By JEAN MARC VON DER WEID*
Environmental conditions help, but the one who lights the match or blowtorch is the livestock agribusiness
From flying rivers to rivers of smoke
For weeks (or months?) we have been witnessing the most spectacular fire season in the country's history, still ongoing and more sinister than the Sunday of Fire in 2019 or the sea of flames in 2004. It is already a worrying sign for the environment in Brazil and, given its magnitude, the planet, that we have such a baptismal name for the winter period. But the accelerated occupation of agricultural frontiers by agribusiness, since the time of the military dictatorship, has accustomed us to increasingly gigantic images of forests and other ecosystems being devoured by flames over the course of months.
In the 1970s, the burning of a XNUMX-hectare property in Pará, belonging to the German company Volkswagen, caused an international scandal. In Brazil, this incident did not make the news, except when it was reported abroad after being detected by satellite photographs.
Since then, the fires have become routine and have been expanding, from the arc of fire rising across the map from the south of the Amazon, from the west of Mato Grosso to the east of Pará, to the fires in the intense occupation of Rondônia, Roraima and Acre and expanding to the Cerrado and the Pantanal.
None of this is new in our history. Let us remember that the first biome to be destroyed was the once-thriving Atlantic Forest, which was cut down with fire and sword since the beginning of colonization. The difference is that the reduction of more than 90% of the vegetation cover of this biome, almost all of which is tropical forest with enormous biodiversity, took five centuries. What we are witnessing is happening in less than two generations.
These days, as was the case in 2019 and, less intensely, in other years, the winds that bring the moisture evaporated by the Amazon rainforest to irrigate the center-west and southeast of Brazil, a phenomenon now known as “flying rivers,” began to push dense black smoke produced by millions and millions of hectares of vegetation, from the Amazon rainforest to the less dense forests of the Cerrado and the floodplains of the Pantanal, all extremely dry due to seven months of total drought. In addition to the smoke generated by the burning of pasture areas, whose original vegetation cover was already devastated a long time ago.
At the same time that three biomes of the new agricultural frontier are burning, large areas of sugarcane cultivation are also burning in what was once the Atlantic Forest biome, more precisely in the center-west of São Paulo. In this case, the occurrence is a novelty, at least since 2007. The burning of sugarcane fields in São Paulo is only phenomenal because the start of most of the fires was simultaneous, as detected by satellite images.
Crimes?
There was a lot of outcry in the press and on social media. Bolsonarists blamed the MST for the fires in São Paulo, while the left accused the sugarcane agribusiness in this state and the cattle ranching industry in the Amazon, Cerrado and Pantanal of criminal actions aimed at demoralizing the Lula government's deforestation control policy and tarnishing Brazil's image and leadership for COP-30. Everything was orchestrated, like the Sunday of Fire in 2019, and Bolsonarist agribusiness was the criminal to be fought. These hypotheses need to be studied further.
In my opinion, there is no national criminal political orchestration bringing together criminals in all the fire areas, almost from Oiapoque to Chuí. Many of these fires are, without a doubt, criminal acts whose intentions we must analyze on a case-by-case basis. But others are the result of other types of causes, natural or not. And natural conditions must be taken into account to determine how much of the burned area results from a loss of control of operations using fire that are legal. And there are situations that require more in-depth police investigation.
Fires in the sugarcane fields of São Paulo
The suspicion of crime is fueled by satellite images showing the emergence of hundreds of fires in the Ribeirão Preto region in a very short space of time (hours). In addition, a video circulated of a truck from a sugar and alcohol plant accompanying uniformed workers who were setting fire to dry straw under the sugarcane fields using blowtorches. The criminal intent seems proven, but who is to blame? Would the sugar mill owners have something to gain from burning the sugarcane fields?
Newspapers have been reporting estimates of sugar mill owners' losses ranging from R$500 million to R$XNUMX billion due to the fires. I have read more than one analysis pointing out that the practice of burning sugarcane fields was common in the past and that sugar mill owners have started using it again. This argument can only be explained by the high probability that the authors are laymen when it comes to sugarcane economics and agronomy.
Until the end of the last century, there was controversy between sugar mill owners and sugarcane growers, suppliers of raw materials to the mills. Among the sugar mill owners, there was a growing support for Embrapa's technical proposals that favored mechanized harvesting and the abandonment of burning.
There were multiple advantages to cutting raw (unburned) sugarcane: more crop residue (leaves and tips) for incorporation into the soil, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers, avoiding losses in sugar content (called brix) of around 8% if the burned sugarcane were processed in less than six days and much more if the deadlines were extended, fewer problems with sugarcane regrowth for the next harvest, elimination of the natural enemies of the leafhopper, the biggest pest in sugarcane fields.
The disadvantages were the costs of harvesting operations. If the operations were carried out using manual labor (boias frias), the amount of sugarcane harvested per worker per day was three times less than with burned sugarcane. This occurs because the worker, in an unburned sugarcane field, has to perform three operations: cutting the sugarcane, removing the leaves and tips, and piling it up. This required hiring more people, since it is necessary to use the sugarcane at its ideal moment of maturity to obtain the maximum sugar (or alcohol). In the balance of losses and gains, the savings in labor, which was scarce in the rural world of São Paulo in the 70s, ended up pointing to greater profits with burning.
The mechanization solution was adopted to eliminate this labor bottleneck, but the harvesters initially available had operating problems. The unburned sugarcane straw caused the machines to become so-called clogged, with frequent interruptions in the harvest to clean the vegetation accumulated on the harvester teeth.
In other words, burning continued to be a part of mechanized harvesting for a long time, as it made the process easier and faster. However, new and more advanced machines have overcome this problem, but their high cost has led many sugarcane mills and suppliers to maintain the practice of burning and using manual labor.
Technological change in sugarcane cultivation in São Paulo was accelerated with the disappearance of suppliers (who had more financial restrictions) and with the adoption of modern mechanization by the mills, induced by legislation introduced in 2006, prohibiting burning for public health reasons due to the smoke that spread through the urban areas of the region.
The benefits of abandoning burning were greater than initially anticipated, including the use of crushed sugarcane bagasse as fuel or as raw material for paper pulp, which is impossible with burned sugarcane.
Twenty years after the abandonment of burning in São Paulo, it seems totally unlikely that the sugar mill owners decided, as a group, to violate the law while losing money due to lower productivity of burned sugarcane and other losses that would take a long time to detail.
Having eliminated the absurd hypothesis that capitalists in the country's most advanced agribusiness are literally burning money, the question worth a billion reais remains: who burned the sugarcane fields in Ribeirão Preto? And why did they do it?
The Bolsonarist hypothesis of a terrorist action by the MST is also absurd. Burning sugarcane fields does not facilitate the settlement of landless people. And how can we explain the video of a sugar mill truck, accompanying employees engaged in burning with blowtorches? Let the São Paulo or federal police speak. I have no answer, and I consider the hypothesis that the sugar mill owners would have done this to cause a rise in sugar prices on the international market to be nonsense. There was, in fact, a 3% rise in the sugar market. commodities in New York, but the profits do not go to the burned areas, but to those that did not burn.
Let it be clear that I am not defending the sugarcane agribusiness here. This sector has a history of disregard for the environment and workers' rights, in addition to frequently relying on subsidies and tax exemptions. But I do not believe that, in this case, they are responsible for the fires, which mean significant losses in their profits.
Amazon in flames
The Lula government, through Minister Marina Silva, proclaimed a 46% reduction in deforestation in the Amazon between August 2023 and July 2024. Despite this positive result, deforestation rates during Jair Bolsonaro's term were so high that, even reduced, the affected area was still gigantic.
The government attributed the success in reducing deforestation to the resumption of monitoring in the region. However, this explanation should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the dismantling of environmental protection institutions, Ibama and ICMBio, under the Jair Bolsonaro government was enormous. Both institutions are short of staff and equipment and, in addition, went through a long period of strikes over salaries and career plans that paralyzed monitoring activities. On the other hand, and we will see this point in more detail later, deforestation in all other biomes increased.
Why deforestation has fallen in the Amazon is something that requires a more in-depth analysis and I do not have the elements to answer this question. I have hypotheses, but not facts and data. Could there have been a concentration of efforts by environmental protection agencies in this biome, with the consequent weakening of the others? It is unlikely, since personnel are not transferred from one place to another so easily. Has the hunger for land grabbing in the Amazon been exhausted? Negative. The history of deforestation does not indicate that the process is in the least bit slowing down.
The only new element to consider is the threat made by the European Union to prevent the import of agricultural or timber products from areas deforested since 2015, worldwide. This decision has already been taken in the European Parliament and has already been ratified in the vast majority of the bloc's member countries and should come into force in 2025. This decision was included in the debates on the European Union/Mercosur agreement at the beginning of last year, generating reactions from the agribusiness sector and the Lula government itself. This could explain the agribusiness's retreat, but it would be surprising to see this gesture of anticipating measures even before the European Union's decision is in force.
In order not to confuse readers who are not familiar with these agribusiness practices, I would like to clarify that there are several stages in what is generally called deforestation. The process begins with the removal of hardwood, followed by the so-called clear-cutting, carried out with bulldozers dragging large chains that lay the vegetation, trees of any size and shrubs on the ground. The next stage, after a waiting period for the plant matter to dry, is burning.
Fires in the Amazon or other biomes are not limited to deforested areas. Pastures are burned to encourage grass to regrow, and areas of forest on the edges of virgin forests are burned. It is less common to burn virgin forests themselves, both because it eliminates the profits from hardwood and because humid, dense tropical forests are more difficult to burn.
While deforestation has decreased significantly, fires in the Amazon have increased significantly. For starters, the fire season has started earlier. Between January and July 2024, the burned area increased by 83% compared to the same period in 2023 and 38% more than the average of the previous 10 years.
What was new in the period from January to March 2024 was the gap between areas of recent deforestation (9% of fires) and areas of primary forest (34% of fires). In the first quarter of 2023, 5% of fires were in areas of primary forest and 21% in areas of recent deforestation. I do not have the data for the second quarter, but the trend points to a continued change in the direction of fires.
This can be explained by the fact that environmental conditions are favoring burning in primary forests, with a long dry period, high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds. The result, intentional or not, is that the reduction in deforestation, proclaimed by the government, was compromised by the increase in the area of burning in primary forests. It may not have been fires started by land grabbers, but simply the spread of fire from pastures to the areas on the edge of primary forests, finding conditions to penetrate the latter. Or this may be part of the explanation.
In another hypothesis, the land grabbing that opens space for the expansion of livestock agribusiness in the Amazon may have inverted the steps of the usual process, taking advantage of the exceptional environmental conditions to first burn and then use bulldozers and chains to remove the remaining charred trees and sow pasture.
This has been happening increasingly in recent years, following improvements in INPE's satellite monitoring systems, which are now capable of capturing and locating in real time any clear-cut forest area larger than 30 hectares. This control would explain the shift from clear-cutting to direct burning, especially in areas where hardwood has been removed, thinning the forest and facilitating burning.
Fires in the Cerrado
In this biome, the deforestation process is simpler and more brutal, with fire being used directly on primary vegetation. This is explained by the fact that the vegetation cover of this region does not offer a tempting quantity of hardwood for exploitation and by the greater ease of burning in less dense forests, such as arboreal and shrubby savannas. The objective of agribusiness is focused on the formation or renewal of pastures, and this region concentrates the second largest herd in the country. In percentage terms, this is the biome with the highest rate of conversion of primary vegetation into pastures, although the Amazon takes first place in absolute values of altered area.
In 2022/2023, 665 thousand hectares of native vegetation in the Cerrado were burned. In this biome, 50% of the original vegetation cover has already been deforested, or 100 million hectares. The contribution of burning to the devastation of the Cerrado, in the year indicated above, seems small (0,66%), but it was concentrated in one of the last frontiers of untouched vegetation, an area common to four states – Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia – MATOPIBA, with 77% of all deforestation in the Cerrado.
In the 2023/2024 period, deforestation (burning) increased by 16%, reaching 771 thousand hectares. In the years of Jair Bolsonaro's government, these numbers were more spectacular, but let's remember that the burning period is just beginning.
The fingerprints of cattle-raising agribusiness are clear throughout the deforestation process in the northernmost region of the biome, but from the center to the south, soy agribusiness predominates.
The Pantanal on the fast track to disappearance
The numbers for this biome are frightening. The burned area increased by 2362% in 2024, compared to the first half of 2023 and 529% more than the average of the last five years. And since the fire season has only just begun, they could get much worse by the end of the year. The burned area is expected to reach 3 million hectares. This staggering data indicates that the record year for burned area, 2020, has already been surpassed by 54%.
Satellites point to an important fact: 95% of fires start on private properties, with cattle ranching being the most common. Fires have already affected 57% of the biome at least once, especially in the last 35 years.
According to Minister Marina Silva, what we are witnessing is the disappearance of the largest floodplain in the world, which could occur before the end of the century, in an optimistic view. The prolonged drought in the region is already the longest and most intense in 74 years (40 years in the Amazon). With low rainfall expected next summer, the flood levels of the rivers and the floodplain will not be reached.
As a result, the regrowth of burned vegetation is unlikely to occur and the conditions for new devastating fires will continue for the coming years. She complained about the budget cuts imposed by Congress, leaving Ibama and ICMBio unable to monitor the fires and without the personnel needed to fight them.
Smoke effect?
The burning seasons, accepted as part of the reality of agribusiness in the Amazon, Cerrado and Pantanal, have long been a public health problem for the populations of the North and Central-West, due to the large concentrations of smoke. In the rest of the country, in “normal” years, they barely make the news in newspapers and television. In years with slightly more intense burning, the smoke causes the suspension of landing and takeoff operations at airports in these regions and the news in the “wonderful south” is more frequent. But in years with major burnings, which have become increasingly frequent, it is the smoke in the noses and lungs of people from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro that makes the news headlines.
Although the issue of public health is very important, it is far from being the most serious for the country and the planet. The increasingly rapid elimination of tropical forests and other vegetation formations on a gigantic scale, covering millions of hectares every year, directly affects the climate, both locally and globally.
Brazil's contribution to global warming comes, 70%, from deforestation and fires and is only smaller than that of the United States, China, the European Union, Russia and India, the largest emitters of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal).
The effects of deforestation and burning in Brazil are even faster and more intense than in the rest of the world. Our climate is changing and in recent years we have seen a succession of heat waves and droughts that are more intense and extensive (in terms of area affected and duration). The rainfall regime in the south and southeast, which is highly dependent on “flying rivers” (rain generated by evaporation in the Amazon region and carried by the winds), has become erratic, with precipitation concentrated in some areas (see the most recent case of Rio Grande do Sul) and prolonged droughts in the southeast. Agribusiness agriculture is already being severely affected by this “new normal” and the forecasts for the future are catastrophic.
Other colossal losses are less perceived by the public. The extremely rich plant and animal biodiversity of the aforementioned biomes has been devastated by this process, impoverishing the future of the country and the planet.
The risk (almost a sad certainty) of the disappearance of the Pantanal has already been mentioned above, but few people realize the risk, announced by INPE scientists, of the proximity of the so-called “point of no return” in the regeneration capacity of the Amazon rainforest. According to this assessment, we are just a few years away from the moment when the largest tropical forest on the planet will collapse, even if deforestation and burning are abruptly halted.
Once the tipping point is passed, the biome will begin an irreversible process of degeneration, devolving into a savannah of trees and shrubs, and even into a process of desertification. For the rest of the country, the problem will be a growing lack of rain, with the stagnation of the formation of flying rivers. It goes without saying what this means for agriculture in the most productive regions of Brazil. The vaunted strength of our agribusiness will be shaken, burying both exports and the food supply of our population.
And who is responsible for this announced catastrophe?
The answer is known by all those who are minimally informed, but not by the general public, bombarded by propaganda that says “agriculture is pop, agriculture is technology and agriculture is everything”, praising the strength of agribusiness. What is incredible about this situation is the lack of reaction from the agribusiness sectors in the South and Southeast, who prefer to support any and all measures that facilitate the ongoing process of destruction in the three biomes, which only benefits extensive livestock farming in the North and Center-West.
Over the past 35 years, 71 million hectares of forest have been converted into pasture in the Amazon alone, now accounting for almost half of our immense herd of over 216 million head of cattle. This conversion has been growing steadily, each year surpassing the averages of previous years.
Attempts to control deforestation have been futile. The Terms of Conduct Adjustment and other agreements with meatpacking plants (JBS, Minerva and Marfrig, and other smaller ones) have been in force for over 15 years with zero effect. These agreements require the purchase of cattle from areas that have not undergone deforestation since 2010, and the meatpacking plants guarantee that they are complying with the rules by showing certificates from suppliers of live cattle that supply them.
However, there is a mechanism to circumvent control and meatpacking plants know very well how to exploit it. Cattle raised on pastures originating from deforestation are sold to other farms for breeding and fattening, and these are, let's say, "clean", outside the deforested area. It is pure cynicism.
The measure to be adopted for total control is known: placing an electronic control chip in each head of cattle, allowing us to know where each head of cattle was born and where it has been. Technically and economically this is simple and relatively cheap, but it is not applied, simply because most cattle actually come from deforested areas.
When the European Union decided that it would only buy meat from non-deforested areas, it was precisely this control measure (tracking) that it demanded. The reaction of Brazilian agribusiness as a whole, and of its representatives in the powerful ruralist caucus in Congress, was one of anger, with protests against what they called “protectionism” and “market reserve”. And the Lula government bought into this discourse, with the obsequious silence of Minister Marina Silva.
If it is surprising that other sectors of agriculture have not supported this measure (which has been discussed for some time in Brazil), it is even more incomprehensible that the Lula government is closing ranks to support the livestock agribusiness in the Amazon, Cerrado and Pantanal, among other reasons (economic and environmental) because it is the focus of the most exacerbated Bolsonarism.
Or perhaps the government is defending the big meatpacking companies, with which it already had important agreements in the previous governments of Lula and Dilma Rousseff. Does anyone remember the huge advantages obtained by JBS to expand its business abroad, under the so-called “national champions” policy financed by BNDES?
Currently, supporting meatpacking plants is the same as supporting cattle ranchers who bought cheap land in areas deforested by land grabbers and who are leading not only to the destruction of three biomes, but also compromising the future of all our agriculture (yes, family farming is being and will be harmed too) and of the country.
*Jean Marc von der Weid is a former president of the UNE (1969-71). Founder of the non-governmental organization Family Agriculture and Agroecology (ASTA).
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