Government of Brazil issues decree for "artisanal mining" | News

Despite the fact that Brazilian Vice President Hamilton Anonio Mourão admitted that January was the month with the highest Amazon deforestation during the current government, President Jair Bolsonaro issued a decree on Monday to stimulate "artisanal mining."

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The measure promotes "artisanal and small-scale mining" for the "extraction of exploitable mineral substances", in a land where 360 ​​km2 of the Brazilian Amazon territory were devastated, according to official information.

The decree, which supports the Support Program for the Development of Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (Pró-Mape), states that the Brazilian Amazon will be "the priority region for the development of works."

For her part, the member of the national coordination of the Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining (MAM), Isabel Cristina, remarked that "the decree only serves the interests of the current government and, in particular, of the businessmen who are financing the illegal mining here in the Amazon.”

Similarly, he warned that “in article 10, the decree prioritizes mining exploration only in the Amazon region. That is, in the Legal Amazon. relation to this? Simply, to make official the exploitation that is already taking place illegally,” said the militant.

Isabel Cristina stressed that the decree formalizes slave labor and the exploitation of those who work in mining, and excludes the communities from a possible territorial defense. "Representatives of public entities or other institutions may be invited to participate in the meetings, but without the right to vote in the decisions," stressed the Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining (MAM).

Another activist, the spokesperson for the Greenpeace Amazon campaign, Carolina Marçal, in a statement to the Brazilian media outlet Brasil de Fato, considered that “the conservation of the Amazon is a central element when we talk about global efforts to contain the climate and biodiversity crisis. Gold extraction causes serious impacts on the ecosystem and is certainly deepening the ecological crisis of the biome.”

The Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) announced at the beginning of February that deforestation in the Amazon has increased by 56.6 percent in the last three years, between August 2018 and July 2021, with the loss of native vegetation of 32,740 square kilometers (km²).