The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, made official as of this Monday the promotion of “garimpo”, as artisanal mining is known, an activity that especially affects the country’s Amazon, the government reported.
The largest tropical forest on the planet concentrates 72% of the country’s mining extraction and of that total, 67% corresponds to “garimpo”, which is practiced mainly in environmental conservation areas.
Through a decree, Bolsonaro created the Support Program for the Development of Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (Pró-Mape), which seeks to strengthen “sectoral, social, economic and environmental policies for the sustainable development of artisanal mining and small-scale”.
A statement released this Monday by the General Secretariat of the Presidency says that it is important to “highlight” that artisanal mining is a source of wealth and income for a population of hundreds of thousands of people, so it is “fundamental” to recognize its conditions of life and scope of its activity.
According to experts, artisanal mining is far from being a legal activity and has become one of the main devastating actions in the Amazon.
“The garimpos are one of the main threats to the Amazon forest and its peoples, and they are far from operating on an artisanal or rudimentary scale, since they do so as true industrial organizations,” says a study by the NGO Instituto Escolhas, released last week. pass.
The study maintains that about 230 tons of gold that were sold abroad by Brazil is of “suspicious” origin.
Illegal mining and illegal timber trade are the main causes of deforestation in the Amazon in Brazil, a problem that has increased during the Bolsonaro government.
This situation is attributed by environmentalists to the easing of control and oversight measures that have taken place during the mandate of the far-right leader, who defends the economic exploitation of the Amazon and the end of the demarcation of new indigenous reserves.
Official data indicates that in 2021, the largest tropical forest on the planet lost 13,235 square kilometers of vegetation, the largest area degraded for a period of 12 months in the last 15 years.
In January of this year, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon skyrocketed and broke a new record, with 430 square kilometers of native vegetation devastated, five times more than the area cleared in the same month last year and the largest destruction in the biome. for this period since 2016. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
