Vice President Hamilton Mourão said that the growth in deforestation in the Amazon is associated with the advance of population in the region.
The statement was given this Friday (19), when commenting on data from the new report by Inpe (National Institute for Space Research) on deforestation in the forest. The numbers, released this Thursday (18), show the record of deforestation in the last 15 years.
The document with data from Prodes (Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Legal Amazon by Satellite) attests to a devastation of 13,235 km2 between August 2020 and July 2021, the highest rate since 2006. The number represents an increase of 22% compared to the previous period.
“What happens is the following. There is a pressure of advance, I won’t say civilization, an advance of people who live in the Center-South of Brazil towards areas of land not occupied in the Amazon. There is this pressure,” he said.
Mourão also stated that he only became aware of the data on Thursday. Such as sheet showed, Inpe concluded the data on October 27 and entered the report in the federal government’s electronic information system on the same day, but the availability was only made this Thursday, after COP26, the UN conference on climate change took place in Glasgow , in Scotland, between the 31st of October and the 13th of November.
“I don’t believe it. That didn’t pass me by. I can’t say something of that nature, it would be reckless on my part. Last year these numbers were only released in November. So much so that I went to São José dos Campos [no interior de São Paulo] on the day of the release of the numbers”, he said when asked if the delay in the release had been deliberate.
During COP26, the Brazilian delegation was criticized by climate activists for not disclosing Prodes, considered more accurate than another Inpe system, Deter — whose most recent data came out on the 12th, at the end of the event, but were not commented on in Glasgow by minister Joaquim Leite.
This Thursday, the current Prodes data were made available on Inpe’s website without any dissemination action. At night, ministers Joaquim Leite (Environment) and Anderson Torres (Justice) participated in a press conference to comment on the data.
Leite stated that the numbers are unacceptable and promised a “hard-hitting” role in the fight against environmental crimes. He was questioned on two occasions about the date of preparation of the data by Inpe — October 27th — but claimed that he only had access to the information on Thursday.
The explosion of deforestation in the Amazon measured by Prodes contradicts a statement made earlier by Mourão. At the last meeting of the Legal Amazon National Council, on August 24, he even anticipated what the evolution of Prodes’ consolidated data would be: a 5% drop in deforestation compared to the previous cycle.
“The data we had were Deter’s numbers. At Deter, our projection was that it would be 5% below the previous year. But what happened: Inpe did a review of the previous year, if you look at it, it decreased, and this one increased . I don’t know if next year can reduce this one as well. We are analyzing”, he argued.
.
