The multiplication of the Amazonian fires is the visible face of the Brazilian president's policy, analyzes the journalist of "World" Nicolas Bourcier.
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Analysis. For once, we watched the house burn. Seventeen years old, almost to the day, after the speech of Jacques Chirac at the IVe Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the French president had called not to look " elsewhere ", the world suddenly took convulsions for the Amazon. Forest fires have been on the front pages of newspapers almost daily since mid-August. The highest political leaders on the planet have spoken on the subject. Help has been proposed. Money too.
Let us judge. For the only day of September 2, 1,284 fire starts were recorded in the Brazilian Amazon alone. They have risen to more than 45,000 since the beginning of the year. According to figures released last week, the rate of deforestation in Brazil increased in August by 222% over the same period of 2018. Either a shaved forest football stadium per minute. Nearly 400,000 trees a day. While these vertiginous figures remain below the peaks of deforestation recorded in the early 1990s and 2000s, the acceleration of recent weeks is more than worrying. Perhaps because the planet has never needed as much as today of this green lung and its biodiversity.
However, a man has looked elsewhere, Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president, elected handily in October 2018 and followed in a unanimous vote of unanimity by his entire government. Several times, the strong man from Brasilia claimed that the statistics were biased. For a long time, this conspiracy theorist argued that the fires were provoked by the NGOs, whom he accused of setting the forest on their own for revenge for losing their public subsidies. It is only recently that he has accepted international aid, chosen and drip.
Paradigm shift
To put the slightest doubt on the subject, Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo has just said that satellite images do not make the difference between "A campfire" and a fire, still striking a little more stupor and indignation the scientific community. Environment Minister Ricardo Salles, a former business lawyer, has planned to meet with officials from a climate-sensitive North American think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, shortly before the summit. September 27, where the issue of the Amazon fires should occupy an important place.
