Fires In Paraguay

In case you haven´t heard there have been a lot of wildfires in Paraguay in the past month. It made international news and someone back in the U.S was able to find an article about it in the L.A times:

Paraguay fires scorch millions of acres

The wind-fueled blazes forced 15,000 people to evacuate. The widespread practice of burning land for agriculture is blamed in part.
By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 15, 2007
BUENOS AIRES -- -- Wind-blown fires scorching the parched Paraguayan countryside have scarred almost 3 million acres of forest, brush, pasture and farmland, officials said Friday, forcing the evacuation of 15,000 people and threatening nature reserves.

A protracted drought and the common practice of burning land for agriculture have contributed to the disaster, which some authorities have called the worst fires in Paraguay's history.

"The complexity of the situation is well beyond human control," Jose Key Kanasawa, chief of the National Emergency Secretariat, told Inter Press Service. "The only thing we can do is contain it, resist it, stop it from spreading and pray that the rain comes."

Authorities have blamed an explosion of separate blazes largely on peasants who routinely use fires to clear pasture and farmland, especially to plant export crops such as soy beans and cotton. Hot, dry and windy weather has fanned the blazes.

But experts cite other culprits: illegal loggers seeking access to protected forest areas, clandestine marijuana farmers and illicit hunters opening paths. Many of the affected regions have few police officers or other authorities.

"These fires are all set in an illegal fashion," noted Maria del Carmen Fleytas, Paraguay coordinator for the Moises Bertoni Foundation, an environmental group. "Then they lose control and the fires spread. It's hard for the state to stop this in vast sections of the country."

Several fires are nearing the sprawling Mbaracayu Forest Nature Reserve, home to numerous threatened mammal, bird and plant species, the foundation said.

Hundreds of blazes have raged in the landlocked South American nation in recent weeks, mostly in sparsely populated regions to the north and east of the capital, Asuncion. Thick smoke has caused some flights to be diverted from Asuncion.

Officials declared a national emergency in four provinces this week amid fierce criticism that the government of President Nicanor Duarte Frutos had failed to recognize the severity of the threat. The current scenario is grave, the president acknowledged.

"The reaction of the government has been very slow," Fleytas said. "Now it's very late, and much of the eastern region is burning."

The specter of smoke and flames has prompted considerable national reflection about using fire to clear land, a widespread custom in South America.

"Paraguay is dry and in flames," the columnist Andres Colman Gutierrez wrote on the website of the newspaper Ultima Hora.

"We Paraguayans were born in a land that appears to be a paradise, but we do everything possible to make it into a hell."

Meteorologists have predicted no letup in the dry and windy conditions.

Authorities in neighboring Brazil have contributed four water-tanker aircraft to aid in firefighting, officials said. The Paraguayan government had also sought to rent a Russian air tanker capable of dropping more than 10,000 gallons of water per flight, but the craft was called to firefighting duties in Russia.

The media have reported only one fatality: Wilder Smith, 40, a farmer who died when a tree fell on top of him as he was trying to put out a fire on his land about 100 miles east of Asuncion.

The other day Peace Corps called me and told me I should prepare myself for evacuation from my site just in case and they told me if i felt unsafe i could go stay in a hotel in Asuncion. I really didn´t realize the fires were that close to Horqueta until that phone call but they never came to Horqueta and things seem to be getting better.

The volunteers in my area and I are doing our part to educate Paraguayans and raise awareness about this topic. Two other volunteers and I have a radio show every wednesday evening. I´ve done a lot of research on deforestation in Paraguay and have gotten a lot of information from environmental education and agroforestry volunteers. I´ve written up a radio show about deforestation and tomorrow we are dedicating the show to talking about the fires, talking about the causes of fires, educating people about why burning fields is bad and what people can do to fight against deforestation en general. It´s not really a topic people talk about. I read that 86% of Paraguay´s original forests are gone now, there are many endangered species here including the jaguar due to lack of natural habitat and many other problems that come along with deforestation. When I told my host mom that i was going to talk about the problem of deforestation, she kind of looked at me like she was thinking "there´s a problem of deforestation in Paraguay?" I got some really good tips from people about how to get Paraguayans to think about the issue, such as making them realize how much further they are having to go to get their wood to cook with and to ask them where the closest forest is and how big it is. When they realize these things are becoming harder to obtain than they were 10 years ago, maybe they will be ready to listen. People watch logging trucks drive through town almost everyday filled with trees that came from protected reserves and they KNOW where they are coming from. What they fail to realize is, what a big problem it is and that it is something they can change. We hope to at least bring up the topic right now in a time when the country is in a state of natural disaster. There is no better time to create change than when people have just seen the effects of their actions, or lack thereof.