Bolivia is in a state
of uproar, at least on social media, over the massive wildfires in southeastern
part of the country. At least one
million hectares have burned since the 5th of August according to the Bolivian
Forest Authority. It turns out that Brazil is in an uproar as
well, with over 70,000 fires identified, 85% more than last year according to
many sources. It also turns out that Paraguay is on fire,
and if you go out further, it turns out that Sub-Saharan Africa is on fire(Figure 1).
We have had massive fires recently in Alaska, Portugal and Siberia and
already July was the hottest month for the world since records began. Now, Huffington Post makes a case that “The
entire global economy is complicit in the destruction of the Amazon”.
While I would agree with that statement, Figure 1, also shows that the basic
problem extends beyond the Amazon to the tropics in general.
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| Figure 1.
Screen capture from NASA image reflecting heat focci. |
In the tropics the
burning season is a yearly occurrence although this time there are a few
differences: it is relatively early for the fires in the Amazon and Pantanal
areas and the scale is ominous, as is the concern that we are in feedback loops
with climate change (more, farther down).
In any case every year at this time, a huge outcry emerges shouting the
following questions:
“This is horrible, why doesn’t somebody do
something?”
“Why do people burn so much in the Amazon?”
“So whose fault is this situation?
The good news
(actually, least bad news) is that the burning season is a yearly occurrence
and people forget about it once the rains begin and everything greens
over. Though earlier than usual in the
Amazon, so far 2019 is within the range of the last 15 years, according to NASA,
and still not yet as bad as 2010 in terms of area burned. The worst burns in Bolivia have occurred around
the Chiquitano Dry Forest which is actually in the Rio de la Plata basin. This
is a very combustible part of the country with frequent burns but this year has
been particularly extensive.
The bad news is that
it has been essentially “this bad” for the last 30 years and people are not
generally aware of it. The really,
really bad news is that many of us have been working on alternatives to
burning, deforestation and related land degradation in the tropics for well
over 30 years and we have not significantly altered the trends. I, along with
my late wife, have had a farm in the Bolivian Amazon for 21 years for the
express purpose of evaluating alternatives to burning and can confirm there is
no golden bullet.
The extremely bad news
is that there are policies that governments can take to slow or reverse these
trends, if they are given priority.
However, President Bolsonaro and President Morales, though in theory at opposite
ends of the political spectrum, have coincided in policies that proudly
encourage the conversion of tropical forests to crop and grazing land.
Bolsonaro was elected on a platform of weakening conservation efforts and
“developing” the Amazon. While touting a
devotion to Mother Earth, only a month ago Evo Morales proudly announced an
initiative, and a new law, to expand the agricultural frontier in Bolivia by 5
million hectares, following
on three other related laws since 2015.
Both policies absolutely, necessarily, go through the burning (whether
previously cut or not) of natural tropical forest.
So now that it is
clear who is directly to blame for the ‘2019 Inferno’, the question that few
people ask is “what is to be done? Even
fewer ask:
How successful have previous efforts been to
counter deforestation and burning, and what can we learn from them?
My dissertation, in
the mid-80s, was on alternatives to slash and burn in Bolivia, and I quickly tired of international
conferences that repeated over and over again how bad the deforestation was,
how accurately the rates of deforestation could be measured, and the dire consequences
of the deforestation, including climate change (yes this was clear 30 years
ago.) What was emphasized less was the
analysis of alternatives. The people on
the ground, “Local Resource Users (LRU)”, are the ones who actually cut the
trees, hunt and/or start fires, for whatever reason (more, below). For the burning and deforestation to cease,
there have to be other alternatives that are more attractive to the LRUs. Brazil tried very hard for many years to
control the fires with punitive measures, using satellites and helicopters, but
you can´t throw millions of farmers and ranchers into jail. ‘Not burning’ has to be more attractive than ‘burning’
to the LRU, for the burning to stop. 30
years later, burning is still more attractive to most locals, and as pointed
out, our governments are actively encouraging it, and the world economy is
complicit.
OK, so what should we do?
At this point it is useful
to review the global prevalence of burning in the tropics, and the reasons
behind it. Each year in our part of the
world the ‘burning season’ is marked by fires, charred landscapes and overall –
smoke. This has been going on for as long as I can remember. In Bolivia, from mid-June until the end of
September the smoke becomes increasingly pervasive. Land that a few months
previously was covered in lush vegetation, is reduced to smoldering stumps,
logs and other tree fragments (Figure 2).
In the Bolivian lowlands, each year seems to be smokier than the last,
which is to say nearly intolerable. You see so much smoke that you wonder if
the rains will ever come again.
 |
Figure 2 My neighbor’s land after
slashing and burning tall secondary forest near Rurrenabaque, Bolivia in 2015. Photo: Dan Robison
|
The 15th of
September is traditionally considered to be the worst day for smoke in the
southern Amazon. I made a memorable trip
on that date down a highway in Rondonia, Brazil in 1992. We literally had to pull the vehicle over
from time to time because the smoke was too thick to drive safely. Each
year regional airports all over the Amazonia are officially closed when the
visibility becomes unacceptable. A few
years ago, there was a report of a pilot who was not able to land a small
aircraft on an airstrip in a national park in Northern Brazil due to the
smoke from nearby burning. He could not
even see the tip of his wings.
It is, importantly,
not just Amazonia where massive burning occurs each year in tropical forest and
savanna areas. Altogether I count 17 countries just in Central and South
America where slash and burn agriculture is present in the humid and sub-humid
areas. In these same countries it is
difficult to distinguish smoke from burning forest slashed for agriculture,
from the yearly burns that occur on the vast grazing lands in the same regions
(Figure 3).
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| Figure 3. Yearly
burning in natural savannas in Beni, Bolivia, within the Amazon Basin and not
far from Rondonia, the epicenter of Brazil´s worse burning and
deforestation. Photo: Gabriela Villanueva, August 2019. |
Though great social
differences exist, similar practices are repeated in other tropical and
subtropical regions of the world. For
example, in South East Asia, there is a yearly phenomenon where a huge haze
cloud forms over the region and builds up progressively until the major rains
come.
Some years the airports in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur have to shut down. Indonesia
blames Malaysia and Malaysia blames Indonesia. The burning is attributed to deforestation,
burning peat and more vaguely to slash and burn agriculture.
What is not generally mentioned is that this form of agriculture has
historically been an important land use from the northeastern part of India
across Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua
New Guinea. In general terms it is
common to have rice paddies in the lowlands, and slash and burn agriculture in
the highlands. In Asia
it is less common to have cattle grazing lands, but where they occur there is
similar burning. Recently the problem of smoke from burning crop stubble in
India has reportedly resulted in intolerable air quality in the main cities.
In sub-Saharan Africa
slash and burn agriculture can be considered to be the dominant land use in many
areas where there is enough rainfall that the natural vegetation would be
forest or tall “guinea” savanna (Figure 4). In dryer areas the savannah burns
many if not most years, even inside National Parks. Together
these explain the extremely widespread burns illustrated in Figure 1.
 |
| Figure 4. My sister,
surrounded by recently burned guinea savannah in Burkina Faso (then Upper
Volta) in 1982. The topsoil would
subsequently be gathered into mounds to plant crops, then left fallow to return
to grass for a few years. Photo. Dan Robison |
Again some “good news”
is that across the world, these burning seasons vary with latitude, and are
generally offset in the northern and southern hemisphere due their generally
opposite rainy and dry seasons. This
means that while the smog cloud in SE Asia is disappearing due to the onset of
the rainy season, the smoke clouds are just beginning to build up in the
Amazon. Part of the problem is that when
it eventually rains, the land, on average, greens up, the atmosphere clears and
people forget about it until the next burning season (Compare Figures 5 and 6).
 |
| Figure 5. Another
neighbor’s land just after a burn, near Rurrenabaque, Bolivia. 2nd burn
after tall forest, 2010. Photo Dan Robison. |
 |
| Figure 6. The same pasture
on my neighbor´s land (in figure 5), 2 years later, after most of the logs had
rotted. Photo Dan Robison |
For the time being we
will not distinguish between African, Asian or American systems. Suffice it to
know that there are many, many millions of farmers and grazers (LRUs) of many
cultures and languages, that deliberately slash and burn, or just burn, the
vegetation to create the conditions for crop or fodder growth. Many millions of people did this before the
oldest person in the world was born. That the burns frequently get out of
control, that the extended and frequent burns degrade the land and can even
increase “the need” to burn, are separate issues.
The best, scientific,
analysis of this phenomenon in Africa, and really the whole world, was
published in 1960. The Soil Under
Shifting Cultivation. Though less and less of the burning can be
attributed to shifting cultivation, and more and more to grazing, the fundamental
rationales remain. In many ways our knowledge
has not improved much since that book, especially in the most important way, “How can we finally, permanently, alter these
practices?”
Next, it is important
to understand that the burning occurs in broadly four scenarios. 1. Traditionally, around the world where the natural
vegetation is tropical forest, a small area of forest is cleared, burned and a
variety of crops are planted into the ashes.
The ashes temporarily fertilize the ground and lower the soil acidity,
while the fire kills unwanted plants, diseases and insects. Both generally make food and fiber production
possible especially on acid soils.
After the crops are harvested the land is allowed to go back to forest
(known as the fallow period) and after varying periods of time the cycle is
repeated: forest is cleared again, burned again, cropped again and left fallow
again.
Where this system is
practiced with low population density and high human knowledge (some indigenous
communities) the system is carbon-neutral (the fallow eventually reacquires the
carbon and nitrogen oxidized in the burn) and can actually increase overall biodiversity
by driving succession. It can be considered to be cropping in
rotation with natural forests. Where
population density is higher the fallow periods are not long enough to restore
carbon stocks and the land enters a process of degradation (figure 7). In both these cases the LRUs are generally
considered quite poor. No farmer ever
got wealthy from shifting cultivation or slash and burn agriculture.
 |
| Figure 7. Slash and
burn or shifting cultivation mosaic in Arunachal Pradesh, India. Photo. Dan Robison. |
2. The second scenario
is in tropical pastures, essentially for cattle, where burns occur nearly every
year. In some cases tropical forest is
slashed and burned directly to create pastures, in some cases land that was
formerly under shifting cultivation is consolidated into grazing lands and in
many cases there is natural grassland, with grasses that have limited use for
cattle and are burned yearly to control woody species and provide more
palatable regrowth. Regardless of how
the land came under grazing, the land is commonly burned frequently.
In Latin America the
overwhelming majority of the burned area, and of the number of fires each year,
is on grazed lands. Most of the pictures
shown in newspapers and shared online are of burning grazing lands. Sometimes these pictures are clearly in the
Amazon area, many times they are in the Pantanal or Chaco regions which
correspond roughly with the Rio de la Plata basin. It does not make sense to separate the two,
because they are part of the same huge issue.
In fact, the ecosystem that is generally the most at risk is tropical
dry forests. They have essentially
disappeared around the world precisely because they are so susceptible to fire. Bolivia has one of the very last expanses of
natural tropical dry forest, and this is precisely this ‘Chiquitano Dry Forest’
that is at great risk now.
3. The third reason
that burns occur is when tropical forests are converted directly to perennial
crops (oil palm, cacao, rubber and sugar cane (figures 8 and 9)), and
increasingly annual crops (soy beans). The only “good” news here is that the
forest is only burned, repeatedly, at the beginning. However, that land, continually cropped, has
very little chance of ever going back into forest, and the carbon in the forest
is permanently burned into the atmosphere.
In most ways it is the worst alternative of the various land uses but
sometimes the most profitable, as long as the forest replaced has no attributed
value.
 |
| Figure 8. Part of
4,500 ha recently cleared from primary Amazonian forest to grow sugar cane for
a state-owned sugar mill in San Buenaventura, Bolivia. Google Earth, August 2019 |
 |
| Figure 9. Clearing land for sugar cane at EASBA (Figure
8), San Buenaventura, Bolivia. The tall
humid forest is dragged down by chains pulled between two bulldozers. The trees, roots, stumps and topsoil are
pushed into large rows (on right) and burned multiple times. The resulting ash is then spread back over
the land. Photo: EASBA. |
4. The fourth scenario
for burns is when the fire from the above three scenarios gets out of
control. This is a yearly occurrence in
the pasture lands and natural grasslands, even inside National Parks. The grazing land and grazing land edges are
where most of the fires occur and, in my opinion, where most smoke, and the densest,
is produced. The fires do not escape
every time a LRU burns, but when it does happen it means the conditions are
right and usually starts happening all over.
Where wildfires occur, land that has burned becomes more and more prone
to burning with each cycle.
An overarching consideration
is climate change. Though there has long
been burning inside the Amazon, and on its fraying edges, this varies from year
to year depending on the severity of the dry season. It also appears to vary with the amount of
rainfall in the rainy season. The more
it rains in the rainy season the more fuel is produced. If this is followed by a relatively humid dry
season burns are “normal”. However, if a
fairly wet rainy season is followed by a very dry, dry season, it becomes a
killer “one-two punch”. Lots of fuel is
produced, followed by conditions conducive to drying, burning and spreading.
We experienced this
one-two punch in 2010. For the first
time in memory parts of the tall Bolivian Amazon humid forest caught fire and
kept burning. In our case the neighbor
of our neighbor burned a pasture. The
fire jumped into our neighbor’s pasture and in less than 10 minutes it had raced
500 meters and jumped into our tall natural forest. It took 8 people three days to put the fire
out. Historically, the edges of the forest would scorch but the fire would soon
run out. However, if the conditions
worsen, Amazonian forests are full of different species of palms that are
commonly high in oils and contribute to the fire in different ways. Some palm trees explode, projecting sparks, while
others burn evenly and extendedly, and along with forest litter and termite
nests, are very difficult to extinguish.
It is hell.
More extreme rainy and
dry periods are exactly what are predicted with climate change in the area. While conversion of tropical forest to crop
and grazing land is contributing to climate change, other factors (namely
historical and current use of fossil fuels) around the world driving climate
change are having an impact in the tropics.
Increased burning is clearly causing local conditions that added to
overall climate change, make the likelihood of burning higher. This is the frightening feedback loop
referred to above.
What should be done about it?
A few years ago there
was a climate change conference in Bali (COP 13) and one of its major
conclusions was that halting deforestation in the tropics was the most
economical way to reduce global gaseous emissions. When I saw this, I laughed out loud. I assume that after the conference everybody
flew home, got in a car or train and went back to their heated or air-conditioned
home. It brought to mind a meeting that I
could hypothetically have with Tacana (indigenous) neighbors who have been
practicing carbon-neutral shifting cultivation for generations. They likely
have never driven a car, heated or cooled a home or gotten on an airplane. We could conclude that the most economical
way to reduce global gaseous emissions would be for people to stop using cars,
airplanes, heaters, air-conditioners and burning diesel to produce grain to
fatten cattle. We would be as right as
the Bali Conferees.
People in temperate
areas would say, “But we need cars, airplanes and furnaces to live.” My neighbors would say, “Well, we need fire to
live”.
Conservation benefits
everybody, but certain people, like Local Resource Users or people who drive to
work, would pay a much higher price to change their practices. It always seems cheaper if people you don’t
know pay the price and you continue living as you always have, doing whatever
you think is most convenient and decrying the burning in the Amazon.
I could stop here. Most people do. Because winters will come to
Europe, and people will cool off. Rains
will come to the tropics, crops will grow and cattle will propagate. Until the next burning season …..
Payment for Environmental Services (PES)
I won’t stop yet
because there is a recent generation of efforts to combat climate change, including
the Bali conference, that broadly take into account what I have been saying,. Beginning with the UN Conference on the Environment and
Development (Rio, 1992), there was the broad idea that companies and countries
that “pollute” would pay countries and entities that conserve, in what became
known as “payments for environmental services” (PES). In
theory, developed countries, the most responsible for the historical buildup of
carbon, would pay less-developed countries to use the land in a way that polluted
less. There was to be a global carbon
market, where, for example, tropical countries would be paid to not deforest
and to not burn.
The Kyoto Protocol
(treaty signed 1997 coming into effect 2005) was intended to set this in
stone. The US participated in the
development of the protocol, signed it, but refused to ratify it at the level
of treaty (which needs approval of Congress).
This was to be a binding agreement, but with the richest and largest
producer of greenhouse gasses (at the time) not participating, this idea was stillborn.
To my knowledge there has been some carbon trading within European countries,
but none of this extended to the tropical countries where the burning keeps occurring.
The Paris Agreement (2016)
which is a voluntary framework, would have been a step in the right direction
but President Trump, famously, withdrew from this agreement. For whatever reason very little of this talk
at international levels, since 1992, has had any impact on the ground, at least
in Bolivia.
It is not just the
fault of the US leaders that US people elect. As the Huff Post article
suggests, the world economy is complicit.
In Bolivia and Brazil, the contexts I know best, both President Morales
and President Bolsonaro are hostile to the idea of PES, and for similar
reasons, though their stated philosophy is very different. Both consider PES to be an imperialist and/or
conservationist idea designed to keep countries in the Amazon from developing
as they might wish. In Bolivia there is
a very convoluted thought process (led by the Vice President) where Mother
Earth is sacred, protected in the Constitution and with her own law declared in
2010 and
a second law in 2012 declaring Mother Earth Rights. Within
this convoluted paradigm it is forbidden to “mercantilise mother nature” (accept
payments for conserving natural ecosystems).
In practice Bolivians have been widely encouraged to deforest, burn and
plant GMO soya beans for biodiesel or for sale to China,
but it is forbidden to mercantilise Mother Nature. In practice you can rape Her, but you can’t accept
payments to offset costs associated with being a good mother.
When Morales came to
power in 2006 Bolivia had the highest absolute and relative area in the world of
certified tropical forest under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standards. These
were mostly private concessionaires, community-owned or indigenous
territory-owned forests (both dry and humid) that had gone through a
certification process. In practice this
meant that they could sell certified lumber at higher prices in a reliable
market to the US and Europe, it promoted improved regeneration of useful
species and improved efficiency of timber use.
Perhaps the most important result was to increase the perceived value of
the forest. While the scheme worked, those certified forests were carefully protected
because they “were worth a lot” to local beneficiaries. Today, Bolivia has 0 ha
(zero hectares) of certified tropical forest.
This idea was discouraged by the Morales government, obstructed and disincentivized
once again because it was considered an imperialistic idea and mercantilisation
of Mother Earth.
Relative value of forest and labor
Oh right! Those people
on the ground who actually make a decision whether to burn or not! First as with any people in the world, there is
a wide range from rich farmers and ranchers to landless poor …
Most have recognizable
aspirations such as having a family, for their children to get an education and
to have a better life than their parents.
In my context, for example, there is a small crisis each year when
everybody has to buy new school uniforms so that their children can participate
in the National Independence Day parade.
Or their grandmother has gotten very sick and the bills have to be paid. People without formal, regular income, have
to seriously consider what they can do that will signify more income. In the Amazonian context, labor is the most
limiting factor. Poor people cannot
afford to hire other people and the most valuable thing that people have is
their own labor, with or without access to land.
In the Amazon, land
and forest are considered relatively abundant.
In the case of shifting cultivation, after the second year of cropping
it becomes more work to keep weeds out, than it is to clear more land to
burn. It is possible, in theory, to
continue to weed with a machete, but the amount of food you can produce is
lower, against more and more labor. Therefore, you move to a new area of forest,
slash and burn, where your crops are more or less guaranteed. The old field is
left to fallow.
In the case of
pastures, it is also possible to weed with a machete, but it can easily take 10
man/days per hectare. A 10 ha pasture could therefore take a person almost 3
months of hard labor. That same pasture
can be burned in an hour or two. If the
rancher has a tractor and mower, not very common, that same pasture might
represent at least 20 hours of tractor, or it can be burned in an hour or two. These are huge differences in maintenance
costs, in a context where new school uniforms are a major issue.
Over the last 30
years, or more, the main alternative land use that has been proposed is
agroforestry. Unfortunately, the area
under agroforestry in Latin America and Africa has not changed much (outside of
coffee and cacao based systems), while the human population in the related regions
has doubled. I have further blogs to
explore this issue, but I will conclude here by mentioning that I have a 20
year experiment on my farm comparing a highly diverse agroforest (Figure 10),
that was never burned, with a high-carbon grazing system (Figure 11) where I
leave as many trees as possible, and only burned once for the pasture
establishment.
 |
| Figure 10. A 19 year-old
agroforestry system on my farm near Rurrenabaque, Bolivia. |
 |
| Figure 11. High-carbon
grazing system on my farm near Rurrenabaque, Bolivia. |
I set out with high
expectations of showing good profitability from agroforestry. I would love to report that these systems are
comparable in terms of their return to labor or return to land, but I
cannot. The income from the cattle
system is at least 10 X the income from the agroforestry, each year. Seen from the point of view a farmer who would
have invested their labor, my agroforestry system - on very poor soils - would
provide a daily wage of roughly $us1/day.
The high-carbon cattle system, right beside it, would provide at least
$us12/day. I trust that it is clear that
in our context $us1/day is far from a suitable income while $us12/day is at the
lower end of a living wage.
These figures will
vary considerably with quality of soil, experience of the farmer and especially
the local market prices. There is an
area of Bolivia, the Alto Beni, where the soils are much better and the cost to
market half of mine. Agroforestry of
different kinds is a real alternative here, with relatively little burning and there
is almost no cattle grazing. However it
is not representative of the greater Bolivian Amazon, let alone representative
of the areas I know in the Amazon regions of Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. In all these areas, tall, natural forest has
almost no value, while deforested, grazing land, no matter how degraded, has
real value. The value of the tall forest
is measured in relation to its potential for being eventually cleared and
turned into grazing land. It has no
value, locally, as the ‘lungs of the world’.
Changing this
relationship between the local value of forested land and the local value of
deforested land is a responsibility of everybody who wishes to preserve the ‘lungs
of the word.’ A commonly stated solution is to stop eating beef. If enough people did this it might result in
a lower price for world beef, but it does not increase the value of tropical forest. One result of lower beef prices would be that
ranchers feel they need to have more pasture to continue to make a living.
Changing the trends of
land use in all of the tropics is very far away and will require a concerted
effort at the global, national and local levels. At this point, I believe that ‘preserving the
Amazon’ is farther away than we were 10 or 15 years ago due to the leaders we
have elected. Many of the initiatives that have been tried could work much
better with true political will at the different levels. For the people reading
this around the world, the best thing you can do in the short term is work to
elect leaders who believe in science, believe that climate change is already
happening, believe that it is everybody’s responsibility and are willing to
work humbly with other countries.
