Fires not the only threat facing Amazon

LIMA: Ragingwildfires have drawn the world's attention to the Amazon but immolation is justone of the dangers facing the world's largest rain forest, environmentalexperts across the region say. The Amazon, covering 5.5 million squarekilometers over nine countries, faces ever more serious threats fromencroaching crop and livestock farming, mining, land occupations and illegallogging.

Crop andlivestock farming       

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

A case in pointis Ecuador, where agricultural land increased by 23 percent between 2000 and2017 -- gouged from its share of the Amazon basin region.  "This is one of the main factors in theshrinking of the rain forest," said Carmen Josse, director of theFundacion Ecociencia in Quito. A practice common in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador andBolivia is for farmers to set fires in the dry season to clear the undergrowthin deforested areas. However, this often leads to uncontrolled burning, whichtakes a greater toll on the rain forest.

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

Mining         

Illegal miningoperations being carried out in most Amazon basin region countries causessignificant damage, compounded by the use of chemicals such as mercury-particularlyin gold mining-which has contaminated soil and streams. The council of theAmerindian 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 rainforesthave been destroyed due to both legal and illegal gold panning since 2003,according to the French territory's National Forestry Office.

Venezuela'scash-strapped government turned to the Amazon's resources after the collapse ofoil prices contributed to its economic crisis. It launched a vast project in2016 to extract bauxite, coltan, diamonds and gold in an area of more than110,000 square kilometers of rain forest. "Mining is much more serious than the fires," said CeciliaGomez Miliani, head of the Venezuelan environmental NGO Vitalis. "Allvegetation is cut, eliminated, and this poses problems of soil erosion, mercurycontamination and population displacements." Josse said the most worryingthing about mining is that it causes "permanentdeforestation" by destroying several layers of soil, preventingregenerative growth. In Ecuador, oil concessions encroaching on indigenouslands are also taking a toll.

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

Illegaloccupation, hardwood trafficking    

Lack of a statepresence in many remote and rural areas has also contributed to the growingpractice of illegal land occupation, in which landless farmers settle on landhoping to get a legal title at some point. "There is a tendency to confuseland occupation with (deforestation for) livestock," said CarolinaUrrutia, of the Colombian NGO Parques Como Vamos. "But there is a morecomplex phenomenon behind this process," namely the greed of politiciansand businessmen to "own as much land as possible," and speculating onresale, she said.

"The absenceof institutional control over the informal land market and the appropriation ofpublic vacant lots make this phenomenon possible," says Rodrigo Botero ofColombia's Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development. Underpressure from environmentalists, the Bolivian government has sought to makeamends this week by announcing an "ecological pause"-prohibiting thesale of fire-ravaged land to crack down on speculators.

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