AMAZON FOREST IN BRAZIL

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has hit a new high in the first four months of the year, according to data released Friday by the National Space Research Institute of Brazil (INPE), which uses satellite imagery to track destruction: 1,202 square kilometers of forest (equivalent to half of Luxembourg) which disappeared from the beginning of January to the end of April 2020. Or an increase of 55% compared to the same period last year, the most high since 2015, date of the first monthly observations.

Faced with these disturbing figures, one can only wonder how Brazil intends to protect the largest tropical forest in the world, under far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. The latter is a notorious climate skeptic who advocates opening up protected land to mining and agriculture.

An almost anti-ecological policy

In 2019, for the first year of its presidency, deforestation increased by 85% in the Brazilian Amazon, with the destruction of 10,123 square kilometers of greenery, roughly the size of Lebanon. This devastation had created a worldwide stir over the future of the jungle, considered vital in the fight against climate change.

The destruction was caused by record forest fires that ravaged the Amazon from May to October, in addition to illegal logging and mining, and farming practices on protected land.

“What's more, everyone burns the forest in Brazil, both big and small owners, because it is the easiest and cheapest way to clean the land before sowing or planting crops (especially soybeans exported to Europe to feed intensive pigs) or even to put the land in meadows to raise beef cattle which, too, will be exported around the world ", specifies Michel Le Tourneau (CNRS- University of Arizona ), geographer specializing in the Amazon rainforest.

This week the army will deploy from Monday, May 11, 2020. in the Amazon to fight fires and deforestation, which last year had been violent and numerous. But the government's military strategy only deals with fires, regardless of the fact that they are often caused by illegal farmers and ranchers who cut down trees and then burn them, deplores Erika Berenguer, forest ecologist at the University of 'Oxford. "It's like taking paracetamol when your toothache is going to reduce the pain, but if it's a cavity, it's not going to cure it," she says.

For environmentalists it would be better to support more environmental protection programs. But under the Bolsonaro presidency, the environmental agency IBAMA had to face staff and budget cuts. And last month, the government sacked the agency's top environmental law enforcement official, who had shortly before authorized a police raid on illegal mines in front of television cameras.

Two tragedies at the same time

Added to this first tragedy is the epidemic of coronavirus which officially left nearly 10,000 dead among some 150,000 infected people. The state of Amazonas, the largest of the Brazilian states located to the northwest, on the border of Venezuela and Colombia, largely covered by nature, is one of the most affected. With his only intensive care unit based in Manaus, he was overwhelmed by the epidemic.

And environmentalists fear that the protection of the forest will be neglected because of the fight against the Covid-19.