Brazil's
deforestation quagmire
by
Elizabeth Rust --- Council on Hemispheric Affairs
In
the last few weeks, a series of major events has signaled the urgent
need for constructive change to Brazil's current policies regarding
the Amazon rainforest. On May 19, 2011, Brazil's National Institute
for Space Research (INPE) released satellite images indicating that
deforestation increased from 103 km2
in March and April 2010 to 593 km2 in
the same period of 2011, a sixfold increase from a year ago.1
Not long after, on July 1, 2011, the INPE announced that this
increase was not just a temporary aberration: deforestation in May
2011 stood at 268 km2,
twice the amount of clearing as in May 2010.2
On May 25, 2011, leading forest conservationist José Cláudio
Ribeiro da Silva and his wife Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva were
killed in the Amazon state of Pará; this event was followed by the
murders of environmental and land reform activists Adelino Ramos on
May 28 and Obede Loyla Souza on June 15.3
And on the same day as da Silva's murder, Brazil's Chamber of
Deputies, the National Congress's lower house, voted 410-63 in favor
of a bill that would allow individual states to lower the legal
reserve requirement, the percentage of land that a landholder
in the
Amazon is obligated to preserve as rainforest.4
Dilma
Rousseff's administration has decried the series of events, and
articulated a number of government responses that are already in
progress. Soon after the dramatic jump in deforestation was
announced, Brazil's Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira stated
that the government was creating a 'crisis cabinet' to investigate
the causes of the increase; President Rousseff has ordered a federal
investigation of the Amazon assassinations, even though homicides are
normally handled at the state level; and Rousseff considers the
bill's passing a major setback in her agenda, while promising to veto
certain provisions if the bill is approved by the Federal Senate,
Congress's upper house.5
After
decades of virtually ignoring the importance of the Amazon, it is a
relief that Brazil's executive branch finally acknowledges the need
to respond to crimes committed in the region. But these responses,
while necessary, are weak and shortsighted. In order to permanently
and dramatically reduce the rate of deforestation in the Amazon and
ensure the safety of environmental activists, Brazil must
determinedly prosecute the alleged Amazon-based criminals. Of equal
importance, Brazil must effectively address the underlying causes of
deforestation in Brazil, which are the result of a combination of
political and economic forces. Controlling these forces is easier
said than done, but a good start would be to reverse decades-long
policies that encourage
deforestation in the Amazon --- policies that may continue if
Congress passes this latest measure.
History
and background on deforestation in Brazil
The
Amazon rainforest has faced constant deforestation since it was first
colonized on a grand scale in the 1960s; before then, access was
largely restricted due to a lack of public infrastructure. The
infrastructure that eventually arose throughout the region was
designed and built by none other than the Brazilian government, in an
effort to encourage settlement and expand the country's agricultural
sector. One of the government's largest projects was the construction
of the Trans-Amazonian highway in 1972, which proved to be a massive
failure when poor crop yields drove the families that settled along
the highway into debt, and when the road itself proved unstable for
having been built on sedimentary land.6
Since
then, Brazil has continued to encourage the destruction of the
Amazon, even if it has ceased direct destruction of the Amazon
through state projects. Today, one of the most significant causes of
deforestation is Brazil's inability to appropriate land in a way that
preserves the health of the rainforest. Of course, there are a number
of factors that contribute to deforestation that are not under direct
control of the Brazilian government. Tropical land is notoriously
nutrient-poor, and can only live through a few crop cycles before new
land must be cleared. Thus, the expansion of soybean production, for
example, hastens slash-and-burn clearing due to soybeans' natural
tendency to deplete the soil's nutrients at a much faster rate than
other crops. Global prices of crops and livestock are also largely
out of the government's hands, determined mainly by market factors.
So when global beef prices increase, cattle ranching expands,
accelerating deforestation.7
Still, these largely uncontrollable elements are exacerbated by two
underlying factors that are entirely within the government's
jurisdiction: policies related to land tenure, and an utter lack of
law enforcement within the sparsely populated Amazon region.
"Productive
use" and the legal reserve requirement
The
Brazilian constitution (Title VII, Chapter III, Article 191) states
that "The individual who, not being the owner of rural or urban
property, holds as his own, for five uninterrupted years, without
opposition, an area of land in the rural zone, not exceeding fifty
hectares, making it productive with his labor or that of his family,
and having his dwelling thereon, shall acquire ownership of the
land."8
This provision, originally intended to promote development in the
Amazon and provide a livelihood for Brazil's poor, in fact acts as a
destructive force within the region and does little to aid the
underprivileged.
The
"productive use" of this provision is interpreted to mean
that anyone who settles on land and clears it for cattle ranching or
agriculture, in addition to fulfilling the other provisions of the
article, is eligible to earn tenure rights to that land. In other
words, deforestation is basically codified within Brazil's
constitution as an ideal vehicle through which one can attain land.
In contrast, Brazil's 1965 Forest Conservation Law requires that all
landowners within the Amazon preserve 80 percent of their property as
rainforest. Ostensibly, the only way for the rural landless to attain
land ownership in the Amazon while complying with both of these
contradictory laws is to clear as much land as possible without
cutting into the 80 percent legal reserve requirement. But with such
a narrow basis to comply with the law and scanty enforcement of the
legal reserve requirement, much less than 80 percent is preserved in
practice.
Latifundios,
minifundios, and the landless
This
problem is complicated by the fact that the vast majority of
privately owned Amazonian land is not possessed by small rural
families but by large landowners (latifundistas).
In the late 1990s INCRA (Brazil's National Institute for Colonization
and Agrarian Reform) estimated that only 12 percent of Brazil's rural
land is settled by small producers owning 100 hectares or less, yet
those parcels produce 80 percent of the nation's food. In contrast,
43.5 percent of rural land is owned by latifundistas.9
Most of the remaining land is public, unclaimed territory that could
be settled at any time; the rest are indigenous lands, extractive
reserves, and national and state forests.
It
is most likely that since INCRA released its report, the discrepancy
between the percentages of land owned by large vs. small landowners
is even greater, as all signs point to the fact that more land is
falling under the control of fewer individuals. Part of the reason
for this discrepancy is that latifundistas
have more workers who can clear larger areas of land. Since land
clearing acts as a vehicle for land ownership, the result is that, as
a squatter in Pará has stated, "Here the biggest title is the
biggest ax."10
While the constitutional usufruct article only applies to small
landowners (minifundistas)
hoping to acquire no more than fifty hectares, when their wealthier
counterparts clear the land, they acquire it de
facto,
because they prevent the sem
terra (those
without land) from being able to clear the area and acquire it for
themselves.
Some latifundistas
even go so far as to claim land that a minifundista
is already in the process of clearing and putting into "productive
use." Reclamation is usually done by force, and such illegal
land grabs are responsible for much of the rural violence that
plagues the Brazilian Amazon. When minifundistas
are thrown off their land, they move deeper into the Amazon
rainforest and the process repeats itself: small landowners clear
more land in an attempt to attain it permanently, and large
landowners once again claim that same land by force. The statistics
reflect the Amazon's complex and murky land ownership situation. A
study from Imazon, a non-profit research organization, states that
only 14 percent of privately owned land is backed by legal title; the
remaining titles are counterfeit or non-existent.11
Under
such a poorly defined system of tenure, the Amazon rainforest suffers
for two main reasons: 1) potential landowners attempt to lay a
stronger claim to the land by clearing more forest and replacing it
with tangible forms of property (crops, cattle, etc.), and 2) public
areas and unclaimed land are treated poorly, in the same way that
public goods in general are treated poorly; when one clearly owns his
own land, he will tend to preserve it better. For these reasons,
former Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc stated in 2009 that
"Land regularisation is of fundamental importance for halting
deforestation."12
Rural
violence and environmental activism
The
same large landowners and agribusiness interests behind much of the
Amazon's deforestation and the eviction of small landholders are
likely to be behind the murders of environmental activists. While
tragic, the deaths of the da Silvas, Ramos, and Souza are by no means
unprecedented. A 1991 Human Rights Watch report identified hundreds
of murders in the Amazon associated with land conflict and
environmental activism since 1985, and by most accounts, the number
of murders per year has increased over the past 20 years. That same
report indicated that these murders are often "assassination-type
killings targeting specific leaders," carried out by "private
gangs of thugs or gunmen hired by the landowners."13
This modus operandi is exactly what authorities suspect happened in
the Amazon's most recent assassinations. In all cases, the victims
received death threats from loggers and cattle ranchers in the months
and years leading up to their murders. In the case of the da Silvas,
even more evidence points to the hiring of gunmen: each body was
found with one ear missing, presumably for their assassins to point
to as proof to whomever hired them that they indeed killed the
activist and his wife.14
Many
assassinations of environmental activists and rural dwellers go
unpunished in the scarcely policed Amazon rainforest. Most police
chiefs do not have a law degree, a requirement in other areas of the
country, or any training in investigative techniques or forensics.
But corruption and a simple lack of interest are more pertinent
factors than a lack of credentials. Most often the local judicial
system takes slow action or none at all in the investigation of these
murders, either due to indifference or animosity toward rural
activists.15
The result is a shocking degree of impunity. Of the thousands of
killings that have occurred since 1988, fewer than 100 cases have
gone to court. Only about 80 hired gunmen have been convicted.
Fifteen of the men who hired those gunmen have been found guilty, and
only one
of them is still serving a sentence today.16
Given these statistics, and Rousseff's spoken commitment to punishing
those behind the recent string of assassinations, it is no wonder
that the president has ordered a federal, rather than state or local,
investigation.
The
new bill and its backers
Since
powerful agribusiness, logging, and ranching interests are behind
much of the Amazon's deforestation as well as the silencing of
activists, one might suspect Congress's new bill --- which proposes
to essentially suspend the legal reserve requirement, allow farmers
and ranchers with small holdings to clear land closer to river banks
and hilltops, and offer amnesty from harsh fines on farms and ranches
of any size on land cleared before July 2008 --- to have been
introduced and backed by those same interests.17
Surprisingly, the bill was actually introduced by Aldo Rebelo, the
leader of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCDoB). Rebelo holds that
the 1965 Forest Conservation Law needs a serious update, and that
some of the current regulations prevent owners of small tracts of
land from growing enough crops to lift themselves out of poverty.18
Rebelo's
claim to speak for Brazil's rural poor is rather puzzling. Given that
the legal reserve requirement is barely enforced in the first place,
it is hard to believe that it contributes significantly to the poor's
inability to advance socioeconomically. Admittedly, in 2009 the
executive branch began threatening to subscribe to more stringent
enforcement of the legal reserve requirement, so perhaps Rebelo acts
in anticipation of this proposed change in policy. But his choice to
"represent the poor" by doing away with the legal reserve
requirement will likely do nothing but preserve the status quo ---
exactly the opposite of what the rural poor want and need. If the
reserve requirement is eliminated and previous offenders are awarded
amnesty, the government is likely to postpone a thorough
investigation of the Amazonian land situation, as it has done so many
times before, and allow latifundistas
to continue to dominate the state of affairs in the Amazon. Given
this, it is no surprise that agribusiness, logging, and ranching
interests in the Chamber of Deputies have favored the bill so
fervently. Rebelo's proposition only amounts to a short-term economic
fix for Amazonian minifundistas
by allowing them to clear more forest and attempt to lay a stronger
claim to their land. A sounder long-term solution requires the
upholding of laws and law enforcement, so that illegal land grabs and
the constant threat of eviction are no longer a concern for the rural
poor.
Other
solutions
Strengthening
law enforcement and cracking down on environmental crimes are much
easier said than done. The sudden levying of fines and arrests would
meet a great deal of resistance, so any increase in law enforcement
must be gradual. Unfortunately, given the dramatic rise in
deforestation, a gradual change in policy might not be enough to slow
the rate of slash-and-burn clearing. What other solutions might
Brazil pursue, in conjunction with the careful imposition of law
enforcement? One potential, less controversial measure would involve
an expansion of protected areas, indigenous reserves, and national
and state parks, instead of leaving large areas of unclaimed forest
vulnerable to clearing on the part of prospective owners. Of course,
such a measure would need to accompany physical
protection of protected areas in the form of --- once again ---
stronger law enforcement. Another, perhaps slightly more
controversial approach would be to tie compliance with environmental
law to financial credits: for example, cutting off financial credits
to local municipalities in areas responsible for large amounts of
deforestation, and tying increased financial credits to a
municipality's registration of land titles. Such a measure would take
some of the burden and responsibility of sorting out the land
ownership situation off the federal government, and give local
authorities an incentive to sort out the issue themselves. This
measure has already been implemented, with modest success and in
conjunction with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the
Nature Conservancy, in the previously deforestation-prone
municipality of Paragominas. The town's mayor has called for a halt
to deforestation by 2014 and so far the goal still seems feasible.19
Conclusion
What
underlies nearly every problem and every solution to the Amazon's
deforestation problem is the critical need for land regularization
and a stronger justice system that punishes illegal land grabs and
assassinations. Slowing deforestation permanently requires Brazil's
permanent attention to these needs. Ironically, punishing violators
of the legal reserve requirement is less critical. Doing so would do
little to address the underlying causes, will be met with
considerable resistance from the majority of Amazonian dwellers, and
may risk punishing lesser offenders before greater ones. What makes
Congress's new bill so devastating is what it represents: an utter
lack of commitment on the part of Brazil's legislature to adopting
change that would reduce deforestation. Their favoring the new bill
represents an interest in encouraging the national government to step
away from the Amazon and allow the region's myriad problems to
continue unabated. If the Senate passes the bill, they may well send
the message that nothing in the Amazon need change. So far, the
country's generosity of vision has not matched the depth of
commitment required to carry out its enormous responsibility.
Fortunately, Brazil's executive branch is finally demonstrating a
readiness, albeit shaky, to embark on a campaign for much-needed
reform. The world is depending on that pledge --- let us hope that it
does not veer off course.
References
for this article can be found here.
