28 AUG 2019: An increasingly personal feud between Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and French leader Emmanuel Macron threatened to derail a pledge of tens of millions of dollars by the G7 nations for the Amazon region. Bolsonaro said the French president had called him a liar and he accused Macron of questioning Brazil’s sovereignty amid tensions over the fires.

Macron has to retract those comments “and then we can speak,” Bolsonaro said.

Meanwhile Bolsonaro had nastily insulted Macron’s wife on Twitter.

Brazil insisted on Tuesday that it would set conditions for accepting any aid from the world’s richest nations to help fight Amazon fires, saying France couldn’t protect the Notre Dame Cathedral from fire devastation and should focus on its own problems.

Brazil has bristled over what it views as neo-colonial interference by Europe on matters of sovereignty and economic development. The acrimony appears to be undercutting hopes of united action to protect the Amazon’s rainforests, a major absorber of carbon dioxide that is described as a critical defence against climate change.

In an address to Amazon state governors, Bolsonaro said the international aid was “welcome as long as who uses those resources is us… We will determine where the money will be applied, it’s useless if those resources get here and go to international NGOs.”

At a summit in France on Monday, the Group of Seven nations pledged $20 million to help fight the flames in the Amazon and protect the rainforest, in addition to a separate $12 million from Britain and $11 million from Canada.

Onyx Lorenzoni, the Brazilian president’s chief of staff, sharpened the criticism, saying Europe should use the funds for its own reforestation. Then he referred to Notre Dame, the medieval monument in Paris that was ravaged by fire in April, shocking the world.

“Macron could not avoid an obvious fire in a church that is a world heritage site,” Lorenzoni said, according to Brazil’s G1 news website.

“What does he want to teach to our country? He has a lot to take care of in his own home and his French colonies,” said the chief of staff, echoing a remark by his boss that France was treating the Amazon region countries like a colony.

Macron, who has questioned Bolsonaro’s trustworthiness and commitment to protecting biodiversity, has shrugged off the snub from the Brazilian president.

The French leader said in a speech Tuesday that Bolsonaro’s interpretation was a “mistake.”

He said the aid money isn’t just aimed at Brazil, but at nine countries in the vast Amazon region that also spans Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, an overseas region of France. About 60% of the Amazon region is in Brazil.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, never one to avoid pointless rhetoric, complimented Bolsonaro, saying he knows the Brazilian president well and that the United States supports him. “He is working very hard on the Amazon fires and in all respects doing a great job for the people of Brazil – Not easy,” Trump tweeted Tuesday.

A smoke-shrouded scene near the lush Jacunda national forest in the Amazonian state of Rondonia, witnessed by an Associated Press team, showed the enormity of the challenge ahead: putting out a multitude of blazes and safeguarding – in the long term – a vast region described by world leaders as critical to the health of the planet.

The country’s National Space Research Institute, which monitors deforestation, has recorded that the number of fires has risen by 85% to more than 77,000 in the last year, a record since the institute began keeping track in 2013. About half of the fires have been in the Amazon region, with most of those just in the past month.

The Amazon has experienced more fires during drought periods in the last 20 years, but the phenomenon this year is “unusual” because drought has not yet hit, said Laura Schneider of Rutgers University-New Brunswick in the United States.

Schneider, an associate professor in the university’s geography department, said fire is commonly used by people to clear land for cultivation. She said the actual area burned this year must be measured for an accurate comparison with damage in past years.

The international aid pledges came even though Bolsonaro has suggested the West is angling to exploit Brazil’s natural resources.

But the funds, which are widely seen as critical support, are still a relatively meagre amount for dealing with an environmental crisis that threatens what Macron has called “the lungs of the planet.”

The AP team drove for hours at a stretch outside the Rondonia capital of Porto Velho without seeing any major fires, suggesting that many had been extinguished or burned themselves out since rapidly spreading in recent weeks. Many fires were set in already deforested areas to clear land for farming and livestock.

Still, smoke billowed from charred fields and scrub, shrouding the sky.

Under international pressure to act, Bolsonaro said he might visit the Amazon region this week to check on firefighting efforts and would make 44,000 troops available to fight the blazes.