From Bloomberg:
Fires are raging across the country. Deforestation rates reached startling highs in July. An escalating trade dispute with the U.S. could force China to lean even more heavily on Brazil—already its top supplier of soy. And it all comes as Brazil’s far-right populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, has pledged to open up the 2-million-square-mile forest—including in protected indigenous areas—to more farming and mining.
From The New York Times:
Scientists studying satellite image data from the fires in the Amazon rain forest said that most of the fires are burning on agricultural land where the forest had already been cleared.
From NASA Earth Observatory:
The map above shows active fire detections in Brazil as observed by Terra and Aqua MODIS between August 15-22, 2019. The locations of the fires, shown in orange, have been overlain on nighttime imagery acquired by VIIRS. In these data, cities and towns appear white; forested areas appear black; and tropical savannas and woodland (known in Brazil as Cerrado) appear gray. Note that fire detections in the Brazilian states of Pará and Amazonas are concentrated in bands along the highways BR-163 and BR-230.
From Washington Post: The Amazon is burning. Bolsonaro says his critics are setting the fires, to make him look bad.