PORTO VELHO: Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro said on Tuesday he was open to discussing G7 aid for fighting fires devastating the Amazon rainforest — only if his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron “withdraws insults” made against him.

Bolsonaro’s remarks come amid an escalating war of words with Macron over the worst fires in years that have sparked a global outcry and threatened to torpedo a huge trade deal between the European Union and South American countries.

Closer to home, the mood was more harmonious, with US President Donald Trump eliciting a grateful tweet from his Brazilian counterpart for defending Bolsonaro’s heavily-criticised response to the blazes.

A top Brazilian official had earlier rejected the G7 countries’ offer of $20 million to combat the fires devastating the forest in Brazil and Bolivia, saying Macron should take care of “his home and his colonies”. “Mr Macron must withdraw the insults he made against me,” Bolsonaro told reporters in the capital Brasilia. “To talk or accept anything from France, with the best possible intentions, he has to withdraw these words, and from there we can talk.”

Macron and Bolsonaro have repeatedly locked horns in the past week, with the French leader accusing Bolsonaro of lying to him about his commitments on climate change and vowing to block the EU-Mercosur trade deal involving Brazil that took decades to negotiate.

The latest official figures show 1,659 new fires were started in Brazil between Sunday and Monday, taking the total this year to 82,285 — the highest since at least 2013 — even as military aircraft and troops help battle the blazes. More than half of the fires are in the massive Amazon basin.

In the hard-hit northwestern state of Rondonia, thick smoke has choked the capital Porto Velho in recent days as fires blacken swaths of the rainforest.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2019