Wildfires are sweeping across Bolivia, concentrated in the Chiquitano dry forests of the eastern department of Santa Cruz, with experts warning the fires are on track to be the worst in the country’s history.The fires are largely the result of slash-and-burn practices used by industrial agriculture to clear land for large-scale farming and cattle pastures.This year’s burning comes as fires return to the country after a devastating fire season in 2023 that devastated tropical regions in Bolivia’s La Paz and Beni departments, including for the first time in the Pilón Lajas Indigenous reserve.Communities have received little recovery support from local and national authorities and are continuing to rebuild and take measures to prevent fires amid fears that last year’s destruction will repeat itself.
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Every Sunday, Hermindo Vies wakes up early and travels by river from his village, Asunción de Quiquibey, in Bolivia’s Beni department, to the nearest major town to sell his produce. Though he knows the route along the Quiquibey and Beni rivers well, in recent weeks a thick smoke has settled over the area. “It was dark for a distance of maybe 100-200 meters [330-660 feet],” Vies said. “The hillsides were hidden” by the haze, he added, making it impossible to find one’s way in the early morning.
There are currently no uncontrolled wildfires near Asunción de Quiquibey, an Indigenous Mosetén village in an Indigenous reserve in Bolivia’s northwestern Amazon Basin. Nonetheless, the area has been covered in smog for weeks, the result of fires nearby. Given the devastating fires in 2023 that ravaged the Indigenous reserve that includes the village, the community is now on edge, fearing it could be hit again. “In any moment a fire could erupt,” Vies said.
Smoke outside of Rurrenabaque on September 16, 2024. Image courtesy of Vicente Canare.
Most forest fires in Bolivia begin when intentional agricultural burning spreads out of control. Though seasonal wildfires in parts of the country’s dry Chiquitano forests occur naturally, uncontrolled megafires have become common over the past decade as industrial agriculture in the country’s lowlands has expanded, using large-scale slash-and-burn practices. Combined with chronic drought, more intense fires undermining the rainforest’s resilience, and government policies that do little to dissuade large landholders from illegal burning, intentional fires often spread out of control. Though some Indigenous communities are working to modify their small-scale cultivation practices to reduce fire risk, industrial agriculture has done little to change its practices, threatening the ability of communities to avoid a devastating fire season.
Wildfires in the Amazon
Last year, historic wildfires swept across Bolivia, razing an estimated 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of Amazonian rainforest and savanna between September and November. Reports of the exact area burned vary due to the lack of consistent and updated official statistics. As communities continue to reel from last year’s devastation, a new season of fires is again burning across the country, jeopardizing their efforts to recover.
While precise numbers are not readily accessible, “it’s evident that this year we have clearly surpassed the size of last year’s problem,” said Juan Pablo Chumacero Ruiz, executive director of the TIERRA Foundation, a Bolivian nonprofit focused on land rights and socioenvironmental conflict. “In every case we’re talking about millions of hectares,” he told Mongabay. “Every year we’re surpassed in our abilities to face the fires.”
Chaqueo, a traditional Indigenous practice of setting fire to dead overgrowth to clear land for cultivation, is traditionally rotational and can be healthy for forests. However, the practice is often confused with slash-and-burn farming, which is typically used by large landholders to clear healthy forests for new crops. “Chaqueo is part of the normal practice of people who live in the countryside,” Chumacero said. “The problem is when [fires] get out of control.”
While chaqueo has been used for millennia, large-scale agricultural burning and the expansion of the agricultural frontier are more recent phenomena. Coupled with a changing climate, the probability of fires spreading out of control is elevated. “We have less and less humidity,” Chumacero said, “so the risk of these burning events getting out of control is increasing.”
Megafires in Bolivia and South America are largely a recent phenomenon, according to Guillermo Villalobos, an independent political scientist and socioenvironmental researcher. However, most uncontrolled wildfires in Bolivia have been limited to the more fire-prone Chiquitano dry forests in the eastern department of Santa Cruz, home to most of the country’s agribusiness sector and where prolonged drought, deforestation and the region’s seasonal climate make the forests vulnerable to burning. Last year, however, fires burned out of control in the humid rainforest regions, and for the first time in the Indigenous reserve that includes Asunción de Quiquibey. “That there are fires in the Amazon is completely abnormal because we’re talking about a tropical humid forest that normally wouldn’t coexist with fire,” Villalobos told Mongabay.
The struggle to rebuild
“We never believed that this would happen,” said Alejandro Caimani Josesito, the leader of Asunción de Quiquibey, about the fires last year. “We had never seen fire and drought from nature.”
For a region unprepared for wildfires, the fallout was devastating. Community members fought fires for months between September and November, but with little equipment and government support across all levels, they were unable to prevent the flames from destroying the cacao, papaya and plantain crops that they cultivate both to subsist and sell in nearby Rurrenabaque. “It was heartbreaking,” Caimani Josesito told Mongabay. “Going into the forest made me cry, looking at the animals lying there, rotting after the fires.”
After the fires died out in mid-November, populations of worms, grasshoppers and moths surged due to the ecological disruption of extensive burning. “The grasshoppers came to attack the leaves of our crops,” Vies said. “They ate everything, and then our crops couldn’t produce anymore, the plants just died.”
The loss of cacao, the community’s primary cash crop, hit hardest. “I was happy because I thought I would harvest a lot [of cacao last] year,” said community member Deysi Josesito Chinare. “It was going to give me the means to support my kids in their studies, to buy them school supplies.” Almost all cacao crops were destroyed,” she told Mongabay, and “we were left with nothing.”
While community members have since been able to replant faster-growing crops, cacao trees take four years to mature and could again be destroyed by future fires. “We’re starting from scratch,” Josesito Chinare said.
According to community members and officials from CPILAP, the Indigenous organization for communities in La Paz, the government response to the 2023 fires in Asunción de Quiquibey and surrounding communities was insufficient. Magaly Tipuni, the president of the Tsimané Mosetenes-Pilón Lajas Regional Council (CRTM-Pilón Lajas), the Indigenous and biosphere reserve of which Asunción de Quiquibey is a part, told Mongabay that the only support the 23 communities in the reserve received from the national government was about 20 citrus saplings. Though some communities in the Indigenous reserve received reforestation resources from their municipalities, recovery support was patchwork.
Many have attributed the weak response to wildfires and deforestation from governments across the political spectrum to clientelist deals with agroindustry in Santa Cruz department. Villalobos added that, in light of Bolivia’s declining oil and gas resources and the corresponding dollar crisis, “we’re talking about a government … with major deficiencies in its power to manage the crisis.”
Learning from last year’s fires
Though the government declared a national emergency and subsequently a national disaster in September, both of which open avenues for international support, state resources provide little in the way of proactive fire prevention. The Land Audit and Social Control Authority (ABT), the agency responsible for forest and land management, passed a ban on burning in Beni department, with similar restrictions for some other departments. Because the CRTM-Pilón Lajas Indigenous reserve straddles two departments and four municipalities, all with their own burning rules, CRTM-Pilón Lajas officials resolved to enforce the rules in place for the Rurrenabaque municipality in their reserve, which prohibits burning from Aug. 1 to Oct. 31. Under this rule, residents of the reserve cannot burn for agriculture without their community leader’s supervision.
Some community members in the Indigenous reserve were apprehensive of the ban. Vies told Mongabay that he agrees that burning restrictions are important to avoid uncontrolled fires, and said his community is exploring cultivation options that don’t use fire. Nearby communities in the Indigenous reserve have found success in cultivating sugarcane without burning. Still, the best months for carrying out chaqueo to grow crops are August and September, and while possible, planting without first burning overgrowth is not as effective for many crops. Restricted burning is “detrimental for community members,” Vies said.
This temporary ban on burning was not taken lightly, Tipuni said. “Ancestrally we’ve always lived growing our crops with fire,” she said. “But in these times when everything is changing, we need to look for other methods.”
Community members in Asunción de Quiquibey and other communities in the Indigenous reserve have also participated in the first of two phases of a wildfire-fighting course, but still lack adequate firefighting equipment. Officials from the reserve and CPILAP are seeking equipment donations from international NGOs, but have yet to receive a definitive decision.
What drives the burning?
According to Tipuni, most of the fires that spread out of control last year were not caused by chaqueo from small Indigenous farmers native to the area, but rather by large-scale burning operations by cattle ranchers and the state-owned sugar production facility in the area. “They set fire [to our reserve],” she said, and “distorted the information saying that it was the Indigenous people who set fire [to the area], but it’s not like that.”
While many drivers play a role in fires that ultimately spread out of control, the primary contributor is “agribusiness or medium-sized land holders,” Villalobos said. “Fires that occur on communal or Indigenous lands” are responsible “to a lesser extent.” According to 2023 data from the ABT and a 2019 TIERRA Foundation report, 55% of authorized land clearing was carried out by agribusiness and medium-sized landholders.
Despite the disproportionate role that large agribusiness plays in deforestation and wildfires, some activists continue to blame Indigenous people for wildfires. “We aren’t big producers, we don’t burn big areas,” Tipuni said. “But all of the climate change we’re seeing, unfortunately it’s our communities who are going to have to pay for it.”
Industrial agricultural operations are often run by people who don’t live in the immediate area and aren’t dependent on crops that take months or years to mature, said Daniela Vidal, a sociologist and researcher at the Solón Foundation. Because of this, they have little incentive to minimize burning when clearing land for cattle pastures or crops. Agro-industrial producers frequently incorporate the minimal fines for illegal burning (previously around 20 U.S. cents per illegally burned hectare, in mid-September fines increased to a maximum of $350) into their cost of business, and often enjoy impunity. The Bolivian cattle lobby recently succeeded in stopping official investigations into the private sources of last year’s fires.
The nearby state sugar production facility and the Federation of Cattle Ranchers in Beni, which community members and officials said were both directly and indirectly responsible for last year’s uncontrolled fires, did not respond to Mongabay’s repeated requests for comment. ABT also did not respond to requests for comment.
While community members and researchers say they worry that agro-industrial burning in the area may thwart their fire-prevention efforts, they add they hope to be more prepared than last year. The prevention measures that each municipality in the area takes will also be important, Vidal said. Rurrenabaque is taking adequate precautions, she said, but others may not do the same.
“It’s thought that the drought will be even stronger this year,” Vies said. “There isn’t help — it never came.”
Banner image: Thick fire smoke over Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where on October 8 the air quality index reached dangerous levels, indicating high contamination. Image courtesy of Kev Alemán.
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Publish date : 2024-10-08 07:20:00
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