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I spent last week in the Brazilian Amazon in Porto Velho, Rondonia, on the edge of what is called the arco do incendios. The “arc of fires” is a region stretching along the yet-to-be-paved highways 319 and 230, between the towns of Humaitá and Apui in Southern Amazonas, a state that still had as of last year.

It is a place where soy farmers and cattle ranchers, connected to international corporate supply chains, are ripping down and burning forest at record rates. Humaitá, which has a new soy terminal in its river port, is where a group of ranchers and farmers in 2017 of the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA).

Soy production for foreign markets, coupled with far-right government of President Jair Bolsonaro’s gutting of environmental protection agencies, are two drivers of the current, catastrophic increase in fires and deforestation.

Minnesota-based Cargill corporation, which environmental organisation Mighty Earth recently called the “”, appears to be a main catalyst in this process.

Former President Luis Inacio “Lula” Da Silva, who during his tenure, was from last year’s presidential race as part of a investigation, with no material evidence, while he was with double the support of Bolsonaro.

Shortly after his arrest, Cargill announced it was building a in Porto Velho on the edge of highway 319 on the Madeira River, expanding its soy export capacity there from 3.5 million to 6 million tons a year.

It appears that increased rainforest devastation is calculated into Cargill’s business plan.

After helping in the Amazon during the 1970s and ‘80s, US companies are no longer the major importers of Amazonian beef; that is now (EU).

Amazon deforestation still generates billions of dollars a year for mining, energy and agribusiness corporations that spend a lot of advertising money. There is constant pressure to counter the information provided by environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace, and to reframe it to make it appear less threatening.

As the world’s attention focused on the fire crisis in recent weeks, media companies employed several strategies to deflect attention from its root causes. As coverage shifts to other events such as Hurricane Dorian, it is important to remember that there is no end in sight to the fires.

Continued fighting is needed to stop an environmental catastrophe, and to do this, we need to focus on causes and how it can be stopped. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be happening.

The following are a few examples of how media are working to please their advertisers by deflecting and confusing their information consumers.

Conservation versus development

I appeared on Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News to talk about the Amazon fires on August 26. I welcomed it as an opportunity to speak to a lot of people “outside the bubble”, and try to put some cracks into their narrative on the fires on live TV. I doubt they will invite me on again.

After attempting to steer the conversation to Brazilians’ supposed apathy over the deforestation — something that recent and a prove is blatantly untrue — the newscaster asked me the following:

“President Bolsonaro is prioritising economic opportunities for Brazilians over protecting the environment. And Brazil … has huge poverty. How much more do people care about the economy and their own livelihoods, because it’s simply a priority over the environment?”

This was a loaded question, built on the false assumption that destroying the environment for short-term capitalist gain benefits society as a whole.

Sky wasn’t the only company pushing this narrative. In Bloomberg, Mac Margolis raised a similar argument , disconnecting the ranchers and plantation owners setting the fires from the international supply chain, and suggesting that further ranching and monoculture production will .

Brazil is a country with a 500-year history of monoculture and mining commodity boom-and-bust cycles, which has always produced high levels of income inequality and poverty.

This pattern only began to be broken under Workers’ Party President Lula, through the implementation of redistributive socioeconomic polices, most importantly through massive , which lifted above the poverty line.

It is absurd to imagine that a monoculture production-based approach tied to the international supply chain, using low labour-intensity activities such as cattle ranching and soy farming on indigenous reservations, will make up for the setbacks caused by the post-’s dismantling of successful poverty-fighting policies and gutting of labour laws, into extreme poverty.

Furthermore, development versus conservation is not an either/or issue. Rondonia’s neighbouring state of Acre has generated and focusing on renewable forest resources such as rubber, brazil nut and açai, becoming a .

Unfortunately, Acre’s governor recently declared a state of emergency, due to fires resulting from new incursions by international beef, mining and soy supply chain actors into the rainforest.

Bolsonaro and Macron social media bickering

The Rondonia state political apparatus is now ruled by Bolsonaro’s PSL (Social Liberal) party and supported by the big ranchers and plantation owners.

IBAMA has not had a superintendent since February and is completely paralysed. It lost after the 2016 coup and has been by the Bolsonaro administration. Restoring its functionality should be a top priority now.

Bolsonaro’s action of sending 400 air force personnel with picks and shovels to put out a few fires for the will only cause his support base to wait a few days to start new fires. I witnessed this in Rondonia when, as the international journalists began to leave town, the city of Porto Velho found itself covered in smoke once again.

Instead of focusing on this, as the fires raged on, Bolsonaro’s bickering with French President Emannuel Macron on Twitter over Brazil’s refusal to accept the EU’s laughably low offer of €20 million to “put out the fires” from articles about the roots of the crisis.

Socialism destroying the rainforest?

According to recent articles in the Guardian, Independent and New York Times, it is the brush fires underway in the semi-arid Chaco biome in lowland Bolivia, and not the destructive policies currently being pushed by the Bolsonaro government, that are the real cause of the destruction of the Amazon.

“The World Believes the Amazon Is in Trouble Because of Bolsonaro. Instead, They Should Look to Bolivia,” declares an August 27 in the Independent.

On September 2, the Guardian ran an article labeling Bolivian President Evo Morales as a .

In the NYT on , Simon Romero — a key actor in the against former president Dilma Rousseff during the lead-up to the 2016 coup — failed to give equal time to Morales while quoting US- and agribusiness-backed right-wing opposition candidate Carlos Mesa: “These fires were caused by Evo Morales and his policies.”

Putting the situation in Bolivia on par with Brazil constitutes a false equivalency.

First, the fires raging in Bolivia are not actually taking place in the Amazon jungle.

Secondly, Bolivia, which has a GDP than that of Brazil, has invested heavily in fighting the fires, and Morales has to address the crisis and is using to fight it. At the same time, Bolsonaro’s congressional allies through the Congressional Justice Committee that will legalise destruction of 11.5% of the remaining Brazilian rainforest.

The attempted deflection of the issue from Brazil to Bolivia seems more tied to Northern geopolitical objectives in the region than addressing the crisis. It comes during a Bolivian election campaign in which the US government has been the conservative opposition candidate, part of its to of left and centre-left governments that came to power in Latin America during recent decades.

Bolsonaro is encouraging international supply-chain actors to rip down the rainforest and is driving the crisis.

There is no end in sight to these fires. Instead of handwringing about the tragedy while trying to shift the blame, or acting like these devastating fires will somehow fight poverty, journalists should work harder to explain the role Northern business groups have in the process, and encourage boycotts against companies like Cargill that have a financial stake in destroying the rainforest and the people who live there. The future of our children and grandchildren depends on it.

[Brian Mier is co-editor at Brasil Wire and editor of the book Year of Lead: Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil. He has lived in Brazil for 25 years. Abridged from .]