- Tweeter
republish
The fires in the Amazon have already taken almost one million hectares of forest in Bolivia in just a few weeks. A disaster for the fauna and flora and for the inhabitants of the affected areas. The origin of these fires? Slash-and-burn agriculture, widely practiced in the country.
from our correspondent in La Paz,
" I cleared everything myself, in three days, " says Emilio, showing his " cato " - his quarter-hectare - where the trees are on the ground, in a jumble of branches and turned earth. In a few weeks, when everything is dry, he will set the plot on fire. She will then be ready to be cultivated.
Emilio is from the municipality of La Asunta, in the Yungas of La Paz, in the Bolivian Amazon Basin. If the fires have not devastated thousands of hectares there, the practices are the same as in Chiquitania, the area where fires are raging. Every year, from August to October, before sowing, we " clean " the plots, it is the season of what is called the " eacho ", the clearing.
Fire, far from the easy way
If it is the cheapest and most practical solution, " it is not easy ," says Juan Carlos Ledezma, biologist, forest specialist at Conservation International . " You have to cut trees of 20, 30 meters, you have to remove them from the plot to sell the wood. It is necessary to clean the edges of the field so that the fire does not propagate. No, really it's far from the easy way . " And Emilio says that two weeks ago one of the leaders of his village died while clearing his land, " a tree slipped, and took away half of the face ".
A dangerous practice , for man and for the environment, but still very much used by small farmers. In Bolivia, most do not have equipment to carry out this cleaning, no tractors, no chainsaw, and " even if they had, difficult to find fuel, " says Juan Carlos Ledezma. So everything is done by the strength of the arms. Moreover, there is no longer a road to access the community of Emilio, it was cut by a landslide, there are about six months. Erosion and soil instability, which are precisely the consequences of these massive clearings.
" What are the families going to live with? "
Before the fire took hold in the east of the country last week, President Evo Morales launched this little sentence, which ignited the spirits: " If these families do not clear the fire, what are you- they live? "This has shocked environmental activists, especially now that fires have spread and ravaged more than 10,000 square kilometers of forest.
Natalia Calderón runs the Friends of Nature Foundation and she is very involved in the burning issue. " We assume that this technique is used and we can not do anything about it. So we are working on better fire management by farmers. That they warn their neighbors, that the fires are organized and managed with the whole community, that they check the climatic conditions of the days to come. A set of "good practices" that could avoid the gigantic fires of recent weeks.
The decree of the discord
But all the associations express the same foolishness towards the governmental authorities and the little case that is made to the tropical forest in general. In their line of sight, a presidential decree, signed on July 9 that allows the "controlled burning" in the regions of Santa Cruz and Beni. A decree that seems to be part of the general spirit of the environmental policy of President Evo Morales : extension of the agricultural frontier in the east of the country, to the detriment of the forest - even though the soils of these areas are not very productive- , hydrocarbon extraction justifying deforestation, and political issues.
Because the sad reality is there: Bolivia is in campaign period, in less than two months voters will go to the polls to elect their new president. But as environmental activist Pablo Solón, who was Bolivia's ambassador to the UN, explains: " Before, Evo Morales could not put a foot in Santa Cruz, he was persona non grata. Today he has bought the vote, not only from small producers but especially from big landowners and breeders ". Because the 350,000 hectares of forest that disappear every year in the country - and which place Bolivia among the 10 countries that deforest the most in the world - are the fact of large producers and livestock .
So the fate of the Amazon is actually played politically, in La Paz, the seat of government, where these days the view is blocked by a veil of permanent smoke ... Smoke that can come from far away, certainly fires in Amazon.