Responsible tourism on Brazil wildlife holidays

The statistics that explain the scale and importance of the Amazon are staggering. It represents over half of the planet’s remaining rainforests, and is the biggest and most biodiverse tract of tropical rainforest in the world. The Amazon region stretches across nine nations, with 60 percent sitting within Brazil.

The Amazon rainforest is seriously under threat from deforestation, with cattle farming to blame for around 80 percent of all deforestation in Brazil. Illegal logging plays its part, too. Powerfully, the go-ahead comes from the top, with President Jair Bolsonaro green-lighting the razing of swathes of Amazon rainforest under the guise of economic development.

Guy Marks, from our tailor made holiday specialists Tribes Travel, explains:
 “The biggest issue in Brazil is that they’re cutting down the rainforest faster than you can blink. It’s just a massive environmental issue. If you fly into Manaus during the daytime, you get to the edge of the forest and you just see hundreds of miles of forest burning. There’s a very distinct line between the soya fields and the forest – and the line is moving on a daily basis. So it’s fairly staggering.”

Brazil is home to more isolated and uncontacted tribes than any other country in the world. FUNAI, the National Indian Foundation, is a government body responsible for monitoring and protecting indigenous territories, and preventing the invasion of this land by outsiders. FUNAI claims that there are 67 tribes which remain uncontacted. Many of these have less than 100 people left, so they are likely to disappear completely. Some tribes are aware of outsiders and have had minimal contact, but choose to remain isolated, while others are cut off entirely.

The greatest threat posed by encroachment on their land is disease. Entire populations have been killed by common colds – which the indigenous population has no resistance to – and malaria-bearing mosquitoes are now present in areas where they previously did not exist. As well as that, their land is being rapidly repossessed by loggers, farmers and miners – both legally and illegally. Enormous hydroelectric dams also cause widespread flooding of territories.

The logistics of policing the Amazon are hard to comprehend, and while there is such high financial value in its natural resources, spending a fortune to protect it poses something of a conflict of interests to the Brazilian government.

While the Amazon steals all the attention, the open marshes of the Pantanal quietly gets on with being the most biodiverse place in South America. Few people live here, but the ones that do are ranchers in a tug of war with the tides that waterlog the land for one half of the year and are home to jaguars during the other half. The best responsible holidays support the farmers, funding schemes that provide them with income that champions coexistence with wildlife – like learning to guide or steer boat trips.