Large farms concentrate the majority of hotspots and deforestation rates in the Amazon and Pantanal

A report by the Amazon Research Institute (Ipam) based on a NASA platform and released in early August already hinted at what was coming: in the Amazon, 71% of the burnings in rural properties — between January and June 2020 — occurred for agricultural management (in previously deforested areas) and 24% were forest fires in areas of native vegetation (which are usually a “side effect” of agricultural management fires). The report also pointed that half of the hot spots happened in medium and large rural properties.

Similar figures appear in the analysis of the Smoke Curtain project, launched on September 23 by Ambiental Media in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. According to the survey, medium and large rural properties accounted for 72% of the hot spots that occurred in 2019 in the four main critical areas of the Amazon deforestation frontier. Altamira (PA), São Félix do Xingu (PA), Porto Velho (RO) and Lábrea (AM) concentrated 17.5% of deforestation between August 2018 and July 2019 in the region. They also top the list of the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) of the municipalities with most forest fires in the last year. To obtain the results, the Smoke Curtain project compared official public data on deforestation and fires from Inpe with the base of the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), which maps rural properties.

In the Pantanal, a survey by the NGOs Repórter Brasil and Instituto Centro e Vida (ICV) showed that outbreaks of fires started in nine farms in the biome destroyed over 141,000 hectares of vegetation. Operation Matàà identified four of those farms in an investigation conducted by the Federal Police in Mato Grosso do Sul State. The other five large properties are located in Mato Grosso. The survey carried out by the NGOs compared data from the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) with satellite images from Inpe and NASA.