BRASILIA, Sept 2 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Brazilian Vice President Hamilton Mourao said a severe drought could lead to energy rationing in Brazil, contradicting other officials who have said that such a step would not be necessary.
Brazil, one of the world’s agricultural superpowers, is suffering from one of its worst droughts in a century. The lack of rainfall has emptied hydroelectric reservoirs, fanned inflation and hurt farmers. The government has given incentives to use less energy but says rationing is not expected.
“There may have to be some rationing,” Mourao told reporters in Brasilia, although he said the government had taken necessary measures to prevent blackouts.
Brazil’s Mines and Energy Minister Bento Albuquerque on Tuesday said the country’s energy crisis was worse than previously thought. In a televised national address, Albuquerque said Brazil had lost hydropower output equal to the energy consumed by the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest, in five months.
Separately on Tuesday, the ministry announced it would once again raise energy prices, with affected consumers paying on average 6.78 per cent more for electricity starting on Sep 1.
The meteorological outlook remains grim for Brazil. Rainfall in energy-producing regions is likely to remain well below average in September, the national grid operator ONS said last week.
Smoke and flames rise from a fire in the Amazon rainforest in August 2020
Meanwhile, the number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon as the burning season opened in August fell slightly from 2020, but remained close to the near-decade highs seen under President Jair Bolsonaro, new data showed on Wednesday.
Brazil’s space agency, INPE, recorded 28,060 fires in the Brazilian Amazon last month – down 4.3 per cent from August 2020, but well above the average of 18,000 for the decade before Bolsonaro took office in 2019.
The president, who has pushed to open protected lands to agribusiness and mining, has presided over a surge of deforestation in the Amazon.
Under his administration, Brazil’s share of the Amazon has lost around 10,000 square kilometres of forest cover a year – an area nearly the size of Lebanon.
That is up from around 6,500 square kilometres per year during the previous decade.
The number of fires has surged, too.
“The amount of fires registered each August has reached absurd levels since 2019,” said Cristiane Mazzetti, of environmental group Greenpeace, condemning a new “Bolsonaro standard” of destruction.
Fires often increase in the Amazon when dryer weather arrives from around August to November, as farmers, ranchers and land speculators fell trees, then burn them to clear the land.
Scientists say natural wildfires are virtually non-existent in the famously wet Amazon.
In 2019, Bolsonaro’s first year in office, a sharp rise in Amazon fires caused worldwide outcry and fuelled fears for the future of the world’s biggest rainforest, a key resource in the race to curb climate change.
INPE recorded 30,900 fires in August 2019, up from 10,421 the year before.
The agency’s figures go back to 1998. The worst August on record was 2005, with 63,764 fires. — NNN-AGENCIES
