LIMA: Raging
wildfires have drawn the world's attention to the Amazon but immolation is just
one of the dangers facing the world's largest rain forest, environmental
experts across the region say. The Amazon, covering 5.5 million square
kilometers over nine countries, faces ever more serious threats from
encroaching crop and livestock farming, mining, land occupations and illegal
logging.

Crop and
livestock farming       

Deforestation for
farming is one of the most serious threats to the rain forest, a problem common
to all nine jurisdictions: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana,
Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. "The main cause of deforestation is
the advancing agricultural boundary," said Jose Luis Capella, director of
a forest plantation program in Peru, 13 percent of which is covered by the
Amazon basin.

A case in point
is Ecuador, where agricultural land increased by 23 percent between 2000 and
2017 -- gouged from its share of the Amazon basin region.  "This is one of the main factors in the
shrinking of the rain forest," said Carmen Josse, director of the
Fundacion Ecociencia in Quito. A practice common in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and
Bolivia is for farmers to set fires in the dry season to clear the undergrowth
in deforested areas. However, this often leads to uncontrolled burning, which
takes a greater toll on the rain forest.

Much to
environmentalists' chagrin, Bolivia's government recently authorized farmers to
burn 20 hectares instead of the usual five hectares -- which is believed to
have contributed to thousands of wildfires that razed 1.2 million hectares of
grassland and forest since May. Illegal crops also nibble away at the forest,
like coca cultivation in Colombia, which now has nearly 170,000 hectares
covered by coca plantations, according to UN data.

Mining         

Illegal mining
operations being carried out in most Amazon basin region countries causes
significant damage, compounded by the use of chemicals such as mercury-particularly
in gold mining-which has contaminated soil and streams. The council of the
Amerindian peoples of French Guiana declared after a recent meeting that
"fire is not the only danger that threatens or destroys the Amazon.
Extraction is largely responsible." Some 29,000 hectares of rainforest
have been destroyed due to both legal and illegal gold panning since 2003,
according to the French territory's National Forestry Office.

Venezuela's
cash-strapped government turned to the Amazon's resources after the collapse of
oil prices contributed to its economic crisis. It launched a vast project in
2016 to extract bauxite, coltan, diamonds and gold in an area of more than
110,000 square kilometers of rain forest. 
"Mining is much more serious than the fires," said Cecilia
Gomez Miliani, head of the Venezuelan environmental NGO Vitalis. "All
vegetation is cut, eliminated, and this poses problems of soil erosion, mercury
contamination and population displacements." Josse said the most worrying
thing about mining is that it causes "permanent
deforestation" by destroying several layers of soil, preventing
regenerative growth. In Ecuador, oil concessions encroaching on indigenous
lands are also taking a toll.

In Peru, the
government has deployed the army in the Amazon to try to stop illegal mining
that has flourished in remote areas long left unprotected by the state.
Colombia has also mobilized its security forces to try to protect the Amazon
basin after more than 138,000 hectares of rain forest disappeared in 2018,
accounting for 70 percent of the country's total deforestation.

Illegal
occupation, hardwood trafficking    

Lack of a state
presence in many remote and rural areas has also contributed to the growing
practice of illegal land occupation, in which landless farmers settle on land
hoping to get a legal title at some point. "There is a tendency to confuse
land occupation with (deforestation for) livestock," said Carolina
Urrutia, of the Colombian NGO Parques Como Vamos. "But there is a more
complex phenomenon behind this process," namely the greed of politicians
and businessmen to "own as much land as possible," and speculating on
resale, she said.

"The absence
of institutional control over the informal land market and the appropriation of
public vacant lots make this phenomenon possible," says Rodrigo Botero of
Colombia's Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development. Under
pressure from environmentalists, the Bolivian government has sought to make
amends this week by announcing an "ecological pause"-prohibiting the
sale of fire-ravaged land to crack down on speculators.

But that may be
too little too late in a country that by its own admission has lost 1.2 million
hectares of grassland and forest to fires since May. The Amazon's massive
timber resources long put the rainforest at risk from illegal logging concerns,
particularly those trading in hardwoods like mahogany, now in danger of being
wiped out from over-exploitation.-AFP