During the past week, when fires in Corrientes seemed to have reached their maximum peak, the lack of responses and lack of control on the part of the Environment Minister, Juan Cabandié. In the course of days, the rumors of a possible dismissal of the minister Cabandie they were getting stronger. But, apparently, the minister was not reproached for anything by the National government. The punishment seemed to reach only the head of the forestry policy of the Ministry of Agriculture, veteran Daniel Maradei.
Unofficially, the newspaper Bichos de Campo announced that the minister Julian Dominguez would have accepted, without resistance, the order to fire DNational Director of Forestry-Industrial Development. According to sources in the forestry sector, maradei He had to accept the decision with a lot of anger and disagreement when he saw how they were solving the problem.
His prompt resignation caused quite a bit discontent within the ministry environment given that maradei is a great expert in forestry and, before retiring, accepted in 2019 the invitation of the Government of Alberto Fernández to assume, again, the a position he held for several years beginning in the 1990s.
maradei He is known for being a professional with a very technical profile and little inclination to get into political debates, he had survived the replacement of Minister Luis Basterra by the empowered Domínguez. But what it did not survive was the whims of Cabandié, who was apparently furious when the forestry director denied several statements made by the environment minister in the midst of the fire crisis.
The statements of maradei that presumably they offended the militant of La Cámpora and one of the favorites of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner were formulated in a report that the agriculture official granted to the specialized medium Argentina Forestand what published on February 14. There, maradei corrected the minister, who had said that the province of currents did not have specialized forest fire brigades and for that reason “90% of fires” had happened in forests implanted with pines and eucalyptus.
“90% of the affected area was forest plantations, not native forests“, had said Cabandie. To which in the subsequent report the person in charge of the forestry area corrected him: “In forest plantations only 2.4% has been affected so far, not 90%”.
The INTA released today a map with the situation of the fires until February 21where it marks that they caught fire more than 930 thousand hectares, more than 11% of the surface of the province. There he confirms that the figures said by maradei (fifteen days ago) were the real ones and that Cabandie was uninformed, because two weeks later it is specified that a 4% of that area corresponds to cultivated forests and another 4% to native forests.
“Obviously he is ill-advised. The mistake that they have made him commit is gross, since he has said that 90% of the area burned in Corrientes is afforestation, when a monitoring carried out by INTA makes it clear that so far it is only 2.4% of the affected surface. They are not rumors or estimates, they are hard, unverifiable data, where there is only 2.4% of forests burned, not 90% as he said, ”said the Agriculture official now forced to resign.
maradei He also highlighted in that report that forestry activity “Perhaps this productive sector is the only one that has an organized Fire Management Consortium and trained forestry brigades. And forest producers are required by national law to establish fire risk prevention measures, with the obligation of firebreak streets between lots that must not exceed 25 hectares and against railways and local roads, among other measures.”
“It must be understood that a forester is a company that invests to obtain an economic result after many years of care and effort, it is the most interested in taking care of its crop from a fire,” engineer Maradei defended the sector, who in the The interview insistently called for the strengthening of coordinated work, the adoption of successful experiences from other countries in the world and the available technologies, and “not getting distracted” looking for “culprits.”
According to reliable sources, the sayings of maradei during the interview they were the central reason for the dispute with the Minister of the Environment and for his removal from office. But this was not the only crossroads he had with the minister. Previously, Maradei tried unsuccessfully to resist the Ministry of Environment stealing the collection of a special rate charged by insurers for car policies, and whose original purpose was to subsidize forestry plans to compensate for the damage caused to the environment. by burning fossil fuels. Thanks to a new tax, Cabandié managed to collect more than 1,400 million pesos for the Fire Management Service.
Those resources, which in times of the government of let’s change served to cancel much of the accumulated debt for the forest plans under Law 25,080were given to the forest area by Cabandie with the penalty of Fire Management Lawwhich provides for the formation of a trust that raised a whopping 1,400 million pesos in a few months. That was the money that many claimed and that did not appear during the fires in Corrientes.