Intervention by Stefanos Stefanou, AKEL Political Bureau member, at the protest meeting on the Amazon forest fires

AKEL C.C. Press Office, 2nd September 2019, Nicosia

Dear friends,

We decided to organize tonight’s event because we feel the need to raise awareness and alert people to the environmental crimes being committed around the world.

We feel the need to join our voices with those of millions of people all over the world who are mobilizing, reacting, struggling and trying to put a brake on the environmental downhill path that humanity has taken.

We feel the need to point out the hypocrisy of all those mighty forces in the world who, though polluting and destroying the environment, are unable to agree and implement a comprehensive plan to combat the ecological crisis.

The pretext for organizing the event was the huge catastrophe that is taking place in the Amazon forest, which is burning and, as international news agencies report, these fires have not only intensified, but new fires are blazing.

The Amazon is our planet’s biggest oxygen lung. It is an enormous carbon reserve and plays an extremely important role in the way heat is distributed throughout the planet. July 2019 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, while at the same time there has been a dramatic increase in the number of fires in areas such as Alaska, Greenland and Siberia where no fires had previously ever been recorded. The fires in the Amazon forest follow this frightening domino now transforming climate change not just into a climate crisis, but an ecological nightmare that raises dramatic questions about our planet’s very future.

Since January 2019, more than 72,000 fires have burned millions of acres in the Amazon rainforest, causing a disproportionate environmental disaster in the world’s largest ecosystem. Scientists fear parts of the Amazon will most probably cross the critical threshold and turn from a lush green rainforest to dry woodland regions, killing hundreds of types of flora and fauna. This could have disastrous consequences not only for people in South America, but also for the whole world.

What is happening in Brazil and the Amazon is not unrelated to the January 2019 election of Bolsonaro to the presidency. This is the far-right politician, who enjoys the unconditional support of Trump’s US and who the EU has been tacitly supporting to halt the road to the Left in this important country of Latin America.

A few months after his election, deforestation rates began to rise sharply. The far-right President, supporting and serving the vested powerful interests in Brazil and internationally, handed parts of the Amazon to private individuals for exploitation, and in doing so is abolishing or curbing policies to protect the environment and the Amazon region. The Bolsonaro government has weakened the environmental department and promoted the opening up of the Amazon to mining, agriculture and logging. For months, it has been steadfastly refusing to activate state mechanisms, leaving thousands of fires out of control, threatening the indigenous peoples that inhabit the area, among others.

It is worth noting that the agricultural lobby is powerful in Brazil and has steadily eroded the protection system that was so successful from 2005 up to 2014.

To understand the magnitude of the far-right President’s criminal activity, it is enough to know that Bolsonaro characterized international concern for the Amazon as “environmental psychosis”, faithfully following the “Trump line” that the climate crisis is a fabrication of environmental organizations.

The reality, of course, is completely different. Climate change is present and is visible in every aspect of our daily lives, everywhere in the world. To survive, capitalism needs to constantly increase production and intensify the exploitation of natural wealth, especially liquid fuels, which the modern world almost entirely bases its growth on.

The environmental crisis is the direct result of capitalist development and over-consumerism in the so-called advanced capitalist world, which glorifies profit and puts it over and above our planet’s very existence. The environmental crisis is connected to the ongoing aggressive wars that are caused by the imperialist mania for securing control of the world’s natural wealth. We can observe what Marx had identified a hundred and fifty years ago: that capitalism destroys the two sources of wealth – People and the environment.

This has resulted in enormous damage being provoked to minor ecosystems and, of course, this has deteriorated living conditions on the planet. Dramatic climate changes and the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather phenomena, higher temperatures around the world, rising sea levels as result of the melting of ice at the poles, are constantly sending out their own signals of danger. Water drought and deforestation, the pollution of the air, the contamination of the soil and seas, desertification and much more make up the ever-growing macabre list of environmental problems.

Today, the dilemma has never been clearer. Either we will develop a different economy, in which the key criterion will not be the profitability of capital, but social benefit and the maintenance of an ecological balance, or we will sacrifice our very life for the sake of the interests of big capital.

We cannot remain mere spectators in the face of all these developments, waiting for others to decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of a “Rescue Plan”.

We demand a real plan to save the planet, and that the rich countries and the EU respond, both with regards the allocation of resources towards this end, but above all in curbing free-market rules that have proved so flexible when the interests of the elite are at stake.

Understanding the protection of the environment as a top priority and aware of the criticality of protecting it, we are here today and demand the self-evident.

Today’s struggle is not just a struggle of the countries and peoples of the Amazon, but it is indeed a global struggle.

A struggle in which each and every one of us has a place and a role to play. We live on a planet that is our home. And today we all need to understand that our home is burning.

And we must stop this – with our struggles and actions. Locally, regionally, internationally and globally.