prominent place in land grabbing. “According to the current ‘land regularization’ programs, one of the best documents to prove the length of occupation is an environmental infraction notice for deforestation. It uses an official document to show that he [the invader] was there on the infraction date. If he wasn’t ‘lucky’ enough to have been given the notice, he needs to show a satellite image of the deforestation carried out up until 2008,” he explains.
In satellite images, the researcher shows that deforestation has been spreading over more than 20 years, precisely in unallocated public areas, which is why combating measures should go beyond fire control. “Inspections are not enough, you have to take action on land ownership. You have to stop deforestation being rewarded with a land title. You have to fight land grabbing,” he argued.
Crimes
In the police commissioner’s view, human action in the use of fire at a time when its handling is banned as it is indicates the existence of a crime, but each case still needs to be brought under scrutiny.
Land grabbing is just one of the environmental crimes that have been investigated. Others include organized crime and money laundering. “That’s why our investigation often takes longer. We attempt to correlate these other crimes and give the public authorities the response these criminals deserve,” he pointed out.
Retaliation
Barros said that the simultaneous appearance of hotspots in a matter of minutes is also a sign of coordinated action. “We recently carried out a crackdown on illegal mining on the Madeira river, in southern Amazonas, in which we destroyed over 420 dredgers. This brings dissatisfaction among the perpetrators, and we’re working with the possibility of retaliation from these environmental criminals following this return to the environmental agenda,” he remarked.
Other efforts to remove invaders from indigenous territories and clear conservation units also raise this hypothesis. In July, a local newspaper in the southeast of Pará published a statement by cattle ranchers who were unhappy with the eviction from the Jamanxim National Forest, saying they could encourage fires in the conservation unit if they were forced to remove their herds from the federal area.
Conservation units
In recent months, fires in conservation units have gone beyond the Amazon and affected national parks and forests in other biomes—like the cerrado, the second most affected by fire.
Vera Arruda, a researcher at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute and coordinator of MapBiomas Fogo, said that in August this year the cerrado savannas saw a 221 percent surge in the area burned compared to the previous year.
“These events result in a major loss of biodiversity, with plant and animal species—often endemic—being significantly impacted. The destruction of native vegetation also affects the biome’s ability to function as a regulator of the hydrological cycle, as the cerrado is home to the headwaters of important river basins. In addition, fires can cause soil degradation, increase greenhouse gas emissions, and compromise ecosystem services,” she explained.
Ecosystem damage
According to Commissioner Barros, in the police probes linked to these forest fires, the costs of services will be calculated so that those responsible for environmental crimes can also be held liable to compensate for these losses. “These ecosystem services that the affected area no longer provides are monetizable, financially measurable, and this has been included in our reports since July last year when the regulations were updated,” he concluded saying.
