Why does the brazilian government allow deforestation

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Language English. What is happening? The Amazon is home to the largest remaining rainforest in the world. But the Brazilian government backed by powerful agribusiness interests is poised to open up vast new areas to agriculture and cattle ranching by changing its long-standing forest law. In , the New York Declaration on Forests attempted to establish a similar objective: ending deforestation by after halving it by As many as 40 countries signed it, but Brazil was not one of them.

Even though the New York Declaration was also celebrated , its actual impact was limited. Countries with significant forest coverage, such as Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, have signed — some for the first time. The list of signatories also includes countries like the UK, Japan and Germany — some of the biggest consumers of commodities like palm oil, cattle, soya, cocoa, timber and rubber — the production of which is intrinsically linked to deforestation. The financial sector is also sending signals in favour of reducing deforestation.

Yet, similar to the pledges made by nation states, only time will tell whether these promises manifest in substantive action. But it is actually nothing more than creative accounting. This change would mean that, in the best case scenario, Brazil keeps its original NDC. In the worst case scenario, it would actually allow for more emissions.

It is more evident at a local level, as the case in Mato Grosso illustrates, where a series of scandals showed the implication of politicians and big landowners in illegal timber exploitation or the occupation of public lands. Smallholders generally clear the land themselves. Big farmers may contract specialized firms which provide an underpaid workforce to do the job, sometimes keeping their employees in a situation considered as modern slavery The areas where such situations take place are typical frontier areas, where violence and impunity rule.

Land concentration also frequently happens at that stage, a number of smallholders choosing to sell their plot after having deforested and transformed it into pasture. Ranchers may sell their properties to big farmers who develop mechanized agriculture, or even become farmers themselves. On numerous occasions, land owners do not invest in them, leaving their property barely active, usually because of judicial disputes. The program of agrarian reform stipulates that such properties can be seized by the INCRA and redistributed to landless peasants who may first squat the properties and obtain official ownership afterwards.

In general, such new settlements trigger a new deforestation cycle, especially inside the legal reserves that had been respected until then. The latter blame the former in order to demonstrate that the agribusiness model is an efficient way of managing Brazilian forests. Some big farms do actually have perfectly preserved legal reserves. On the other hand, smallholders, and especially members of movements linked to the agrarian reform, request land redistribution and are opposed to land concentration.

Godar et al. Such findings may explain why the steps taken to contain deforestation are proving less efficient nowadays since they are mainly aimed at big farmers and ranchers. In the region of the Transamazonian highway, Godar et al. Big landowners therefore orient their properties towards large-scale production but they nevertheless save a sufficient portion of land to more or less respect the legal reserve. Smallholders need to deforest almost all of their estate for them to be profitable.

However, as Brondizio and Moran pointed out, different logics may appear depending on the scale of observation and on the regional context. The complexity of these strategies complicates modelization attempts and the observation of current trends Dalla Nora et al. In fact, the installation of colonists in general leads to deforestation.

However, it must be noted that for the last two decades, the land allocated for settlement projects are generally expropriated large properties that have already been partially deforested rather than closed forest areas. The deforestation resulting from agrarian reform settlements is therefore not linked to the colonists themselves. Studies demonstrate that Indigenous territories and strictly protected areas such as national parks and ecological stations are less encroached by deforestation Nolte et al.

In many cases, these inhabitants are no longer able to rely on traditional activities for their subsistence and they are compelled to turn towards other more profitable activities such as cattle ranching. This situation has been well documented in the emblematic Chico Mendes extractive reserve Souza, There has been an intense academic debate on the causes of those peaks and on the responsibilities of given sectors like soybean cultivation, but the reasons for the decrease seem much clearer and consensual.

However, not all the subsequent actions were produced within this plan. They were the fruit of a political agenda which has gradually extended to all the divisions of the Federal government and which produced a wide array of initiatives. This is why, long after its emblematic ambassador was dismissed, deforestation control still remains a major issue in governmental policies. Since , Brazil maintains a program of satellite monitoring of the rainforest that reports deforested areas.

Since , the report, as well as highly precisive geographical information, have been accessible online for free Although it is a very precious instrument, it has several inherent limits. First of all, the data are published annually, which makes it unusable to detect deforestation while it is being done.

Brazil has also been very active in spatial research in order to have its own observation satellite 19 , but the technical and operational obstacles have not yet been completely overcome. The number of fines which were applied increased sharply during the last decade, but their contribution to the decrease of deforestation must be put into perspective as only a very small proportion of them are effectively paid less than 0.

State agencies are not always as strict as the federal administration on illegal deforestation. Based on the PRODES data, 36 counties were identified and underwent important restrictions for instance, loans for agricultural activity were banned until their situation was normalized. The mechanism proved efficient. As we have seen, in the absence of a cadastre, identifying the owners of illegally deforested lands or judging legitimate claims are difficult.

A number of initiatives have been set up to tackle those issues. According to Taravella , one reason for the success of such measures is that they break the mechanism of land speculation. Potential buyers are discouraged to acquire claim titles posses 21 since those may be finally invalidated if localized in protected areas.

The value of those lands theferore diminishes considerably and it is hereafter no longer profitable for the claimer to deforest them. Figure 6: The creation of Federal protected areas in the Amazon by presidential mandate Its adoption has been an important step: for the first time, Brazil explicitly stated which parts of the Amazon were open to agricultural development and which were reserved for environmental conservation.

The zoning plan is based on two different scales. The first designates the use of relatively small areas classified in three different categories: already deforested areas, areas where economic activities are allowed with the condition of maintaining the forest cover and areas reserved for conservation Figure 6.

Table 3: Regions defined in the macro-zoning of the Amazon see figure 6. Pantanal protection, promotion of local culture, traditional activities and tourism. Regularization and innovation of the agro-industrial complex. Planning and consolidation of the logistical integration with the Pacific. Redefinition of productive systems in the Araguaia-Tocantins area. Diversification of the agricultural, forestry and cattle ranching frontier.

Containment of expansion fronts through the creation of protected areas and the promotion of alternative land use. Reinforcement of coastal cities, mining regulation and diversification of the economy. Protection of the forest heartland by developing productive activities. Reinforcement of the Amazon-Caribbean integration corridor.

It mainly focused on 43 counties with high deforestation rates and its final objective was the regularization of , pre claims on federal lands, for an estimated total area of over 15 million of hectares. States governments were also prompted to do the same on state controlled lands. When completed, this geographical database will considerably simplify environmental monitoring and environmental law enforcement in every property.

In case infractions are detected, compensatory measures will be required from land owners who will be clearly and easily identified. Because this crop has had a very bad reputation as a driver of deforestation, they have feared that such an accusation would threaten their image and bar their access to certain foreign markets, especially in Europe.

Furthermore, the whole soybean complex is firmly structured and capitalized, which made a collective reaction possible. The goal of this agreement was to contain soybean cultivation to areas already used for this purpose. It thus prohibited soybean farming in parts of the Amazon that had not already been deforested at that time converting already deforested areas such as pastures into soybean fields was however possible. Signed for a limited period of time, the agreement has been renewed several times.

It is monitored by satellite imagery Rudorf et al. The perspective now is to transform it into a permanent mechanism based on the rural cadastre program CAR. The overall results have been significant since, according to Macedo et al. In the Northern region of Brazil, which is almost completely included in the rainforest biome, the surface area dedicated to soybean cultivation has risen from 0.

As most of these new soybean fields occupy former pastures, new land will probably be sought to raise the cattle that grazed in these pastures, and, as an indirect result, parts of the rainforest will be cleared. Local initiatives try to control this trend by enforcing environmental rules. Table 4: Soy-bean cultivated areas in the Amazonian states. Instead of trying to identify the farmers responsible for illegal deforestation, which proved to be a frustrating and time-consuming task, it concentrated its attention on slaughterhouses and big supermarkets, threatening them of heavy fines if they sold meat produced in illegally deforested areas.

Today, they involve more than 97 slaughterhouses, including very important firms of the meat sector like JBS, the biggest meat producer and processor in Latin America. They have led to a reorganization of the whole meat sector with, for instance, the implementation of livestock traceability in order to prove the origins of the meat processed and sold by supermarkets.

However, this system is far from being perfect as cattle may be bought from one property but have been raised in another, possibly an illegally deforested one. Moreover, the new system has a cost which may be too important for small farmers. The deal imposes that farmers reforest riparian forest areas that have been illegally cleared if they want to sell their production to Syngenta.

Other major NGOs, such as the Socioambiental Institute ISA , have also proposed deals to farmers in order to reduce the environmental impact of farming. However, the effective implantation of such programs proves to be quite tricky.

As underlined by Wunder et al. Choices must therefore be made, even at the cost of establishing territorial injustice. According to the same authors, the best strategy is probably to exclude either the forest heartland, where the pressure to deforest is low, and the agricultural frontier, where the rewards which may be offered would not be high enough to compete with the profits made from cattle ranching or land speculation.

Such programs could accordingly target the fringes of the frontier, where they could orient local activities towards conservation. In their study of the Cruzeiro do sul area, Eloy et al. Limited to 12 regional poles with a few hundreds of families each, it encountered many difficulties and did not end up being generalized.

However, as Hall explained, its weaknesses may serve to illustrate the difficulties found in setting up this kind of program in the Amazon. It was designed to provide a supplementary income for the inhabitants of state protected areas, provided they respect a number of rules and restrictions on certain economic activities.

Since , the federal government has been deploying a similar program nationally, entitled Bolsa verde, in order to benefit inhabitants of the federal protected areas. These people have also been included since in the program of agrarian reform and they are able to access special credit programs for housing improvement or the development of economic activities.

By bringing new perspectives to their inhabitants, such incentives may certainly diminish the pressure put on protected areas. However, as Wunder et al. Brazil was interested in the prospects of funding within this framework, but did not formally commit.

However, its management by the BNDES does not seem optimal: being used to manage large industrial projects, the Bank seems to have difficulties with the types of actors involved in alternative projects NGOs, local communities and associations.

Table 5: Commitments of the Amazon Fund, by subject area. However, their action is not yet very effective, principally due to the lack of financial resources. According to Gebara et al. First of all, deforestation is by far the first source of CO2 emissions in Brazil. Secondly, Brazil considered that signing binding agreements on CO2 emission reductions would lead to international interferences on its domestic policy in the Amazon; it consequently firmly refused to go ahead with these negotiations to shield its sovereignty.

Having apparently managed to control deforestation, Brazil was able to present an excellent carbon balance, with a Brazil is today ahead of these objectives, but there are nevertheless remaining hurdles. Finally, forest degradation and global warming could have triggered a change in the Amazon rainforest ecosystem which could now absorb less carbon than it emits Davidson et al.

But it is still too soon to call it a victory. This means that the ecological and climate impacts will continue to expand. A situation of equilibrium or recuperation which would guarantee that the Amazon rainforest will exist in the future has yet to be reached. The hold of the Federal government on the situation is therefore elusive in certain places and a climate of violence continues to characterize some areas of the Amazon.

Similarly, the policy of forest concessions applied to very large forest blocks may dramatically increase forest degradation, in which the ecological balance is heavily disturbed even if the forest cover remains in place. Concerning deforested areas, the Federal government claims that subsidies for sustainable production are already included as a third step in its plan for controlling deforestation and that intensification is already happening in certain sectors like soybean cultivation.

The potential for such measures is very high: according to Barreto and Silva , if a quarter of Amazonian cattle ranching farms were as productive as their European counterparts, it would be possible to supply the projected increase in meat demand for the next ten years without deforesting more areas. Moreover, there are many degraded lands which could be made productive again.

The Federal government has committed to restore 15 million hectares of such lands, but how this will be done and where is still unclear. However, these initiatives do not seem to sufficiently tackle the main issue at stake, which is that despite its fundamental importance in global and local climate, the Amazonian rainforest on its own has no evident economic value. Many pilot programs put in place during the period were designed to valorize NTFP and did not gain enough momentum to trigger a new economic cycle, with the exception of very few market niches, insufficient to improve the livelihood of more than a handful of local communities.

Araujo C. Arima E. T, Perz S. Arnauld de Sartre X. Arvor D.