While the Amazon rainforest is slowly consumed by fires, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro hinted on Thursday, August 22, in a speech broadcast on Facebook, that his government could not afford to extinguish them. The government has opened an investigation into these fires, said the head of state.

He also reversed his accusations against the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) he accused the day before of setting off forest fires in the Amazon for the purpose, he said, of damaging his government. It was not an affirmation, he said, adding that he wanted to share his "suspicions".

"Everything indicates" that NGOs go to the Amazon to "set fire" to the forest, said yesterday the far right leader in a video broadcast live via Facebook.

Bolsonaro, who did not offer evidence to support his argument, said the large drop in government subsidies to NGOs could be a cause for discontent and prompted NGOs to do so. "We took the money out of the NGOs, they received 40% of the grants coming from abroad, they no longer have them, and the public subsidies" to NGOs, "he explained.

An 83 % increase in fires

The Brazilian Space Agency (Inpe) says it has recorded 72,843 fires in the Amazon rainforest since the beginning of the year, an increase of 83% over the same period last year and a record since it started collecting such data in 2013.

Deforestation in Brazil jumped 67 percent year-on-year in the first seven months of the year, Inpe said, whose work is being attacked by the Bolsonaro government. Millions of people around the world have expressed on social media their concern about the future of the Amazon rainforest. The largest carbon sink in the world is 60% in Brazil.

In the eyes of environmental experts, the statements of Bolsonaro are a "smokescreen" intended to mask the measures undertaken by his government favoring agricultural and mining investments at the expense of environmental regulations.

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"Increased deforestation and fires are the consequences of Bolsonaro's anti-environmental policy," said Marcio Astrini, the public relations coordinator of Greenpeace in Brazil. A researcher from the University of Sao Paulo, a specialist in climate issues, pointed out that farmers used fire to clear their land. He also attributed the increase in fires to the peak of illegal deforestation this year.

With AFP and Reuters