The Government anticipated the convening of extraordinary sessions, in which it will define the legislative agenda. The Multisetorial Pantanal, together with 380 organizations, demands that the Pantanal Law be included to contain the fire, which has already consumed 40% of the habitat of the Paraná Delta. Meanwhile, agribusiness expands the extractive frontier due to the inaction of the Judiciary and the lack of State resources to fight the fires.
That the Pantanal bill has lost its parliamentary status for the third time —as happened in 2015 and 2017— and that (obviously) the National Executive has no intention of including it in the extraordinary sessions of the National Congress, is nothing more nor less that what we all assumed would happen. After all the delays and obstacles this bill has: why be surprised?
The productive model that this country has been carrying out for decades, sustained and intensified by each government in power, is an extractive and largely polluting model that aims to generate wealth for a few at the expense of the quality of life of millions of human beings.
This entails the loss of large masses of biodiversity in all environments that make up our Nation, as well as the material loss of housing and work inputs of small producers —most of the family and small-scale economy— who inhabit the territories and face fires. active in 11 provinces of our country.
Thus, in Argentina production modes are installed that are expressly prohibited in many other countries, perpetuating colonial logics that persist to the present day, where the global north continues to plunder the global south in the name of the evil called “development”.
In November 2021, the Multisectoral of the Pantanal de Rosario, together with about 380 organizations in the country and in the face of the imminent fall of the bill, wrote a letter addressed to President Alberto Fernández urging him to include the aforementioned project in the special sessions of the National Congress. A logical and necessary action.
But the recipient was a government that supports and encourages mega-mining; the exploitation of fossil fuels in the Argentine Sea; the expansion of areas destined for monocultures —which, in addition to increasing the use of agrochemicals, are the cause of fires, deforestation and desertification—; the approval of transgenic wheat; the installation of mega swine farms and the construction of new nuclear power plants. It was a logical and necessary (albeit useless) action, which once again collided with the deafness of a complicit and responsible State.
The deputies who welcomed us after rowing 350 kilometers asking for the Pantanal Law in August 2021, knew that the project would never be sanctioned. Upon entering the National Congress along with other entities, the three deputies affirmed: on the one hand, the lack of will of the National Executive. On the other hand, they cited “the difficulties they caused in their work”: the agricultural, mining, forestry and real estate lobbies that closely link them to the other committees for which the Wetlands Law has not yet been addressed.
These commissions are: the Agriculture and Livestock Commission, chaired until the legislative change on December 10th by José Arnaldo “Pitín” Ruiz Aragón (Frente de Todos); Budget and Finance Committee, chaired by Carlos Heller (Frente de Todos); and Committee on River, Fisheries and Port Interests, chaired by Juan Aicega (PRO). In this August conversation with the deputies, Alberto Fernández, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Sergio Massa were also expressly mentioned.
Before this proclamation (useless excuse if there was) there is a rhetorical question, which by rhetorical is still a question: do the deputies of this country represent the people or the economic interests of minorities? And then another inevitable arises: are our representatives the ones who govern us or are they the lobbies with which they weave agreements and through which they channel (or not) supposed public policies?
Pantanal law to preserve the environment and health against agribusiness
In the Paraná Delta alone, and in less than two years, the fire consumed about one million hectares, a number that represents almost 40% of the Paraná Delta wetland. That is, almost half of the swamp turned to ash. Adding to this the fire in the rest of the country leads us to affirm that the biodiversity of the wetlands of our country is in a state of extreme vulnerability.
The UNR Environmental Observatory maintains that the damage produced can be very difficult to reverse, even in the long term. On the other hand, the levels of air pollution sometimes become dangerous even for human health. According to a report carried out by the University of Medical Sciences of Rosario focused on the consequences of air pollution, and according to what the WHO claims, the worsening and development of respiratory infections, heart disease, strokes and different types of cancer. Exposure to high levels of pollution is also associated with an increased risk of miscarriages and brain abnormalities that can contribute to reduced cognitive ability in school-age children.
In turn, studies carried out by CONICET and by different graduates of the Faculty of Anthropology at UNR show how these processes of pampeanization and transformation of wetlands affect the populations that live in Paraná and its islands, transforming not only the space they historically inhabit (since the end of the 18th century), but also generating contradictory and tense processes in the social life of these people in their daily lives in which work, schooling, displacement from one island to another or to cities and houses are weaved (since the loss of several farms, it has been recorded in relation to the fires on the island). Thus, reproducing processes of inequality and social exclusion in these populations that inhabit burning territories.
Thus, the enormous complexity that this advance has for the total population and what it implies in terms of health —understood in broad terms that presuppose the possibility of reproduction throughout life— for current and future generations is noted. It is incredible, therefore, that these people who claim to represent us do not care about the health of the environments we inhabit, the impact that environmental and social degradation has on our health and the guarantee of our constitutional rights over the advances of agribusiness. .
Fire advances in wetlands without fines or legal action
When we talk about fire we talk about prevention and combat. Prevention begins with the planning and control of the territory. Today the Paraná Delta is a liberated zone. Legislation exists, but there is no intention of putting it into practice. After more than 40,000 fires in 2020, no fines have been issued and the few cases sleep in the Judiciary without any significant progress. Combat is nothing for the poor.
The brigadistas can do little with buckets and shovels, which are the items they usually have. Only if the situation becomes “visible” is a helicopter sent. In the last week of this 2021, the islands in front of Rosário ended up burning, with the islanders organized into brigades that, with the help of people who crossed from neighboring villages, planted a fight against the flames. The help of the Provincial Governments and the National Government arrived late and was scarce, at the last minute the helicopter appeared, this while the houses of the islanders burned on an island that was a sea of fire.
At the same time, land devastated by fire was disclosed and images of drums were circulated near the burned areas, reinforcing the clear intention and complicity in this wetland business. The non-sanction of the Wetlands Law not only anticipates the deepening of environmental damage, but also exposes an even more worrying lack. Democracy, by definition, is government where the people exercise sovereignty, where the will of the majority is respected. If this will is ignored, how authentic is our democratic system?
Maybe it’s time to restore everything. And while we close a year with the cry of “Argument”, as in Miguel Cantilo’s song, which sets us on fire in the face of this state of affairs and complicity, environmental organizations continue to replicate and sustain the incessant and tireless struggle and claiming: ¡¡ Enough burning! Wetlands Act Now!
By Julieta Bernabé, Lisandro Citta and Macarena Romero Acuña.
Multisectoral Wetlands Members, Rosário.