WORLD WORLDWIDE SOUTH-AMERICA BRAZIL - news journal UPDATE - (en) Brazil, UNIPA: Fires as an agribusiness strategy for territorial expansion: An anarchist analysis (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Fires are a strategy for agribusiness to expand its territory at the

expense of public health and the ecological balance of biomes. They are
part of the project of the agrarian fraction of the domestic bourgeoisie
to expand areas for cultivation and pasture. Most of the fires result
from illegal deforestation, motivated by the accelerated expansion of
agribusiness, and are known and complicit with the authorities. The
socio-environmental legacy of this expansionist project for private
profit is environmental degradation, land theft, the death of wild
animals and the precarious health of the working class, particularly the
most vulnerable sectors, such as children, the elderly and people with
respiratory problems.

In 2024, fires burned the Amazon, the Cerrado and the Pantanal,
affecting several regions of Brazil, including metropolises such as São
Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. According to data from the INPE (National
Institute for Space Research) Burning Program, there was an increase in
fires in all regions of the country compared to 2023. Deforestation in
the Cerrado, since January 2023, resulted in the emission of more than
135 million tons of CO2, which is equivalent to approximately 1.5 times
the annual emissions of the Brazilian industrial sector. In 2024, the
Cerrado recorded, until September, the highest number of fires since
2012, affecting approximately 11 million hectares, according to data
from the Environmental Satellite Applications Laboratory of the Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro. Emissions associated with deforestation
are mainly concentrated in the MATOPIBA region, between January and July
2023, according to the Amazon Environmental Research Institute.

In the Center-West, Mato Grosso do Sul showed an increase of 601%, with
11,990 outbreaks in 2024; The Federal District recorded a 269% increase,
totaling 318 outbreaks; and in Mato Grosso, the increase was 217%,
reaching 45,000 outbreaks. In the North, Pará also saw an increase,
recording 17,297 outbreaks, representing a 21.2% increase. In the
Southeast, the increases in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro stand out. In
São Paulo, the increase was 428% in September, with 7,855 outbreaks
recorded. In Rio de Janeiro, the increase was 184%, totaling 1,074
outbreaks.

Luciana Gatti, coordinator of INPE's Greenhouse Gas Laboratory, blamed
agribusiness for this situation and received hostility from the sector.
Not even the state's repressive apparatus could hide the fact that the
fires were planned. Although he conceals the class origin of these
actions, Chief Humberto Freire de Barros, Director of the Amazon and
Environment Department of the Federal Police, stated in an interview
with Globo News that preliminary investigations indicate that several
fires started almost simultaneously, suggesting the possibility of
coordination. At the same time, the State's legal department has
attempted to conceal those responsible who have already been identified,
as was made clear in the court ruling that determined that the name of
an individual involved in deforestation and fires in the Pantanal, in
the region of Corumbá (MS), should remain confidential.

The Lula-Alckmin (PT-PSB) government recently announced the reactivation
of initiatives to combat deforestation, including the Action Plan for
the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon (PPCDAm).
However, the government released approximately 0.1% of the amount
allocated to agribusiness landowners through the Harvest Plan, which
allocated R$400 billion to corporate agriculture, for fighting fires, an
increase of 10% compared to the previous harvest. In addition, R$108
billion in debt securities issued by banks increased the total available
for national agribusiness to R$508 billion.

Demonstrating the current government's commitment to continuing an
agrarian-export model for Brazil - and highlighting that the practice of
"passing the buck" is not exclusive to the Bolsonaro government - in
September, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Agriculture, Mauro
Vieira and Carlos Fávaro, sent a letter to the leadership of the
European Union (EU) expressing concern about new legislation approved by
the bloc. This law, known as EUDR, prohibits the import of products from
deforested areas, regardless of legality, starting in 2020. The measure,
which will come into effect at the end of this year, will have a
significant impact on exports to the region. In a country that has the
second highest number of murders of environmentalists, government
responses have focused on limited efforts to combat fires and timid
threats to punish those responsible, without addressing the basis of the
power of large landowners: land ownership.

Environmental issues as social issues: the need for a comprehensive
revolution.

 From an anarchist perspective, in a class society, the environmental
issue is a social issue. In other words, in societies where the
appropriation of land and nature is mediated by private ownership of the
means of production and regulated by a state authority that legitimizes
and enables this appropriation, the uses of biomes do not occur under
the same conditions for the different social classes.

The classes themselves have built different relationships with the
biomes over time in Brazil. The peasantry, indigenous peoples and
traditional communities have related to the Amazon, Caatinga, Cerrado,
Pantanal, Atlantic Forest and Pampa with a view to their social
reproduction, building cultures and forms of social organization that
preserve these biomes because they depend on them for their survival.
The bourgeoisie has transformed the biodiversity of the biomes to serve
its monocultures, pastures and mines, aiming at the accumulation of
capital through the export of commodities.

The State not only protected, through legislation and police and
military forces, the ecological transformations necessary for the
expansion of the capitalist economy, but also made possible the
bourgeois appropriation of biomes, through a technical-scientific
bureaucracy that mapped agricultural, mineral and energy frontiers for
the installation of expansion fronts in territories traditionally
inhabited by a diversity of peoples. The expansion of capitalism and
statism are dialectically linked. The expansion of the nation-state
implied both a subordinate integration of peoples into the government
system and an ecological degradation of biomes for the installation of
infrastructures (farms, dams, highways, power lines, wind, solar and
nuclear power plants), thus resulting in a process of socio-ecological
domination of peoples and biomes.

The logics of statism and capitalism are expansionist. The State aims to
increase its domination by subordinating and integrating peoples and
territories. Capitalism is based on the endless search for growth and
profit through the exploitation of the collective labor force and the
private appropriation of nature. Both structures of domination are
incompatible with the preservation of the diversity of peoples and
biomes in Brazil and Latin America, which implies that the ecological
balance necessary for the reproduction of life and the safeguarding of
peoples depends on a fight against the degraded socio-ecological order
produced by the State and capital.

The State and capital must be seen not only as socio-political and
economic institutions of the dominant classes based on the exploitation
and domination of the collective force of the international proletariat,
but also as agents capable of altering the ecological balance of soils,
aquifers and the atmosphere, achieved by nature for millennia, to meet
their expansionist logic of centralization of power and concentration of
capital. In this sense, the State and capital are capable of producing a
socio-ecological order through which the power and wealth of the
dominant class are guaranteed and reproduced at the expense of the
socio-ecological living conditions of peoples and nature.

Faced with a comprehensive crisis, which is economic, political, social
and environmental, we need a comprehensive social revolution. The future
of the planet's ecological balance, and of the freedom and well-being of
the people, depends on this comprehensive and internationalist
revolution, capable of socializing the monopolies of wealth and power
and profoundly reordering current socio-ecological relations.

by União Popular Anarquista - UNIPA

https://uniaoanarquista.wordpress.com/2024/10/12/queimadas-como-estrategia-do-agronegocio-para-a-expansao-territorial-uma-analise-anarquista/
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