Brazil's head of state, Jair Bolsonaro, lifted a ban on sugarcane cultivation for the wetlands on the Amazon and in the Pantanal on Wednesday (local time). It was decreed by the leftwing government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ten years ago.
The Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture dismissed allegations that the release of sugar cane for the production of biofuel ethanol would endanger the Pantanal. Rather, the decree is outdated, because since then laws to protect the Pantanal and rainforests in the Amazon came into force.
The Observatory do Clima, an alliance of local environmental groups, however, criticized the decision of ultra-right and pro-business President Bolsonaro. The general permission of sugarcane cultivation "exposes two sensitive ecological areas to the plundering and economically unjustifiable expansion of sugar cane," the environmentalists said. Moreover, it destroys the "image of sustainability", which had been painstakingly built for the ethanol extracted from Brazil.
Bad fires in the Pantanal
The Association of the Brazilian Sugar Cane Industry (Unica) said the 2009 decree was merely a "bureaucratic framework". It goes without saying that ethanol must be "sustainable from beginning to end".
Brazil is the world's largest sugarcane producer. According to industry association Unica, the plant was grown in 2018 on more than ten million hectares of land in Brazil.
The Brazilian Institute for Space Research (Inpe) had announced on Monday that the Pantanal is currently raging the worst fires in years. In October alone, according to Inpe, there were 2430 fires - more than 20 times as many as in the same month last year. About 122,000 hectares of land are affected.
According to Inpe, the number of fires in the Amazon region has fallen to a minimum in October. In the entire period since the beginning of the year, however, there were still 29 percent more forest fires in the Amazon than in the same period in 2018.
Bolsonaro, who doubts man-made climate change, has taken a series of steps since he took office at the beginning of the year, allowing for the entry of Brazil's powerful agricultural economy into the forested and species-rich Amazon. Brazil plays an important role in the fight against global warming because of its vast forests.