The Minister of Overseas, Annick Girardin, and elected officials of Guyana on Sunday called for the creation of an international fund "against forest fires and for reforestation" while fires raging in the Amazon caused a global emotion.
"Preserve this common good of humanity"
"France, country of Amazonia, preserve this common good of humanity", is titled their tribune published by the Journal du Dimanche and which recalls that Guyana, French territory of South America, is touched directly by these fires.
"It is often forgotten, the Brazilian president (Jair Bolsonaro) forgets: the largest external border of France is between Guyana and Brazil," had already insisted President Emmanuel Macron Friday, while the fires in the Amazon, one of the green lungs of the Earth, were urgently invited to the menu of the G7 summit.
"While the Amazonian forest, which covers nine countries including France, has lost more than 550,000 km2 in the last ten years, the size of the Hexagon, it is more than 2,500 km2, equivalent to the size of Reunion, which were slaughtered during the month of July, mainly in Brazil ", deplore the signatories of the tribune, including Rodolphe Alexandre, president of the territorial collectivity of Guyana, and Sylvio Van Der Pijl, president of the large customary council of the Amerindian populations and bushinengue.
A request for funds to the European Union
"These lost hectares are all carbon sinks annihilated, it is an exceptional biodiversity that disappears little by little," they add, applauding the refusal of Mr. Macron to ratify the current EU trade agreement. Mercosur.
Noting that "the indigenous inhabitants of the forest" were the "first impacted", the elected representatives plead for the creation of an "international fund, which would not be directly dependent on the States, and which could, according to the amounts collected, launch concrete, punctual actions targeted directly at local actors, against forest fires and for reforestation ". The signatories also ask "the European Union to double its inter-regional development fund dedicated to biodiversity and development of the Amazon".