Below-average rainfall – even through the rainy season – has plagued the Amazon and much of South America since last year, also feeding the worst wildfires in more than a decade in Brazil and Bolivia. Researchers say climate change is the main culprit.

Scientists predict the Amazon region may not fully recover moisture levels until 2026.

Last year, the drought became a humanitarian crisis, as people reliant on rivers were stranded without food, water or medicine.

This year authorities are already on alert. In hard-hit Amazonas state, at least 62 municipalities are under states of emergency with more than half a million people affected, according to the state’s civil defense corps.

“This is now the most severe drought in over 120 years of measurement at the Port of Manaus,” said Valmir Mendonca, the port’s head of operations, who said the river level is likely to keep falling for another week or two.

With the region never fully recovering due to weaker-than-usual seasonal rains, many of the impacts of the drought last year look set to repeat or reach new extremes.

The Port of Manaus measured the Rio Negro river at 12.66 meters on Friday, according to its website, surpassing the previous all-time low recorded last year and still falling rapidly.

The Rio Negro is a major tributary of the Amazon River, the world’s largest river by volume. The port sits near the “meeting of the waters” where the black water of the Negro meets the sandy-colored Solimoes, which also hit a record low this week.

Grain shipments have been halted on the Madeira River, another tributary of the Amazon, because of low water levels, a port association said last month.

Researchers are once again finding the carcasses of Amazon freshwater river dolphins, which they blame on thinning waters driving the threatened species into closer contact with humans.

National disaster monitoring agency Cemaden has already called the drought Brazil’s worst such event since at least the 1950s.

The drought has also sapped hydropower plants, Brazil’s main source of electricity. Energy authorities have approved bringing back daylight savings time to conserve electricity, although the measure still requires presidential approval.

The extreme weather and dryness is affecting much of South America, with the Paraguay River also at an all-time low. That river starts in Brazil and flows through Paraguay and Argentina to the Atlantic.

The same extreme heat and dryness is helping drive surging fires in the Amazon and neighboring Pantanal, the world’s largest wetlands. Bolivia is also on track to break a record for most fires ever recorded, according to data from Brazil’s space research agency.

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Of more immediate concern is evidence the disease, once largely confined to bird species, appears to be spreading between mammals. This strain has already killed a handful of dolphins in Chile and Peru, some 50,000 seals and sea lions along the coasts, and at least half a million birds regionwide.

To confirm mammal-to-mammal transmission, scientists would likely need to test infections in live animals.

“It’s almost certainly happened,” said Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. “It’s pretty hard to explain some of these large infections and die off without having mammal-to-mammal spread.”

The strain has shown up in dozens of bird species, including some migrating species, which can spread it beyond the region, scientists told Reuters.

As climate change escalates, animals will be forced to move into new territories, mixing with one another in new ways and possibly boosting opportunities for the virus to further mutate.

“It’s a matter of time before you will detect the first South American strain in North America,” said Alonzo Alfaro-Nunez, a viral ecologist at University of Copenhagen.

Human risk

The growing concern has prompted the 35 countries in the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) to convene regional health experts and officials at a meeting this week in Rio de Janeiro.

The group plans to launch the world’s first regional commission to oversee bird flu monitoring and response efforts, a PAHO official told Reuters. This has not been previously reported.

Since the virus was first detected in Colombia in October 2022, there have been two known cases in humans on the continent, one each in Ecuador and Chile. Both came from exposure to infected birds.

While those patients survived, H5N1 bird flu is deadly to humans in roughly 60 per cent of cases worldwide.

The World Health Organization is unlikely to raise the risk level for humans from the current “low” without evidence of human-to-human transmission or mutations adapted to human receptors, experts said.

Drugmakers, including GSK and Moderna, have said they are developing bird flu vaccines for humans, and have the capacity to produce hundreds of million so doses within months utilizing production lines used for seasonal flu vaccines.

“We’re seeing (the virus) doing little evolutionary steps that are on the long-term moving towards a potential human infection,” said Ralph Vanstreels, a University of California, Davis researcher studying South American variants of H5N1.

Every year, Argentina’s Peninsula Valdes on the windswept Atlantic coast teems with densely packed elephant seals rearing pups.

Last November, Vanstreels came across a grim scene: hundreds of dead and rotting pups on the beach. Researchers estimate 17,400 pups died, nearly all born to the colony that year.

For each of those pups to have been infected by birds is highly unlikely, scientists said. Pups usually have contact only with their mothers, leading scientists to suspect this is how it spread.

Vanstreels is part of a group of scientists working to trace the virus’ genetic mutations in South America.

In a draft paper posted on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, they analyzed samples from sea lions, seals and birds from up the coast from Peninsula Valdes. Comparing the genomes from these samples with those collected in North America in 2022 and Asia earlier, the team identified nine new mutations.

The same mutations were found in samples collected in 2022 and 2023 in Chile and Peru, which were also hit by mass mortality of sea lions and birds.

“This is the first time this virus is so adapted to wildlife,” Vanstreels said. “Clearly something happened in Peru and in northern Chile where they acquired these new mutations.”

In the draft paper, researchers noted that the same mutations were present in one of the continent’s two human cases, a 53-year-old man who lived one block from the seashore where seabirds congregated.

Researchers said that case “highlights the potential threat posed by these viruses to public health.”

Regional response

With health officials and experts meeting in Rio this week, Latin American countries will be pressed to boost disease surveillance in the wild.

The region’s patchy data and limited resources has left scientists struggling to understand how the disease is spreading in the wild, with the number of cases likely much higher than reported. Some cases are not being sampled or lab-tested, scientists said.

Bolivia, for example, did not register a case in the wild last year, though the disease has been detected in surrounding countries, said Manuel Jose Sanchez Vazquez, epidemiology coordinator for PAHO’s veterinary health center.

Managing the disease response can also be complex, Sanchez noted. Threats to humans are dealt with by public health officials, while threats to poultry or livestock fall to agriculture or veterinary authorities. In wild animals, the purview typically falls to environmental officials.

The new regional commission, expected to be announced on Thursday, would aim to set standard protocols for monitoring, handling and reporting cases among various government agencies. It could also help in pooling laboratory resources, Sanchez said.

“We are worried and we are vigilant,” Sanchez said. “The more adaptation of the virus to mammals, the more likely it is that transmission to humans could happen.”

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The report www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1 found that we are already experiencing those effects of climate change, as the planet has surpassed more than 1 degree Celsius in average warming. Heat waves, droughts and torrential rains are only set to become more frequent and extreme as the earth warms further.

It is the first time that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has quantified the likelihood of these extreme events in a wide variety of scenarios.

“As the IPCC makes plain, the impacts of the climate crisis, from extreme heat to wildfires to intense rainfall and flooding, will only continue to intensify unless we choose another course for ourselves and generations to come,” U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said.

The report found that once-in-a-decade heavy rain events are now 1.3 times more likely and 6.7 percent wetter, compared with the 50 years up to 1900 when major human-driven warming started to occur.

Previously once-in-a-decade droughts could happen every five or six years.

Scientists emphasized that these effects of climate change are already here, with events like the heat wave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest killing hundreds in June and Brazil currently experiencing its worst drought in 91 years.

“The heat wave in Canada, fires in California, floods in Germany, floods in China, droughts in central Brazil make it very, very clear that climate extremes are having a very heavy toll,” said Paulo Artaxo, a lead author of the report and an environmental physicist and the University of Sao Paulo. (Graphic on warming planet)

The future looks even grimmer, with more warming meaning more frequent extreme events.

Heat waves show stronger increases in frequency with warming than all other extreme events. Twice in a century heat waves could happen roughly every six years with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, a level which the report says could be surpassed within two decades.

Should the world become 4 degrees Celsius hotter, as could happen in a high-emissions scenario, those heat waves would happen every one to two years.

Carolina Vera, another report author and a physical climate scientist at University of Buenos Aires and Argentina’s main agency for science research (CONICET), said there is also an increasing likelihood that multiple extreme weather events could happen at the same time.

For example, extreme heat, drought and high winds – conditions that could feed wildfires – are more likely to happen at the same time.

The IPCC has a medium or high-level confidence that many important agricultural regions around the world will see more droughts or extreme rain. That includes parts of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil that are major growers of soybeans and other global commodities.

“It is scary, sure, with the risk that fires, heat waves, droughts will affect humans in the form of weather and food insecurity, energy insecurity, water quality and health – mainly in poor regions,” said Jose Marengo, a climatologist at the Brazilian Science Ministry’s disaster monitoring center.

Marengo was a review editor for the IPCC report’s chapter on human influence on the climate system.

For example, regions that are already prone to drought are likely to experience them more frequently, including in the Mediterranean, southern Australia, and western North America, said Friederike Otto, IPCC author and climatologist at University of Oxford.

Increased frequency of drought and heavy rain also are not mutually exclusive and are predicted in places like Southern Africa, she said.

The projections on extreme weather events laid out in the report reinforce the importance of curbing climate change to the levels laid out in the Paris Agreement, scientists said.

“If we stabilize at 1.5 degrees, we can stop them from getting much worse,” Otto said.

– Additional reporting by Nina Chestney in London and Andrea Januta in Guerneville, California

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Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of soybeans, the vast majority of which are genetically modified organisms (GMO). Many newer GMOs, however, are not used in Brazil because they are not approved for sale in China, the largest customer for the Brazilian farm sector.

“Brazil’s private sector can only effectively use new technologies with the importation authorization by the Chinese biosecurity committee,” Araujo said at an event on Brazil-China co-operation in the farm sector. “It is necessary to better fine-tune the approval of Brazilian GMOs by the Chinese government.”

His comments underscore an attempted shift by the new Brazilian government to a more pragmatic approach in its relations with China, avoiding the skeptical rhetoric from President Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign and Araujo’s own writings on the rise of the Asian country.

The Chinese committee now takes roughly five to six years to approve new GMOs, compared with about 240 days for approvals in 2010, said Orlando Leite Ribeiro, international affairs secretary at the agriculture ministry.

China’s ambassador to Brazil, Yang Wanming, told reporters on the sidelines of the event that the Asian country considers co-operation with Brazil on GMOs important. But China also takes food safety seriously and must ensure the safety of new GMO products under Chinese law, he said.

— Jake Spring reports on Brazilian agricultural, environmental and resource sector policy for Reuters from Brasilia.

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Companies such as Bayer and its unit Monsanto, which produces glyphosate-based weedkillers, have faced legal challenges over allegations that glyphosate causes cancer. A new study published this month also links high exposure to cancer.

“There is no scientific evidence that glyphosate causes health damage beyond shown in tests with laboratory animals,” Anvisa director Alessandra Soares said.

Brazil bans agrochemicals found to cause cancer and the findings, if approved, would allow sales of glyphosate, the most widely sold herbicide in the country, to continue with some restrictions.

Anvisa’s risk analysis team presented its conclusions on Tuesday to the agency’s directors, who voted to advance them to a 90-day public consultation before a final decision.

Monsanto sells the herbicide under its Roundup brand and historically has been the largest seller of glyphosate-based products in Brazil. Bayer declined to reveal its market share.

Monsanto faces US$78 million in damages after a jury in California last year found that its products caused a man’s cancer and the firm failed to warn customers of the dangers of its use.

A similar trial was set to begin this week, also in California.

The companies deny the allegations and have said that decades of use and hundreds of studies have found their glyphosate-based herbicides to be non-cancerous. France and Germany are seeking to curtail the use of the chemical.

In a study published this month in the journal Mutation Research, U.S. academics linked high exposure to glyphosate-based products to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer.

While Anvisa analysts found the herbicide non-cancerous, it said that health risks remain for those exposed to the chemical when it is being applied to crops and suggested new limits on exposure.

It proposed maximum daily ingestion limits of 0.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight for the general population and 0.1 milligrams for rural workers using the chemical. Previously there were only chronic exposure limits and no daily limits.

The agency also recommended banning products sold with concentrations over one per cent of the glyphosate active ingredient, and adoption of safer application practices to limit exposure.

— Reporting for Reuters by Jake Spring; additional reporting by Ana Mano.

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The negotiations on next year’s farm subsidies highlight the powerful agribusiness lobby’s struggle to preserve benefits at a time when Economy Minister Paulo Guedes is pushing for belt-tightening efforts including cutting state-subsidized loans in favour of lending on the open market.

State-run Banco do Brasil SA, responsible for handing out many of the subsidized farm loans, favours cutting that lending and offering favourable insurance instead, chief executive Rubem Novaes said last month.

But while subsidized insurance payments are expected to rise, that will not correspond to a cut in subsidized loans for the next crop year, agriculture policy secretary Eduardo Sampaio Marques said in an interview with Reuters.

The agriculture ministry favours shifting subsidies toward insurance and away from credit in the “medium term,” and the economic team has agreed to a gradual transition, Sampaio said

“There will not be a rupture, but movement in the sense that there will be more rationalization and modernization with less state intervention,” he said.

For this year, the hope is that subsidized farm loans of 194 billion reais (C$69 billion) in the last national harvest plan will be maintained or increased for the next crop year, he said.

The government could increase its budget to subsidize premiums for insurance against potential harvest losses to one billion reais, Sampaio said.

That compares to a 2019 budget of 440 million reais, which subsidizes insurance to cover an estimated 6.8 million hectares, or just under 10 per cent of Brazil’s total planted area, according to government data.

The subsidies are still being negotiated by the agriculture ministry, economy ministry and central bank, and specific numbers have yet to be agreed to, Sampaio said.

The government has also agreed that subsidized financing for small- and medium-sized farms will be maintained, while large producers will be gradually weaned off subsidies, Sampaio said.

Brazil’s record-low benchmark interest rate would allow the government to hand out more subsidized loans at similar rates while spending the same amount of money, he said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Jake Spring.

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Farmers form a key base of support for right-wing firebrand Bolsonaro who since taking office Jan. 1 has placed pro-agribusiness policies at the center of his agenda. Activists warn his government’s positions would strip away protections for the environment, the Amazon rainforest and indigenous peoples.

Reservation land covering roughly 12 per cent of Brazil’s territory is currently off limits for commercial farming.

“They could plant there … and maybe have income for their community,” Dias told reporters. “They cannot do this today. That needs to be changed in Congress.”

Reservations should still be required to preserve a minimum percentage of native vegetation, as all farmers currently are, she said.

Bolsonaro has given control over indigenous land designations to the agriculture ministry, after arguing on the campaign trail that no new indigenous reservations should be created. But Dias struck a more moderate tone, saying Bolsonaro did not favour new reservations in areas that have long been settled by farmers.

“Small farmers that have been there 50 years and have deeds issued by the state or federal government, if you kick them out, there aren’t conditions there for indigenous people to hunt and fish and have their lives,” she said in a press briefing.

“When the president says he doesn’t want more demarcations, he’s talking about this type of contested areas.”

But the Amazon deserves completely different treatment, and tribes with little contact with the outside world should be protected, she said, a position that is shared by Brazil’s new rights minister who will be responsible for indigenous affairs.

Bolsonaro has suggested Brazil may exit the Paris Agreement on climate change and appointed a foreign minister who calls global warming a leftist fabrication. But Dias said she is fine with staying in the accord, as the country is on track to meet its climate change goals.

As for a campaign promise to end the “industry” of environmental fines, Dias told Reuters prior to the briefing that Brazil must end “indiscriminate” fines levied by multiple agencies without working with the farmers to resolve misunderstandings.

— Reporting for Reuters by Jake Spring and Anthony Boadle.

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Nabhan Garcia, land issues secretary at the ministry, said the government must convince the National Congress to change the law to more stringently deal with such invasions and give police broader autonomy to act against invaders.

“It is the challenge of this government to demonstrate to Congress that this is a thing very close to terrorism, or it could be said in some circumstances is terrorism, and to have a more severe application of the law,” Garcia told reporters.

Farmers have formed a key support base that helped Bolsonaro win the presidency, with a list of producer-friendly policies are now at the center of his agenda after he assumed office Jan. 1.

Garcia founded the far-right group UDR that is militantly opposed to land invasions. His newly created secretariat of land issues consolidates previously disparate powers over rural land reform and demarcation of indigenous territory under the agriculture ministry.

Garcia made the remarks in response to a land invasion in the northern state of Para, the first incident under Bolsonaro’s presidency, noting that hundreds of such invasions are underway around the country.

The landless workers movement MST behind many of these invasions was a major supporter of former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Many landless workers’ movements seek to take over properties in the name of social and economic justice to more equally distribute rural wealth, but farmers argue this flies in the face of the country’s property laws.

Garcia favours land reform initiatives already in place that redistribute land classified as “unproductive” to the rural poor. But he said laws must be respected and invasions by force would not be tolerated.

Watchdog groups say that police, often under the sway of powerful local landowners, frequently get away with bloodshed against landless activists.

While campaigning in Para last year, Bolsonaro strongly defended the police, saying they shot and killed 19 activists in a bloody episode in 1996 because they feared for their lives.

Also on Monday, Garcia offered the government’s support to foreign investors interested in buying land in Brazil, a prohibited practice that would require legalization by Congress.

— Reporting for Reuters by Jake Spring and Anthony Boadle; additional reporting by Brad Brooks.

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In a Friday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, JBS Foods International requested a withdrawal of the IPO. While neither company gave a new timetable for the IPO, JBS said in a statement to Reuters that a U.S. listing of JBS Foods “is the best way possible to maximize shareholder value.”

Parent JBS and the processed food subsidiary first announced plans for a U.S. offering on Dec. 5. Sao Paulo-based JBS, the world’s No. 1 meatpacker, reaffirmed plans to list the subsidiary in August, saying a transaction could take place by the end of next year.

The proposal for the JBS Foods International IPO was first put to test in March, after a scandal over an alleged bribery of health officials triggered bans on Brazilian meat exports. Two months later, two members of the family that controls JBS agreed to a plea bargain deal in Brazil relating to a corruption probe.

A collapse of the plan is a setback for Brazil’s billionaire Batista family, which owns 42 per cent of JBS and saw the IPO as a way to improve JBS’s global standing. The transaction was seen as a way to help decouple JBS’s businesses from Brazil — where reputational issues have impaired share performance in recent months.

Reuters reported in March and in May, shortly after the food safety and corruption scandals, respectively, that JBS would press ahead with the US$1 billion IPO plan despite dwindling investor confidence.

Common shares fell 0.6 per cent to 8.60 reais (C$3.39) on Monday. The stock is down 25 per cent so far this year.

Brothers Wesley and Joesley Batista were arrested last month in connection with insider trading and other offenses related to their plea deal. Wesley, the elder of them and also JBS’s former chief executive, quit as a result.

Both brothers will face trial for carrying out stock and foreign exchange transactions based on knowledge of their plea deal, a federal court confirmed on Monday. Both have been charged last week on the same case.

Both Batistas worked personally on the refinancing of 21 billion reais (C$8.3 billion) in short-term debt of JBS and spearheaded the sale of several assets, including the company’s cattle feedlot at Brooks, Alta.

Among the international operations that would have been included in the JBS IPO is one of Canada’s biggest beef packing plants, also at Brooks, with capacity to process up to 4,200 head of cattle per day.

— Reporting for Reuters by Guillermo Parra-Bernal and Jake Spring.

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