As the fires ravaging Brazil\u2019s Amazon stoke global outrage, its neighbours are also scorching, ripping up and poisoning their forests \u2013 largely under the radar.
\nBolivia and Peru have seen faster growth in the number of fires this year than Brazil, as illegal miners, ranchers and cocaine producers continue to wreak havoc.
\nThe 2.5mn square-mile Amazon is being attacked on all sides, with fires claiming an area equivalent to dozens of soccer pitches every hour in Brazil alone. At the deforestation rates seen in recent years, the whole forest will lose an area about the size of Virginia over the next decade according to Michael T Coe, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center.
\nThat\u2019s endangering an eco-system that not only hosts a vast and largely unknown share of the world\u2019s biodiversity but also helps regulate the continent\u2019s climate.
\nFires have multiplied in Brazil as loggers and farmers, emboldened by President Jair Bolsonaro\u2019s disdain for environmental oversight, set ablaze land cleared earlier this year. Countries like Colombia, Peru and Bolivia aren\u2019t encouraging deforestation, but lack resources and political will to enforce existing regulations, according to Carolina Gil, an attorney for environmental protection group Amazon Conservation.
\n\u201cThe current crisis in Brazil is just the tip of the iceberg,\u201d Gil said.
\nContinued destruction threatens to turn dense forests into scrub-land covered in shrubs and weeds, she added, wrecking a region which provides a home to tens of thousands of animal and plant species, and roughly one-fifth of the world\u2019s fresh water.
\nColombia, which has the largest swath of the Amazon after Brazil and Peru, lost 530,400 acres (215,000 hectares) of the rainforest in 2017, according to satellite data monitored by Amazon Conservation. Brazil, which has about six times as much of the jungle, has been losing about 1.58mn acres a year.
\nMeanwhile, cultivation of coca plants, the raw material for cocaine, more than quadrupled in Colombia between 2012 and 2017. Farmers often slash down forest in national parks to plant illegal crops in remote parts of the country where the government\u2019s presence is weak or non-existent.
\nMercury used by informal gold miners also continually seeps into the rivers in Colombia\u2019s Amazon, poisoning fish.
\nColombia\u2019s environment ministry didn\u2019t reply to a written request for comment.
\nBrazil has experienced more than 83,000 fires so far this year, up 77% from the same period last year, according to the country\u2019s National Institute for Space Research, known as Inpe. Meanwhile, Bolivia and Peru have seen their number of fires roughly double during the same period.
\nIn Bolivia, where nearly 19,000 fires have destroyed more than 1mn acres of forest this year, left-wing President Evo Morales has mobilized firefighters and used a Boeing 747 Supertanker to fight the blazes.
\nBolivia\u2019s environment ministry and presidential press office did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment. Morales on Sunday said he was open to international help to put out fires and called for a summit between countries that make up the Amazon to \u201ccoordinate immediate actions and long-term plans,\u201d according to a statement.
\nPeru\u2019s environment ministry didn\u2019t reply to an email seeking comment.
\nBrazil\u2019s neighbours don\u2019t share Bolsonaro\u2019s belligerence, or hostility to environmental protection, but their record isn\u2019t much better, said Rodrigo Botero, director for the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development in Colombia.
\n\u201cYou can see across the region that the pressures in countries like Bolivia, which is suffering huge losses, or Paraguay are the same as in Brazil,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a question of left or right.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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