RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – Peru has fallen into one of the worst political crises in its history and the protection of the Amazon rainforest is failing, according to a report released Thursday. Peru is home to the second largest part of the Amazon rainforest after Brazil. The country has promised to stop deforestation by 2021.
The South American country has been mired in political turmoil since 2016. Corruption scandals and disputes between the executive and the legislature have led to an intense change – four presidents in five years. The current president of Peru, left-wing outsider Pedro Castillo, has already survived two impeachment attempts since taking office in July 2021.
The Peruvian Amazon is massive – larger than Ukraine, about 68 million hectares (168 million acres). It owns the springs of the Amazon River, as well as the Manu National Park, one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world. It is a transitional zone between the Andes Mountains and the lowlands of tropical forests, rich in microclimate and ecology.
But the Andean Amazon Monitoring Project (MAAP), an initiative of the non-profit Amazon Conservation Organization, says deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon has reached six historic highs in the last ten years. The analysis is based on data from the University of Maryland, which has been recording since 2002.
The worst year was 2020, when Peru lost about 170,000 hectares (420,000 acres) of Amazon rainforest. Last year, that number dropped, but still ranks sixth as the highest in history. Peru’s official figures, which run only in 2020, agree.
Corrupt actors who take advantage of environmental crime, along with the political crisis, have led to the government’s inability to fight environmental crime, the report said. “Moreover, the Peruvian government continues to prioritize economic development over the protection of the Amazon rainforest. The Igarapé Institute commissioned the report from InSight Crime, a non-profit organization focused on investigating crime in Latin America.
As in the Brazilian Amazon, livestock and agriculture are the main drivers of deforestation. Agribusiness companies and poor migrants from other parts of Peru are illegally seizing land. Other illegal activities that harm the forest include gold mining, logging and coca plantations.
“Agriculture is already well established,” as the leading driver of deforestation, centered in the central and southern Peruvian Amazon, said MAAP Director Matt Finner. “This includes both widespread small-scale agriculture and recent large-scale activities by new Mennonite colonies.
The report, entitled “The Roots of Environmental Crime in the Peruvian Amazon”, identifies three actors behind deforestation: large businesses, such as palm oil companies; entrepreneurial criminal networks that profit from the trade in timber, land or drugs and cheap labor – poorly paid workers who cut down trees and plant coca crops.
The products of these illegal activities end up in other parts of the world. Most of the gold exports go to Switzerland, the United States, India and Canada. Peru’s domestic market absorbs most of the timber; what is exported goes mainly to China. About 28 percent of Peru’s gold is illegal, according to an InsightCrime investigation, which also estimates that most timber is mined without permits.
“The political crisis has diverted many of our environmental concerns,” said former Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal in an interview with the Associated Press in Rio de Janeiro on the sidelines of a climate change meeting hosted by the Brazilian Center for International Relations, a think tank. . The pandemic and war in Ukraine have exacerbated these problems, he said.
The current government also encourages activities such as illegal mining and illegal logging, he said. The former minister linked this to the non-judicial deaths of many environmentalists.
Connected on Monday by phone and email, the Peruvian Ministry of Environment did not respond to requests for comment on the current situation in the Amazon.
The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest in the world and a huge absorber of carbon. There are widespread concerns that its destruction will not only release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, which will further complicate hopes of slowing climate change, but will also push it above the turning point, after which much of the forest will begin an irreversible process. degradation in the tropical savannah.
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