Fires typically follow deforestation in the Amazon, a problem Bolsonaro’s administration has resisted fighting. Bolsonaro refused to strengthen the country’s environmental protection agencies as increasingly large parts of the forest were converted to pasture and illegal mining sites.
The fire season comes as Brazil’s soy and beef exports are booming, raising concerns among foreign investors and business leaders that they’re profiting from the Amazon demise.
And Brazil is struggling to change the narrative around the crisis. “This story that the Amazon is burning is a lie,” president Bolsonaro said in a recent meeting. This year’s season, however, intensifies the focus on Brazil’s troubling environmental problems yet again.
So what, if anything, has changed?
What’s different about the Amazon fire season this year?
The main difference this year is that there is more wood to burn.
When political and business leaders across the globe expressed outrage at Brazil’s inability to stop the Amazon burning, former army captain Bolsonaro acted the only way he knew how: sending in the military.
Data suggests the military helped curb fires in the ensuing months, but they left their work incomplete. They didn’t stop deforestation, which kept rising, and didn’t hold the perpetrators accountable. That means that this year, farmers and land grabbers are free to burn what they meant to last year, plus all the trees they’ve knocked down since.
Research from the Amazon’s Research Institute, Ipam, calculates that roughly 3,500 square miles of destroyed forest have been left to burn as of August this year. If only 60% goes up in flames, this year’s season will be as bad as last year’s. If all of it burns, however, it could also lead to “an unprecedented health calamity” in the region by adding to the effects of Covid-19, Ipam wrote.
Did the world's outrage last year make a difference?
Yes, but there have been no significant changes in policy or in farmers’ profit margins.
Investors from Brazil and abroad reacted strongly to the government’s inability to control deforestation and fires. Links between environmental destruction and the supply chains of major agribusiness players have also been called into question.
Brazil banned fires in the Amazon after a group of global investors said it was concerned about the country’s environmental record. Yet inaction led Nordea Asset Management, the investment arm of Europe’s largest financial services group, to drop JBS, the world’s largest meat packer in July. HSBC also warned investors of the risk in investing in JBS, arguing the company was unable to monitor its own supply chain for connections to illegal activity. China’s Cofco, one of the biggest trading companies in Brazil, promised to make its soy supply chain fully traceable by 2023.
Still, there has been little sign that investors have taken significant amounts of money out of Brazil because of environmental issues, and exports of agricultural products are booming, even as their links to illegal deforestation become apparent.
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