EL PAÍS offers the América Futura section for free for its daily and global informative contribution on sustainable development. If you want to support our journalism, subscribe here.
“The fire started at around 9:30 in the morning, in the upper part of Pomacochas,” says Mrs. Rocío Valles, a resident of this town located in the department of Amazonas (northeastern Peru). “When we arrived,” she adds, “two houses had already burned down and we were trying to dig trenches with picks and shovels, so that the fire would not spread any further.”
It was Friday, September 13. According to Valles, help from central and regional authorities arrived two days later; meanwhile, residents fought the flames with wet blankets. Corn and potato crops were lost. The charred bodies of a beautiful spatula-tailed hummingbird (Loddigedia mirabilis) and a yellow-tailed woolly monkey.
Like several other South American countries, Peru has been ravaged by a wave of forest fires in recent days that have left up to 20 people dead and affected 20 regions of the country. According to the National Forest and Wildlife Service (SFO),SERFOR), as of September 23, 7,069 hot spots (sites where high temperatures could cause fire) and 179 forest fires had been recorded. A number that has dropped compared to September 17, when 234 were recorded, due to the fact that there has been rain in the affected regions in recent days.
From January to August of this year, before the wave of fires that shook the country broke out, there were already 192 fires, which represents 23% more than those recorded in 2023 in the same period.
In the midst of the crisis, the President of the Council of Ministers, Gustavo Adrianzén, has declared that the main reason for the fires are the “ancestral practices”, consisting of burning forests or grasslands to gain agricultural land or improve the soil. But historical evidence suggests that, although this practice existed in the pre-Hispanic world, its use was not widespread and was done in a much more controlled manner.
The practice of burning, but not setting fire
Professor Daniel Valle Basto, from the Scientific University of the South (UCSUR), recalls that it is true that burning was practiced before the colonial period. In fact, he cites a work by RK Hofmann and CF Ponce del Prado, which states that native groups had and still have the habit of burning to protect swamp ecosystems from the advance of shrub vegetation.
However, he himself points out that at that time “the pressure on the ground was much less.” In the current fires, he emphasizes, even the roots of the grasslands have been burned. “Today’s fires are deep and they have been left to run on their own for several days,” he adds. They are, therefore, distant from the ways that Andean humans had of relating to the land.
This is not the only evidence that exists about fires in the past. In the book ‘Environmental History of Peru. 18th and 19th Centuries’published by the Ministry of the Environment (MINAM) itself, points out that in those centuries natural resources suffered “strong pressures” due to “the burning of grasslands and overgrazing.” However, not all of this was due to burning carried out by natives. Later in the same book, the chronicler Bernabé Cobo is quoted when in 1653 he wrote that “more fuel is burned in one day in the house of a Spaniard than in one month in the house of an Indian.”
This alludes to the huge demand for firewood by the conquistadors. Ana Sabogal, director of the Master’s in Environmental Development at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), gives other clues on the issue. In the mountains, she points out, there was crop rotation and cattle grazed freely, moving from one place to another; in the jungle, there was a lot of migration and almost no agriculture. “That generated less pressure on the land,” she explains. “Since the conquest, we occupied the territory in such a way that we did not allow the ecosystems to regenerate naturally.”
Everything indicates then that Adrianzén’s statement, repeated insistently by political analysts and some media, is at least exaggerated, if not discriminatory. It is probable that most forest fires (about 90% according to the Ministry of Defense) are the product of human action, but not because it is an atavistic cultural practice.
Instead, a series of concurrent factors have caused the fires to spiral out of control: the burden on forests, the insufficient number of forest firefighters in the country, climate change and, of course, the new Peruvian Forestry Law.
“The Forestry Law creates a perverse incentive to burn, deforest and then occupy the land to obtain a title,” former Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar Vidal told América Futura, explaining that, in addition to this, there is the rise of illegal activities, such as logging or illegal mining, and something that is worrying: the political disinterest of authorities, both central and regional, regarding climate change.
Climate not on the agenda?
Sabogal recalls that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already warned about high temperatures in the Amazon, droughts and, consequently, the savannahization or desertification of this ecosystem. It is no coincidence that this year, in several areas of the forest, the heat reached worrying extremes.
Since 2018, a document from the National Service of Natural Areas Protected by the State (SERNANP) already clarified that “an increase in forest fires and an increase in their intensity associated with the variation in natural fire regimes and climate change have been observed.” And in 2021, the National Meteorological and Hydrographic Service of Peru (SENAMHI) issued the report ‘Climate scenarios for 2050 in Peru’which specifies that, for that year, in the Amazon the average extreme hot temperatures could increase, during the dry season (July to September), between 2.8 and 3.9 degrees Celsius.
Along the same lines, Mariano Castro, former deputy minister of environmental management, maintains that “an additional determining factor for the occurrence of the widespread spread of current forest fires is the increasing heat wave, due to the effect of climate change.” He himself was surprised by the fact that, despite the numerous forest fires, an environmental emergency was not declared.
And the fires cause a vicious circle: they overflow due to climate change and at the same time increase the fires, in addition to generating a feeling of desolation for those who live through them. This crisis has not been the exception: it left the inhabitants of Pomacochas and other areas of the country helpless, at the cost of 20 dead, 165 injured and thousands of hectares charred.
#Ancestral #fires #burning #practice #explaining #fires #Peru