Brazil is handing over the Amazon rainforest to mining companies and big agriculture

[NewsFeed]

Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, the massive swath of vegetation that accounts for 10 percent of the world’s known species, is again under siege. Last year alone, over 3,000 square miles were deforested, and if Brazilian President Michel Temer gets his way, a host of new infrastructure projects — dams, man-made waterways, mines — will only accelerate the degradation.

Deforestation in Brazil is nothing new; since 1970, nearly 300,000 square miles have been destroyed. But the rate of deforestation had actually slowed for much of the past decade, reflecting the “Save the Rainforest” initiative supported by countries around the world, including several countries that share the Amazon with Brazil, to reach zero net deforestation by the year 2020.

Now, however, the easing of environmental regulations in Brazil and the desire to combat the country’s brutal recession appear to once again be accelerating the demise of Brazil’s portion of the Amazon, known as Amazonia — deforestation rates were up 29 percent from the previous year. Low humidity caused by the loss of rainforest has already triggered record droughts in Brazil’s northeast. And scientists and environmentalists worry that the construction will not only have its own detrimental effects but also make way for more destructive projects in the world’s largest remaining rainforest, covering an area more than half the size of the contiguous United States.

“It opens the floodgate for any kind of project,” said Philip Fearnside, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and professor at the National Amazon Research Institute who’s researched Amazonia for more than 40 years. “Politicians are very anxious to have the economy recover, but removing environmental restrictions and approving all sorts of projects adds up to environmental and social impacts that are not being considered.”

Temer and his administration have begun to approve dams, waterways, and mines in the Tapajós and Xingu river basins, endangering about one-fifth of Amazonia, which is regarded by scientists as a crucial climate regulator for the planet. The government of Pará state, where the projects are planned, says that the investments will help ease the economic woes of the people who live there and the country as a whole — but the region’s ribeirinhos [traditional riverside communities], along with indigenous tribes who have long relied on the rivers and their ecosystems to survive, may instead be devastated by the results and be forced to leave their homes.

Driving the development is a powerful agroindustrial bloc collectively called the ruralistas , which manages the world’s second-largest soybean industry in Mato Grosso state south of Pará. Ruralistas have lobbied the government for years to gain easier access to the Amazon in order to transport their products, which would require developing industrial waterways with dams and locks that would make the Tapajós and its tributaries in southeast Pará

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