BRAZIL DEFORESTATION
Rio de Janeiro, March 14 (EFE).- Some thirty NGOs asked the European Union (EU) to adjust the proposal to regulate deforestation-free products in which they ask to include ecosystems other than the Amazon that are threatened by agribusiness, among other demands.
Through a letter sent to parliamentarians and diplomatic representations of EU countries, released this Monday by the Climate Observatory network, 34 non-governmental organizations made a call to improve the proposal presented by the EU Environmental Commission and which will be reviewed on 17 of March.
The project is the first action of its kind in the world and aims to “halt and reverse” deforestation by 2030″.
According to the NGOs -among which there are several international ones such as WWF, The Nature Conservancy, 350.org and Conectas- although the proposal is “positive and necessary” it presents a series of “gaps” to take into account.
One of them is that it is limited to the definition of forests of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), leaving out other ecosystems.
Among them, the letter points to the Brazilian Cerrado, where tropical savannah vegetation predominates, the Pantanal, made up of humid areas and which extends between Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, or the Pampas, an area shared between the South American giant, Argentina and Uruguay, where native grasses are formed.
“These biomes have suffered increasing rates of loss of native vegetation due to the expansion of agribusiness. From August 2020 to July 2021, for example, the Brazilian Cerrado lost 8,531 square kilometers, the highest annual rate of deforestation since 2016,” the letter states.
Deforestation is the main cause of fires and the one that the Pantanal has been suffering in recent years caused that in 2020 it recorded the most serious in its history.
The largest wetland in the world lost 26% of its Brazilian area to fire -an area slightly larger than Belgium-, an area where 4.6 billion animals were affected, including millions of insects necessary for the balance of biodiversity.
The NGOs warn that if these other ecosystems are not included, there is a risk that they will become a new target for those who live from agribusiness, which will cause an increase in deforestation, putting “at risk 75% of the Cerrado area, 89% of the Caatinga, 76% of the Pantanal and 74% of the Pampa”.
According to the Commission proposal, coffee, cocoa, beef, palm oil, soybeans, wood and derived products must go through an audit (due diligence) before being placed on the EU market. .
However, the organizations that defend the environment pointed out that other products such as cotton, corn and canned meat should be taken into account. In 2020, 39.54% of beef exports from Brazil to the EU were industrialized meats, according to the letter.
They also asked to include small and medium-sized companies that practice agribusiness activities in the controls and emphasized reviewing the way in which inspections are carried out within large farms, so that they are taken into account as a whole and not just some. of their plots.
“In large properties, an owner can maintain a production area free of deforestation to export to Europe and devastate another part (of the same farm),” they assured.
–
