Preventing pillage in the rainforest

A scheme to regularise land holdings in the Amazon forest faces many obstacles

GRAND plans to halt the destruction of the Amazon rainforest have come and gone over the years with scant success, so a degree of scepticism about Brazil’s latest scheme seems justified. However, one positive sign is that, this time, the federal government seems to have recognised the importance of working with, rather than against, state governments in the region.

The new plan, discussed at a meeting of state governors and federal officials earlier this month, involves regularising the titles to 80% of the private land holdings in Brazilian Amazonia over the coming three years. This, it is hoped, will encourage the occupants to stay and improve their land instead of abandoning it and moving on to clear the next patch of virgin forest.
Click here to find out more!

A small-scale initiative under way near the village of São Luiz do Anauá in Roraima state provides an illustration of what the scheme hopes to achieve. The local soil is the colour of cement and almost as rich in nutrients. The area was deforested 15 years ago. Cattle ranchers came and went, and for the past few years the land has been unproductive. But now, neat rows of palms sit waiting to be planted, thanks to a biofuels company based in São Paulo.

Brazil lacks a central land register, suffers widespread forgery of title deeds and has a long history of squatters seizing land. A widely-quoted study by Imazon, an NGO, reckoned that only 4% of private land in Amazonia is covered by secure title deeds. Much of the rest has been grabbed in the hope of establishing de facto ownership eventually.

The government’s new scheme is, in principle, simple. Plots of up to 100 hectares (247 acres) will be given to the people farming them. Larger ones, of between 100 and 2,500 hectares, will be sold using various different pricing mechanisms. Plots of over 2,500 hectares will be reclaimed by the government, which is meant to own them anyway. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the minister responsible for the new scheme, believes that solving the problem of insecure land title will “change the economic equation that has made pillage more attractive than either preservation or production in the Amazon.”

In the past, however, similar initiatives have floundered, for a number of reasons. First, state and federal governments have disagreed over who should be responsible for what. The state governors particularly dislike INCRA, a federal agency charged with distributing small plots of land. Eduardo Braga, the governor of Amazonas, says “INCRA abandoned the families it settled on land in the Amazon without electricity or infrastructure.” The agency certainly has a poor record of preventing deforestation on the land it administers.

Second, the existing laws that govern what land can be used and what cannot are confusing and close to unenforceable. In the 1960s and 1970s, farmers were sometimes required to cut down trees as a condition for getting credit from the state. Some token efforts were made to change this regime in the 1980s, and then in 1996 a decree was issued requiring 80% of each plot of land to be preserved as forest, with only 20% to be cultivated or ranched. This law is widely ignored, and when the government has tried to enforce it, it has often met with strong resistance from the men with the chainsaws. Given this history of mutual antagonism, the process is unlikely to be smooth.

Still, some of these problems have been resolved in the new plan, which has the force of law via a presidential decree. On a federal level, the Ministry for Agrarian Development will handle some of the implementation, taking it away from INCRA, which could be described politely as troubled. Mr Unger, a former Harvard law professor, seems to have succeeded in charming the governors of the states in the Amazon into a more co-operative mood. “We have Obama’s teacher here,” says José de Anchieta Júnior, the governor of Roraima, while addressing a public meeting in the state. “Things are looking up.”

Nevertheless, there is a risk that the scheme, by making it easier to get secure title for dubious land claims, might somehow stimulate demand for virgin forest land, not damp it. And, as ever, enforcing the rules will be the difficult bit. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government has shown an indulgent attitude to violations of property rights elsewhere in the country by the Landless Movement, making it an unlikely guardian of them now. The new scheme is not bound to fail, but the sceptics will take a bit more convincing.

http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13184683