Brazil is burning: setback for Lula’s rainforest protection ambitions

Last week, the Brazilian Agriculture Minister wanted to show his G20 colleagues on site how sustainably his country’s agricultural industry produces. A good opportunity, thought Carlos Fávaro, because Brazil currently chairs the group of the world’s twenty leading industrial nations. So Fávaro, himself a large farmer, invited the G20 agriculture ministers to Cuiabá. This is the capital of the state of Mato Grosso, where Brazilian farmers produce the most corn and soy for export.

But Fávaro’s plan went completely wrong: so many fields and areas are currently burning on the farms and in the surrounding dry savannah that the meeting had to be moved at short notice to the nearby Chapada dos Guimarães National Park due to the extreme air pollution.

But even there, the smoke pollution was so bad that the park had to be closed to tourists. “Sustainability and agriculture are possible,” the minister told the delegates defiantly. “It is not up to us to point the finger at those responsible.”

For many, the farmers are behind the arson

From the perspective of many Brazilians, however, Fávaro should point the finger at himself and the Brazilian agricultural industry: environmentalists see the farmers as complicit, if not the main cause, of the worst fires in Brazil in decades. Two thirds of Brazil’s land area is currently covered in a veil of smoke.

In the neighboring countries of Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina, the sky is also covered with clouds of soot that extend far out into the Atlantic. In Peru and Bolivia, fires are also burning like never before. The Brazilian Space Research Institute (Inpe) registered 350,000 fires in thirteen South American countries at the beginning of September. The last time this happened was 26 years ago.

For President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the fire disaster is a bitter setback for his efforts to position himself as a global rainforest protector. After his election victory against his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, who did not believe in environmental protection and supported farmers and gold diggers, Lula wanted to shine with an exemplary environmental policy in his third term from January 2023. In the Amazon region, the government succeeded in reducing deforestation in the first year. But the successes are now being undone by slash-and-burn agriculture.

On the one hand, the Amazon rainforest is burning on its southern flank. This is where the agricultural border runs, which criminal land squatters and farmers want to move further north. The fires in the Amazon region in August released as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as was last seen in 2003 – when the rainforest there could still be burned largely undisturbed.

But forest areas are also currently burning in the huge dry savannah of the Cerrado to make room for cotton, soy and corn fields. Almost half of all fires are currently occurring in this biotope, which is the size of Mexico. It is also a significant CO₂-Storage. There are also severe fires in the floodplain of the Pantanal on the border with Bolivia – as they do almost every year now. The fires are getting stronger and the devastated areas are getting larger and larger. There is already speculation about when this biotope, which is half the size of Germany, will no longer exist.

Even in the sugar cane growing areas around São Paulo in southeastern Brazil, pastures and the undergrowth in the plantations are being burned, something that has been banned there for twenty years. It is unclear whether this is due to the expected impunity for the arsonists under Governor Tarcisio Freitas, who is a close confidant of Bolsonaro. It is far cheaper to burn pastures than to treat them mechanically. There is also speculation as to whether the PCC drug mafia, which dominates in São Paulo, is behind it in order to create chaos and confuse the security forces.

According to the Swiss air quality institute IQAir, São Paulo was once again the metropolis with the highest air pollution in the world last week. In the state of the same name, fatal accidents on highways have increased due to poor visibility caused by the smoke clouds.

The fires have not yet reached their peak

The environmental disaster is likely to worsen in the coming weeks: the dry season usually begins in August. However, the biomass is usually not dry enough to burn until September. “The peak of the fires is still to come in September and October,” says Mark Parrington of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). The fires usually end in early December with the onset of tropical rains.

This year, an early dry season and a heat wave have brought the fire season forward. June was the hottest, driest and windiest month in Brazil in 70 years, according to the World Weather Attribution (WWA), an association of research institutes that study extreme weather events. Since then, there has been little rain in Brazil’s interior.

The extreme dryness was exploited by arsonists. Fires in Brazil are mainly caused by people – not by lightning, as in many countries. On the one hand, this can be legal slash-and-burn to prepare pastureland or fields for agricultural use. These must be reported to the authorities. “However, the vast majority of slash-and-burn practices are criminal,” says Carlos Nobre, one of Brazil’s leading climate experts.

From slash-and-burn to modern plantations

They trigger a chain reaction: first, “grileiros”, professional criminal land squatters, burn down forest areas to turn them into pastureland and sell them to small cattle farmers. When the pastures no longer produce any yield, the illegal cattle farmers sell the pastures to professional farmers, who then turn them into plantations that are managed using the latest agricultural technology.

Using satellite monitoring, the Brazilian authorities can locate and track the illegal fires with great precision. The land is then closed for resale and the owners no longer receive state loans. But the small farmers who operate illegally don’t care anyway. The large farmers are counting on an amnesty for slash-and-burn practices – which has happened every year in the past. The agricultural lobby in Congress is one of the most powerful interest groups in the legislature.

But with such a massive increase in fires as we are seeing now, the authorities can no longer keep up. “We cannot post an officer on every field and on every pasture,” says Rodrigo Agostinho, head of the environmental agency Ibama.

Lula’s initial successes in the Amazon are now going up in smoke

Next year, Brazil will host the UN Environmental Summit. At the UN General Assembly in two weeks, Lula wanted to underpin his traditional opening speech with progress in the fight against climate change – and call on the world to take action.

But that will not succeed if the government cannot even get the situation under control at home. Although it has been warning about the danger of impending drought and fires since the beginning of the year, it has not presented a plan on how it intends to respond. Now President Lula has brought up the idea of ​​a climate super-ministry, which he had already mentioned during the election campaign. But how this authority, without its own budget and extensive powers, is supposed to manage climate-related activities between ministries remains a mystery.

Environmentalists are increasingly criticizing the government for standing by and watching as more and more forests go up in flames. Sergio Leitão, director of the environmental institute Escolhas, is calling on the government to take much more comprehensive measures to fight the fires. “If nothing changes, the fire will not only burn the forest, but also the credibility of the government,” he warns.

Collaboration: Adina Renner, Gilles Steinmann.