In One Brazilian Municipality, 36,000 Deforestation Alerts As The Forest Is Burned To Plant More Soy
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The destruction in Querência echoes the wider devastation taking place across the Brazilian Amazon, where deforestation hit a 14-year high in May. Experts are also bracing for an especially bad season of fires as Brazil grapples with its worst drought in more than 90 years, with burning expected to outpace the already higher-than-average rates seen over the last two years.
In Querência, where forest is increasingly giving way to soy, more than 36,000 deforestation alerts have been recorded so far this year by the Global Land Analysis and Discovery lab at the University of Maryland. Much of the forest loss has been concentrated along the border of the Wawi reserve. “This was meant to be recognized as an Indigenous land,” Kamikia said. “But it’s turning into ash. It’s all being deforested for soy fields.”
Satellite data from the University of Maryland visualized on Global Forest Watch show most clearing of the area happened in May 2021.
Querência is no stranger to forest destruction, thanks to a long history of logging, cattle ranching and agriculture. Under pressure, the Kĩsêdjê and the Tapayúna Indigenous people were pushed off their land and into the adjacent Xingu Indigenous Park in the 1960s. They only returned to their ancestral territory in the 1990s, after Funai, the federal agency tasked with protecting Indigenous interests, recognized Wawi as a protected reserve.
Still, the assaults on Indigenous land rights have not stopped — and the threat from agriculture has crept closer. Much of the forest destruction in recent years has been driven by soy’s frenzied, and often legal, expansion across Mato Grosso, Brazil’s agricultural powerhouse. The drive toward the crop has been especially visible in Querência, home to at least 320,000 hectares (about 791,000 acres) of soy fields, according to official estimates.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2021/07/as-soy-frenzy-grips-brazil-deforestation-closes-in-on-indigenous-lands/