In the run-up to the emergency summit on the Amazon, held Friday (September 6th) in Leticia, southern Colombia, Colombian President Ivan Duque announced the adoption of a regional pact to protect the largest forest tropical world. A text that will be presented to the UN General Assembly.
The Leticia Pact will include "concrete actions" in each of the six signatory countries, said Carlos Holmes Trujillo, Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Amazon Summit brings together the heads of state from Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, as well as Surinam's vice-president and Brazilian Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo. from Jair Bolsonaro. With this text "we will energize the action not only national, but also regional and global to defend the Amazon", advance Carlos Holmes Trujillo.
As soon as it was announced, and while we do not yet know the detailed content of the measures, the media and the environmentalists rushed to remind the Colombian government that a treaty of this kind already exists, and for more than 40 years.
Ecologist rhetoric but extractivist politics
Signed by eight countries in 1978, the Amazon Cooperation Treaty (CAW), and the organization responsible for promoting its implementation since 1995 (OCTA), aimed to achieve "a balance between economic growth and the preservation of the forest. ".
"It was a failure because there was a strong contradiction between the ecologist rhetoric of the signatory countries and their extractivist policies", deplores Manuel Rodríguez Becerra, Colombian Prime Minister of the Environment, today president of the Colombian NGO Foro Nacional Ambiental questioned by France 24. "At the time, there was little interest in preserving the forest, while a myriad of hydroelectric projects, mining and road," recalls the one who was president of Forum of the United Nations on forests.
In the face of the failure of OCTA, a new pact wants to see the day with the intention of "unifying the visions" that the different Latin-American countries have to protect the Amazon - except Venezuela, which has not not been invited to these orders. "I am not sure that this will lead to something concrete. We have no mechanism to sanction Brazil and it must be remembered that 55% of the carbon emissions of Amazonian countries are linked to deforestation, "says Manuel Rodríguez Becerra.
Expansion of the agricultural frontier
Even today, agribusiness lobbies are ubiquitous in South America, and the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has given them wings. The OECD already planned in 2015 that the country would become the largest supplier of agricultural products on the planet in2024. And in Peru, Colombia and Ecuador, the agricultural industry accounts for around 15% of jobs.
In Bolivia, in July, Evo Morales signed a presidential decree authorizing "controlled fires" on farms in the departments of Santa Cruz and Beni, near the border with Brazil and Paraguay, on the border of Bolivia. Amazon. Voluntary fires that increase agricultural areas, to the detriment of the forest.
Two months before the Bolivian presidential election, faced with the political weight of the agribusiness giants, the president does not hide his desire to support local producers and to continue the development of soybean, livestock and agrofuels. According to the Bolivian National Institute of Statistics, the amount of arable land has increased by 83 percent since 2000 to around 3.5 million hectares. On August 6, the Bolivian government reaffirmed its intention to expand this area to some 10 million hectares by 2025, taken from the forests.
Colombia, 42% of whose territory is Amazonian, is also closely scrutinized by environmental advocates. In 2018, 25 young people had lodged a complaint against the Colombian State for climate inaction concerning the Amazon rainforest. The Supreme Court of Justice had declared the Amazon "a subject of law" and ordered the government to put in place concrete measures to reduce deforestation. But according to figures from the Colombian ministerial ecological monitoring agency, IDEAM, the destruction of the Amazon would have decreased by only 4% between 2017 and 2018.
"Agriculture is at the center of the problem," Valentina Rozo, a researcher in economic development for the NGO Dejusticia, told France 24. In addition to the giants of agricultural production, farmers also practice slash-and-burn farming. "The peasants tell us that they can not afford to stop their activity. They burn the forest to survive. "
The researcher, who has accompanied the plaintiffs in their ecological struggle, emphasizes the importance of extending a mechanism known as "Payment for Environmental Services" (PSA). "It's about paying communities living in a fire zone for reforestation work, especially since they know the local flora well," she says.
The Way of the Anaconda
"Interesting answers exist," adds Manuel Rodríguez Becerra, who also discusses solutions to be found in the livestock sector, which is mainly responsible for deforestation. "Even the Colombian Federation of Farmers says that with better technological optimization, farmland could be reduced by a third, that is to say about 12 million hectares," he says. -he.
Another way of thinking would be to give life to the Way of the Anaconda, also known as the "AAA Corridor": a protected area project of some 265 million km2, connecting the Andes, the Amazon and the ocean Atlantic, shared between eight different countries. This reserve would include nearly 400 indigenous communities and 30 million inhabitants.
The idea comes from the Colombian NGO Gaia Amazonas and germinated in the head of its founder, anthropologist Martin Von Hildebrand, for almost 30 years. In 2017, studies have shown the danger of a phenomenon essential to South American biodiversity: the continuity of the green and wet fringe that connects the Andes to the Amazon. That year, ministers and ambassadors from Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela met to try to move the project forward.
"The most effective way to protect the Amazon is to legally shield indigenous reserves and natural parks," confirms Manuel Rodríguez Becerra, president of Foro Nacional Ambiental. "The figures of IDEAM are optimistic: in Colombia, for example, this special protection regime has allowed only 5% of these surfaces to undergo environmental transformations." In theory, Brazil has a legal system designed to protect these native areas, but Jair Bolsonaro has weakened these laws.
The Anaconda Way, according to the Gaia Amazonas Foundation, would save some 200 species. The Brazilian president sees a direct competition to his plan Calha Norte, a vast infrastructure plan along the northern border of the country, which was initiated by the military dictatorship in the 1980s and that Jair Bolsonaro wishes to resurrect with a part of its defense budget.