SHOTLIST:

1. Various of fires in Argentina
2. Various of fires in the Pantanal of Brazil
3. Various of the devastation of the Amazon from the air

STORYLINE:

Dense column of smoke and the smell of burning forces us to direct our eyes towards the environmental catastrophe that has been developing for months in the Amazon and the Brazilian Pantanal, in the wetlands of the Paraná River and in Córdoba in Argentina, in forests and protected areas of Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Paraguay.

Across South America, fires are at their highest in a decade. According to the Secretary of Environmental Control and Monitoring of Argentina, Sergio Federovisky.

These fires are the equivalent of what was happening in the Amazon last year. They are trying to change an ecosystem, freeing up natural lands to encourage commercial activity.

There are thousands of fires, while environmental organizations protest so that the State and justice of the South American countries put a stop to "ecocide".

In Argentina, the Justice investigates agricultural producers, criminally denounced for burning the pastures of the Paraná delta for the development of livestock production.

The Minister of the Environment of Argentina Juan Cabandié assured that those responsible for the fires are "the agricultural producers who are burning the pastures to improve the forage", and was convinced that, to solve the problem, Justice must stop and arrest them .

“We are facing a burning that is not a burning of pastures, but a burning of vegetation that goes to the roots, we are facing a clearing with fire. As unlike other lands, the wetland is not a place that can be dismantled with a mechanical shovel, as happens in other territories for the extension of the agricultural frontier, it is dismantled with fire in a process equivalent to the one we also see in the Amazon”, according to Sergio Federovisky, biologist and environmentalist, and now secretary of Environmental Control and Monitoring of Argentina.

“The cattle were displaced to areas marginal to agriculture such as the Delta, and in this region there were 160,000 head of cattle in 1997 and, a decade later, official figures counted 1,750,000 cows, an increase of more than 10 times, with the consequent impact on these wetlands ”, according to Rubén Quintana, president of the Fundación Humedales and director of the Conicet Institute for Environmental Research and Engineering

In the Pantanal of Brazil, likewise, commercial farmers are largely to blame for the destruction, clearing vegetation during the dry season to graze livestock and farm crops for export.

This methodology is responsible for the 70% increase in the area dedicated to livestock and crops in the biome in 20 years until 2018, according to Mapbiomas, from Brazil.

This has been causing a change in the ecosystem. Dry periods in general are getting longer, according to a study by institutions such as Embrapa and the University of Kentucky. The number of rainy days in the Pantanal during the summer, which runs from December to March in the southern hemisphere, fell 25% to 32 between 1926 and 2016.

Brazilian Vice President Hamilton Mourão received a warning letter on Tuesday signed by ambassadors from eight European countries: Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and Belgium. The message left no room for doubt: while the issue of deforestation and preservation are the focus of governments and companies on the continent, “Brazil is making it more difficult for companies and investors to comply with its environmental criteria , social and governance”.

International pressure joins an unprecedented reaction from more than 200 organizations, including NGOs, agribusiness companies and the financial sector, which sent a message to the Government urging it to take measures to reduce deforestation in the Amazon.

France said Friday it was opposed to the yet-to-be-ratified deal between the EU and Mercosur blocs, after a government-commissioned report blasted the accord as a "missed opportunity" to hold South American countries accountable for protecting the environment.

The report notably analysed the link between the expansion of beef production in Brazil and deforestation in the Amazon, where environmentalists accuse farmers, ranchers and land speculators of razing trees to make way for crops and pasture.

But Brazil argued the report "showed the true protectionist interests of those who commissioned it."