Area of the Amazon rainforest deforested to plant soybeans near Porto Velho, Brazil. VICTOR MORIYAMA / New York Times / ContactoPhoto (NYT)
We could say that Leonardo DiCaprio is "also" a great actor.
Without denying that undoubted condition, I say this because of his notable role as an environmentalist.
The message “the lungs of the earth are on fire” is his, which he directed a few months ago on Instagram to his 34 million followers about global warming and the tremendous forest fires that were taking place in Brazil on those days.
The Amazon region is literally under attack.
Using the word "threatened" is insufficient.
It is amazing that the issue is not a priority for political elites and governments in the region.
It would even seem that DiCaprio or the French president, Emmanuel Macron, pay more attention to the issue.
He has been mentioned at the IX Summit of the Americas to materialize in the US announcement of the very modest commitment to contribute 12 million dollars against deforestation in Brazil, Colombia and Peru.
Any.
The latest expression of this drama has been the disappearance of the British journalist Dom Phillips, a contributor to
The Guardian
newspaper , and the Brazilian indigenista Bruno Pereira, produced last Sunday 5 in the Yavarí Valley, Brazil, near the border with Peru.
Everything indicates that the criminality of illegal fishing or logging, seeking silence and impunity, would be the origin of this serious attack.
Four issues are usually overlooked in the brutal social and environmental drama of the accelerated destruction of the Amazonian flora.
First, the Amazon as the “vegetable lung of the world”.
The Scientific Panel of the Amazon, which brings together 200 international experts, warned at the international summit in Glasgow on climate change (the so-called COP26), six months ago, that if the current high rates of deforestation continue, a point of will not return before 2050, having lost up to 70% of its native vegetation.
Without that forest, global warming would be much more impressive and could lead to the transformation of that territory into a savannah, releasing gigantic amounts of carbon.
This would ensure that the world cannot meet the targets set to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
So brutal.
Secondly, since this threat is valid for the entire Amazon region, it has to do especially with Brazil, due to its size.
Precisely where most of the world's tropical forest is located, with the capacity to absorb -still- most of the carbon dioxide emitted on the planet.
Deforestation in the protected areas of the Brazilian Amazon grew 79% during the first three years of the Bolsonaro government.
In the period August 2020-July 2021 alone, the Amazon lost 13,235 square kilometers of vegetation cover, the greatest degradation in the last 15 years.
An area larger than Qatar or Jamaica, equal to the Bahamas or more than half of the entire territory of El Salvador.
Most reliable analyzes agree on the direct responsibility of the Bolsonaro government: lack of control by environmental authorities and the reduction of the budget to combat these crimes.
Illegal deforestation also increased by 22% in just one year thanks to official leniency, given the impunity of land invaders and illegal miners and loggers.
Much of this result has to do, however, with the interests of ranchers and ranchers.
Which is not a small thing considering that Brazil is the largest exporter of beef in the world and that 50% of that cattle is raised and grazed in what was once the Amazon rainforest.
According to the information available, the business actors involved would be well protected by the Secretary for Land Affairs of the Ministry of Agriculture, Nabhan García, a “colleague” rancher himself.
Third, the impact of all this on the Amazonian indigenous peoples and their representatives.
Deforestation especially impacted indigenous territories or conservation areas.
Every year Brazilian indigenous leaders have been assassinated;
24 in 2019 and another 20 in 2020. To the impunity in the investigation of these crimes is added a huge drop in the confiscation of illegally extracted wood and in the prosecution of environmental crimes.
According to the NGO Global Witness, the majority of Latin American environmental defenders (71%), and not only in Brazil, were killed precisely for protecting forests from deforestation.
Fourth, what to do?
Begin by strengthening the capacity for action and reaction of the articulation of the eight member states in the now weakened Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO).
Its current limited vigor is, by the way, part of the current Latin American fragmentation.
That should find in the Amazon agenda, however, a meeting point.
This is subject to the governments putting the protection of the Amazon on their agenda —and seriously.
On the other hand, this drama should call for stronger action by those who import goods resulting from this destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
Part of them is in Europe that imports meat or coffee, in the context in which the expansion of industrial agriculture is responsible for 80% of global deforestation.
The European Commission has a draft regulation "on certain raw materials and products associated with deforestation and forest degradation" that should be translated into a decision.
The aim is to "minimize the consumption of products from supply chains associated with deforestation or forest degradation" and increase the demand for legal and "deforestation-free" products.
The serious pace of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon;
its effects on Brazilian society and the world;
the serious political responsibilities of the government of Jair Bolsonaro, president of the country that occupies the main tropical space in the world;
have global repercussions.
Faced with this, the world has still been lukewarm.
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