Bolsonaro rants against environmental preservation

A day after declaring that deforestation is a “cultural thing” in Brazil, President Bolsonaro ranted again when the press asked him questions about environmental issues. “How is Brazil now in the environment? 61% is still preserved. What other country in the world has it? No other. So nobody can bother us about the environmental issue,” he said to journalists as he was leaving the presidential palace. “What is the forest in the margins of rivers in Europe? One palm? (…) We only have the machine of our economy which is agribusiness. Do they want to bury agribusiness? Want me to do what some leaders wanted in the first international meeting, to go from 14% to 20% of indigenous reservations. Do they want to finish Brazil? It ends, and you will eat grass. You from the press will eat grass because there will be no more food in the fields”.

On the same day, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), relaxed the rules for monitoring and fines against buyers of illegal wood. The measure makes it more difficult to punish sawmills that buy wood using fraudulent documents and may encourage illegal logging in the Amazon.