An area of Brazil the size of the UK has already been ravaged by fire this year, conservationists claim
A new Greenpeace video featuring Brazilian actor Wagner Moura, who plays drug lord Pablo Escobar in the TV series Narcos, has been released to highlight the role of industrial meat production in rainforest destruction.
The video, titled “There’s a Monster in my Kitchen”, tells the story of a young boy who comes downstairs in the night to the fridge only to find a terrifying beast – Jag-wah, the jaguar – is unexpectedly in his home.
Jag-wah shows the young boy how the humans taking over his forest home to produce meat are fueling the clearance of precious forests – both for feed for animals reared for meat, and for space to graze the herds themselves.
The release of the video comes as a new analysis by Greenpeace UK of the latest fire data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research suggests that an area almost equivalent to the size of the UK has burned across Brazil so far this year.
Last year’s Amazon fires caught the media’s attention but the 2020 fire season has seen new records set across the board. Across Brazil, 226,485 sq km of land had burned up until the end of September.
The Amazon has seen the worst fire season in a decade and it has been the worst ever recorded in the world’s largest wetlands, the Pantanal, and happened despite a supposed “ban on fires” set by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro in July.
Meat is the single biggest driver of deforestation worldwide, with the push for space to produce beef and animal feed crops like soya being a key reason for clearances in the South American forests, Greenpeace said.
Read the rest here: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/greenpeace-uk-video-deforestation-meat-production-theres-a-monster-in-my-kitchen-b1204944.html