I'm John Bachelor Professor Avignellis of the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.

Fires in Brazil. Reuters reporting in these last days, the number of fires in Brazil's

Amazon Rainforest region surged to a record high for the month of July in almost two decades.

Satellite detector 11,400. July in almost two decades.

Satellite detector 11,434 fire hotspots in the Amazon in July, the largest number for that month

since 2005.

Professor Annecdote from years ago, the Amazon Forest was threatened by farmers or people who ran

agricultural episodes in the Amazon and the burning was to

clear the land and then there was money in it. You plant, you sell. The world depends upon Brazil as a bread basket. But that's

years ago. Is that still the driver of these fires? Thank you.

That is still the case, John.

The fires right now, or at least the record number of fires are a product of two reinforcing things.

On the one hand, the northeast part of the Amazon is indeed experiencing a particularly dry climate, which facilitates

wildfires just as it does in Chile and California in other places. But at the same time, you also

have this continuing pressure of marginalized populations, not the wealthy farmers, but those farmers who are looking for to carve out a little bit of land to raise cattle and do other things on.

And so one of the tried and trued ways of clearing land, if you want to do that,

is to just start accidentally a wildfire and burn the land to clear it.

And so to some degree those fires reflect, you know, those in search of land for

making a livelihood, setting fires is a part of clearing land.

So you bring those two together and you have the current situation, even though

the Lula administration has stepped up enforcement of forced regulations through their

Forest Service, Embari, I believe is the name of it.

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