BRAZIL-ENVIRONMENT: Government Burned up Over Amazon Fire Story

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 10 1995 (IPS) - Brazilian officials acknowledged this week that there had been an increase in the incidence of forest fires in the Amazon, but said the number was not as significant as indicated in media reports.

Environmental Minister Gustavo Krause, responding to a cover story in the magazine Veja, rejected the charge that Brazil had resumed its role as “environmental villain” in the eyes of world opinion.

Veja, the magazine with the highest-circulation in Brazil, said new attacks were being launched on the country’s forests. There had been an increase in “burnings” that could reignite accusations made four years ago that the country was engaging in massive destruction of the Amazon forests.

But official data released by the environment ministry, based on satellite reconnaissance of “hot spots” in the Amazon region, showed there had been substantial decline in the number of such hot spots over the past four years.

Encompassing nine of Brazil’s 27 states, the data showed that from 312,900 in 1991 – the worst year- the number of so-called ‘hot spots’ in the Amazon had fallen to 118,671 in 1992, 109,989 in 1993, 69,683 last year and 75,423 this year.

The data was gathered during the dry season from June to October. That is when most of the traditional “burnings” by large landowners and small farmers takes place to clear land for planting or cattle grazing.

Krause acknowledged that this year’s figures were clouded by “technical problems”. Some 10,600 hot spots registered over the period Jul. 7-11 were excluded from the total because the satellite involved was suspected of having made false readings.

If excluded data is added to the total, the number of hot spots grew by a rate of 23.5 percent since 1994.

Joao Antonio Pereira, an expert with the National System for the Prevention and Control of Forest Fires, explained that the satellite was unable to distinguish between fires and light reflected from bodies of water and farmland.

This had caused a dramatic increase in the number of false fire readings. The government created the forest fire prevention agency six years ago.

Because of this problem, on Aug. 15 the National Institute of Space Research (INPE) began using images gathered by the NOAA-12 Satellite, instead of the NOAA-14. But this substitution raised new technical questions, adding fuel to the debate about the forest burning.

Volker Kirchoff, the interim INPE director, said an increase in the number of “hot spots” did not necessarily mean that more forest burned compared to last year or that the geographic range of burnings was more extensive. Kirchoff made several trips to the Amazon region this year.

The satellite images, subject to correction, show hot spots but cannot identify their size or what is burning. “My personal observation is that fire activity was concentrated along the transitional zone between the forest and the “cerrados,” and not in all of Amazonia,” Kirchoff told IPS.

The cerrados are a savannah-like terrain of poor soil and low, sparse vegetation that extends through much of central Brazil and has also been seriously affected by burnings.

The expert said that a more detailed analysis including other satellite images, Landsat data and corroborating evidence such as gas emissions is needed to understand the real extent of deforestation this year. He said that INPE has already begun this analysis and expects to complete it in two or three months.

The number of hot spots registered last June and July more than quadrupled compared to those months last year but fell in September and October, probably due to the early dry season this year.

Despite the larger number of hot spots, Kirchoff believes that fire deforestation this year was about the same as the 10,000 square kilometers that burned in 1994 compared to 20,000 in 1991.