Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro says the proposal to create an international alliance to save the Amazon rainforest would be treating his country like “a colony or no man’s land”.
After French President Emmanuel Macron announced that the G7 had agreed on a $20m fire-fighting fund and a long-term initiative to protect the rainforest, Bolsonaro said the plans were an attack on the country’s sovereignty.
He slammed Macron's “ludicrous and unnecessary attacks on the Amazon,” saying they were unacceptable and accused the Frenchman of treating the region “as if we were a colony”.
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Leaders at the G7 summit have agreed to provide logistical and financial support to help fight fires in the Amazon rainforest.
Macron said the money would be made available immediately and that France would also “offer concrete support with military in the region within the next few hours”.
But Bolsonaro accused the French leader of launching “unreasonable and gratuitous attacks against the Amazon region”, and “hiding his intentions behind the idea of an ‘alliance’ of G7 countries”, reports the BBC.
The row came as a leaked document provided further evidence Brazilian government was complicit in the fires.
Writing on Twitter, journalist Glenn Greenwald said the document showed “the Bolsonaro Government - specifically its Environment Ministry - was notified in advance about the plans of rural industrialists on WhatsApp to start fires in the Amazon.
“Needless to say,” he adds, “they took no action to stop it”.
Sky News points out that the Amazon contains half of the planet's remaining tropical forests, covers about 40% of South America, and produces 20% of Earth's oxygen.
