RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- In view of the ongoing devastating wildfires in Amazon rainforest, the Brazilian government is pushing for measures to prevent further spread of fires.
Agriculture Minister Tereza Cristina Dias said Monday the government will try to discourage the practice of using fire to clear land for crops and cattle.
"The Agriculture Ministry will, again, do a campaign to use other methods, instead of using fires, to open up these areas," Dias told reporters at an event in Sao Paulo.
"But to do that, we need to train and provide technical assistance, and they (producers) need to have credit to be able to (do) it in a more rational way," she said.
Clearing by fire is usually done by peasants to get small plots of land, "but during these (dry) seasons, they can really cause problems," she said.
Brazil has come under pressure from the international community to better preserve the Amazon rainforest, after a series of fires have razed vast swaths of forest this year.
Brazil owns about 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest, which covers an area of some 5,500,000 square km in South America. A total of 71,497 forest fires were registered in Brazil in the first eight months of 2019, up from 39,194 a year ago, according to data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research.
Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro on Monday said he spoke with his Colombian counterpart about a joint plan "to guarantee our sovereignty" over the Amazon rain forest and its natural resources.
Considered the lungs of the Earth, the Amazon is mainly situated in Brazil, but parts of it lie in Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and other South American countries.
"In a conversation with President Ivan Duque of Colombia, we spoke about the need to have a joint plan between most of the countries that comprise the Amazon to guarantee our sovereignty and natural wealth," Bolsonaro tweeted.
The raging fires in Amazon came into global spotlight after large swaths of the tropical forest were destroyed in recent days.
Over the weekend, during a gathering of the Group of Seven (G7) in Biarritz, France, French President Emmanuel Macron proposed that the member countries take part in fighting the fire.
So far this year, there have been 74,155 fires in Brazil, more than half of them in the Amazon jungle, an 84 percent increase compared with the same period in 2018, according to the National Space Research Institute, which monitors the region via satellite.
