Brazil: Amazon losses help drive growing wildfires elsewhere

By Fabio Zuker

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More than 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of land have burned this year in Brazil's wildlife-rich Pantanal, a tropical wetlands that normally alternates between periods of flooding and drought each year.

The increasingly severe drought behind the fires has its origins in the Amazon, said Pierre Girard, a hydro-ecologist at Brazil's Federal University of Matto Grosso, located in one of the states that contain the Pantanal.

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But as the forest becomes smaller and more fragmented, it can produce less of the rain that other parts of Brazil - and Argentina - depend on.

"Burning the forest has an impact on the wetlands" - and potentially on food production in Brazil's rich southern breadbasket, Girard said.