Peru declares state of emergency in regions scorched by forest fires

By Marco Aquino

LIMA (Reuters) -Peruvian President Dina Boluarte on Wednesday declared a state of emergency in three regions affected by devastating forest fires that have burned through swathes of the nation's Andean and Amazonian crop lands and left 16 dead.

The heavily forested northern regions of Amazonas, San Martin and Ucayali will be under the new emergency measures, she said, following several requests from local authorities for more resources to be allocated to fight the fires.

Forest fires are frequent in Peru between August and November, largely due to the burning of dry grasslands to expand agricultural frontiers and sometimes by land traffickers, according to data from Peru's environmental ministry.

Boluarte urged farming communities to stop burning grasslands as thousands of hectares have gone up in flames, while noting that the fires are also a result of the lack of rainfall caused by climate change.

Speaking at the government palace, the president said Peru had registered 238 fires across most of its regions, and some 80% of these were "controlled".

Ucayali's regional governor had earlier called for military aircraft to help firefighters and volunteers put out the fires that have spread to rugged, hard-to-access terrains and are damaging the area's palm and cocoa crops.

Satellite data analyzed by Brazil's space research agency earlier this month registered a record 346,112 fire hotspots so far this year across South America, surpassing the 2007 record of 345,322 hotspots in a data series that goes back to 1998.

(Reporting by Marco Aquino; Writing by Sarah Morland; Editing by Brendan O'Boyle and Alistair Bell)