Amazon faces bigger threats

LIMA, Peru (AFP) — Raging wildfires have drawn the world’s attention to the Amazon but immolation is just one of the dangers facing the world’s largest rainforest, environmental experts across the region say.

The Amazon, covering 5.5 million square kilometers (2.1 million square miles) over nine countries, faces ever more serious threats from encroaching crop and livestock farming, mining, land occupations and illegal logging.

Deforestation for farming is one of the most serious threats to the rainforest, a problem common to all nine jurisdictions: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela.

“The main cause of deforestation is the advancing agricultural boundary,” said Jose Luis Capella, director of a forest plantation program in Peru, 13 percent of which is covered by the Amazon basin.

A case in point is Ecuador, where agricultural land increased by 23 percent between 2000 and 2017 — gouged from its share of the Amazon basin region.

“This is one of the main factors in the shrinking of the rainforest,” said Carmen Josse, director of the Fundacion Ecociencia in Quito.

A practice common in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia is for farmers to set fires in the dry season to clear the undergrowth in deforested areas. However, this often leads to uncontrolled burning, which takes a greater toll on the rainforest.

Much to environmentalists’ chagrin, Bolivia’s government recently authorized farmers to burn 20 hectares (almost 50 acres) instead of the usual five hectares (12 acres) — which is believed to have contributed to thousands of wildfires that razed 1.2 million hectares of grassland and forest since May.

Illegal crops also nibble away at the forest, like coca cultivation in Colombia, which now has nearly 170,000 hectares covered by coca plantations, according to UN data.

Illegal mining operations being carried out in most Amazon basin region countries causes significant damage, compounded by the use of chemicals such as mercury — particularly in gold mining — which has contaminated soil and streams.

The council of the Amerindian peoples of French Guiana declared after a recent meeting that “fire is not the only danger that threatens or destroys the Amazon. Extraction is largely responsible.”

Some 29,000 hectares of rainforest have been destroyed due to both legal and illegal gold panning since 2003, according to the French territory’s National Forestry Office.

Venezuela’s cash-strapped government turned to the Amazon’s resources after the collapse of oil prices contributed to its economic crisis. It launched a vast project in 2016 to extract bauxite, coltan, diamonds and gold in an area of more than 110,000 square kilometers of rainforest.

“Mining is much more serious than the fires,” said Cecilia Gomez Miliani, head of the Venezuelan environmental NGO Vitalis. “All vegetation is cut, eliminated, and these poses problems of soil erosion, mercury contamination and population displacements.”