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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

Indians at Risk as Fires Rage in Brazil

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

http://forests.org/

3/10/98

OVERVIEW, SOURCE & COMMENTARY by EE

Fires are intensifying in Brazil's northernmost state Roraima.

Thousands of members of the Macuxi, Wapixana and Taurepangi indian

tribes are at risk. Improper forest management coupled with El Nino

weather dynamics are intensifying the threat of fire in virtually all

remaining rainforest wildernesses. This does not portend well for

planetary survival.

g.b.

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Title: Indians at risk as fires rage in Brazil

Source: Reuters

Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint

Date: March 5, 1998

Byline: By William Schomberg

BRASILIA, March 5 (Reuters) - The skies of Brazil's northernmost state

Roraima are thick with the smoke of fires raging in highland savannahs

and even the normally humid Amazon jungles of the Yanomami Indians are

beginning to burn.

``The whole region is catching fire,'' Walter Blos, the head of the

government's Indian Foundation in Roraima, told Reuters on Thursday.

``This summer is hotter and drier than ever before. We've never seen

anything like it.''

He said fires set by subsistence farmers were out of control and

eating into the fringes of the Portugal-sized reservation of the 9,000

primitive Yanomami Indians who live in remote, densely forested

mountains near Brazil's border with Venezuela.

In one area, the forest has been burning for the last 20 days.

``Normally the jungle is humid enough to put out the flames but not

this year,'' Blos said.

The Indian Missionary Council, a Catholic Church group, warned that

medical teams were no longer able to reach Yanomami villages affected

by malaria because rivers in the region had dried up, effectively

cutting them off from the outside world.

Carlos Zacquini, a priest who works with the Yanomamis, said he saw a

curtain of smoke several miles (kilometers) long hanging over the

forest when he flew over the region this week.

``The Indians are very worried. They see the smoke and they know that

it means extreme danger for them,'' he said.

Also at risk were thousands of members of the Macuxi, Wapixana and

Taurepangi tribes in a savannah area of Roraima. Their manioc crops

have failed in the dry conditions and many villages are down to their

last supplies.

Blos said he had requested about $10,000 to dig several wells in the

region to ease the crisis.

While seasonal downpours have put out forest fires that last year

destroyed large areas of the vast Amazon rainforest further south, in

Roraima the rains have yet to begin.

Located above the Equator, Roraima's wet season normally starts in

late March or early April. By now, however, first showers would

normally have extinguished fires set by poor farmers settled in the

area under Brazil's land reform program.

This year, the only clouds to be seen are those of smoke.

``It's as if the whole region were under a blanket of cloud,'' said

Reinaldo Imbrozio Barbosa, a researcher with the independent National

Amazonian Studies Institute. ``The level of burning is much higher

than normal.''

Barbosa said he believed the dry conditions were caused by the El Nino

weather phenomenon that triggered flooding in Brazil's south while

drying out the northern, Amazon region.

``What we have is a severe drought compounded by the outdated

techniques of subsistence farmers who still use fire to clear their

land and have little control over where the flames spread,'' he said.

Brazilian environmental officials say the settling of hundreds of

thousands of small-scale farmers in the Amazon under the government's

land reform program is now a major contributing factor to destruction

of the Amazon.

Satellite data released in January showed that 71 percent of

deforestation in 1995 -- when an area the size of Belgium was

chopped down or burned -- occurred in small areas, a sign of the

impact of subsistence farming in the rainforest.

Concerned by the drought, which has killed an estimated 12,000 cattle

in the region so far this year, the Roraima state government declared

a state of calamity in January. Officials were due to arrive in

Brasilia on Thursday to seek emergency funds.

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