BOLIVIA HAS been forced to ask for international help after admitting that fires in its Amazonian region are raging out of control, risking an environmental disaster.
The deliberately set fires have already consumed an estimated 1.5 million hectares of forest and tropical savannah in recent weeks, and smoke has caused the suspension of flights in several cities in the affected lowland regions.
Bolivian authorities have asked Brazil and Argentina to send fire-fighting aircraft to help deal with the emergency, saying it lacks the necessary equipment.
“For me it is a total disaster, it is an environmental disaster. We have six forest fires which have a height of 50m and are growing, and as a country we do not have the capacity to put them out,” Weimar Becerra, the head of the country’s forestry service, told journalists yesterday.
He said the ferocity of several blazes meant local firefighters were not even able to get close to try and start containing them.
The director of the country’s land management agency, Cliver Rocha, said the number of “hot-spots” his service was tracking saw a “radical and very fast” leap from 17,000 on Sunday to almost 25,000 just three days later.
The fires are mostly started by peasant farmers seeking to clear land during the dry season for farming. High winds and dry conditions are being blamed for this year’s burning season spiralling out of control.
One fire this week took just three days to destroy 1,000 hectares of national parkland located 4km from Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third biggest city.
Mr Becerra said he had asked Brazil to help combat the fires in the northern departments of Pando and Beni, and for Argentina to help with containing blazes in Santa Cruz, the richest of Bolivia’s nine departments, where the local government has declared a state of emergency. Heavy smoke has enveloped the country’s main international airport, located in the city of Santa Cruz. Though authorities have so far kept it open, 23 regional airports have already been closed by the fires.
Local health officials are reporting a steep increase in hospital admissions of children suffering from respiratory ailments.
On Tuesday the government met peasant and farming groups to sign an agreement to promote fire-prevention.
According to Mr Rocha this year’s burning season is the biggest since 2004, when 50,000 fires consumed six million hectares. The deliberate setting of fires to clear land for farming is a long-established tradition in the Amazonian regions of several South American countries.