More than 300,000 fires have burned more than 200 million acres and claimed hundreds of lives across South America this year. Brazil and Bolivia are the most affected, with record numbers of fires. Devastating fires are also raging in Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia and Paraguay.
While some mainstream media has reported on the resulting death and destruction, few have examined the structural causes of the capitalist-caused catastrophes.
In Bolivia, fires have burned at least 25 million acres (10.1 million hectares), affecting 68% of grasslands and 32% of forests. At least 54,000 families have been affected.
In Brazil, fires have burned 113 million acres (45.7 million hectares) — 70% of which is native vegetation — this year, as at mid-September.
Early last month, smoke covered about 60% of the country, and São Paulo was among 10 cities with the worst air quality in the world. This poses an extreme health risk, as smoke from fires kills an estimated 12,000 people every year in South America, disproportionately affecting Indigenous Amazonian communities.
Due to widespread deforestation and raging fires, instead of performing their crucial function as carbon sinks, parts of the Brazilian Amazon are currently some of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the world.
The root causes of the current bushfire crisis in the Amazon are: capitalist-driven climate change; unchecked industrial expansion (particularly for agribusiness); seizures of Indigenous land coupled with criminalisation of human rights and environmental land defenders; and a global financial system that commodifies nature and funds environmental destruction.
Consistently high temperatures and low rainfall across the entire Amazon basin last year produced a severe drought, which scientists found was mainly driven by climate change. Just 100 companies were responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 1988–2015, and therefore climate change.
Agribusiness
Industrial expansion in the Amazon, particularly for agribusiness, contributes to climate change through land use change from carbon-negative forests to grazing land or monocultures. Agribusiness also creates the conditions for bushfires through land-clearing and huge water consumption, which leads to desertification.
Brazil’s agribusiness industry, in its rapacious hunger for land, deliberately burns forests to convert them to monocultures and pastures for cattle ranching — the vast majority of fires recorded in August were in agricultural areas. Nearly 90% of cleared areas in the Brazilian Amazon are used for cattle farming.
Sabrina Fernandes, writing in NACLA, says that agribusiness in Brazil is “a financial market, and its logic of profit, speculation, and rent-seeking sees production conditions in the short term”. Therefore, agribusiness will continue expanding into new territories to extract short-term profits.
In Peru, the government actively facilitates the expansion of industrial and illicit agribusiness, such as palm oil, logging and gold mining, which drive deforestation — a huge factor in causing fires.
Peruvian Congress passed a law in January that loosened the country’s already weak Forestry and Wildlife Law by reducing government oversight and weakening Indigenous land rights. The “anti-forest law”, widely protested by environmental groups and Indigenous communities when it was passed, further opens the door for industrial logging of forests.
The Peruvian government has employed a racist strategy of blaming highland and Amazonian Indigenous communities for using traditional farming methods, instead of recognising the decades of government inaction and industrial activities. Peruvian Prime Minister Gustavo Adrianzén said that “ancestral practices” were to blame for all of the fires.
Despite causing the death of at least 21 people since July and 23 of 25 of the country’s regions reporting fires, Adrianzén downplayed the situation and said that there are no “critical reasons” to declare a state of emergency in the regions affected.
President Dina Boluarte only declared a state of emergency in three regions late last month, shortly after she was refused Congress approval to fly to the United States to attend the United Nations General Assembly in the midst of the crisis.
But while government inaction and allowance of industrial expansion is certainly partly to blame for the current catastrophes, the global financial system drives the destruction of South America’s most important ecological systems.
A Greenpeace International report found that European banks have lent about €256 billion (A$417 billion) to environmentally destructive companies since 2015. Brazilian agribusiness giant JBS — one of the world’s biggest meat-producers — received US$35 billion in loans and bond placements between 2015–23, mostly from British-based Barclays bank, Royal Bank of Canada and US-Canadian BMO Financial Group.
This means that Western banks are essentially funding corporations like JBS to commit land grabs, deforestation, fires and other violations of Indigenous land rights.
Land rights needed
Granting secure land tenure to Indigenous communities is not only a human rights obligation to stop violence at the hands of states and corporations, but is also the most effective way of slowing deforestation.
Between 1990–2020, recognised Indigenous territories in Brazil lost just 1% of their native forest cover, compared to deforestation rates of 20.6% in other areas.
Indigenous people are also responsible for regenerating previously deforested areas, which is crucial to restoring carbons sinks and biodiversity.
However, little effort has been made from governments globally to aid South American countries locked into development trajectories predicated on ecologically-destructive industries.
When former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa attempted to persuade rich countries in 2007 to pay Ecuador not to drill for oil in a pristine Amazon reserve, he was forced to abandon the plan after rich countries only donated a pathetic US$13 million (A$19 million).
Rich countries only pledged a paltry US$9.3 billion (A$13.8 billion) last year to the Green Climate Fund, a global fund to assist climate action in low-and-middle-income countries. High-polluting countries like Australia, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and the US failed to even make pledges. The Green Climate Fund’s balance is roughly equal to the amount the Australian government gave in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry in 2023–24 (A$13.5 billion).
The Amazon’s critical role in regulating the global climate means there is a duty globally to confront the capitalist-driven crises pushing it towards irreversible tipping points.