New Brazil Forest Code Could Put Amazon in Peril, Say Critics

SAO PAULO—Critics of Brazil’s controversial new Forest Code have a few days left to press for changes before the bill will be voted in the legislature on May 10. The bill was originally on the docket for May 3, but it was held over at the 11th hour when the Green Party succeeded in getting an injunction to delay it.

The current Forest Code is a much-hailed environmental piece of legislation that helps protect the Brazilian Amazon (and all other native Brazilian forests) and is seen as the cornerstone of Brazil’s efforts to protect biodiversity and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The code stipulates that farms and settlements must conserve 80 percent of the forest on their land as legal reserves (LAs), and use it for sustainable timber management—in other words they cannot destroy it.

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For the last 12 years, nongovernmental organizations have been fighting to protect this legislation, but representatives of agribusiness, biofuels, and energy sectors—as well as members of Brazil’s Congress that predominantly represent the rural sector—are pushing for dramatic changes to the code.

The new code, spearheaded by communist Congressman Aldo Rebelo, critics say will make it much easier to clear tracks of land for large-scale agribusiness as it reduces the reserve area to 50 percent for large areas, and down to zero percent in small areas of up to 400 hectares (988 acres).

Supporters of the bill say it’s necessary for Brazilian development to move forward. "The goal was to try to regularize the situation of 90 percent of Brazilian producers, who are underground. And, of course, keep the vegetation that we have today in Brazil," Rebelo said on Tuesday in an article on his website.

The WWF estimates that if passed, the Code could see approximately 85 million hectares (210 million acres) of the Amazon destroyed.

That is one major controversy in the law. A second is that it would offer amnesty to anyone who deforestated illegally until July 22, 2008. Critics complain that this allows lawbreakers to keep the profits they have been earning for years from farming on illegal land. What to do with violators has been a bone of contention for years.

Violators of the reserve requirement have never been prosecuted. In December 2009, stiff penalties were to go into effect, but under pressure, then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, passed a decree giving land owners three years to register their lands. Anyone who did not meet the 80 percent reserve requirement, were supposed to enter an agreement with the government to correct the situation. It is estimated that some 3 million landowners are in violation. By June 2011, landowners who failed to register were to face fines and criminal penalties by June 11, 2011.

Daniel Nepstad, who runs the North American branch of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), explains in an interview with Mongabay.com that the Code issue is complex not a black-and-white show-down between environmentalists and farmers.

Nepstad says for one thing, the government has contributed to the public’s frustration on the part of landholders, thus fostering non-compliance.

“Farmers who I have talked with are outraged that their neighbors, who thumbed their noses at the law and converted their cerrado [tropic woodland] or forest reserves to crops or pasture [before July 2008], would be pardoned," said Nepstad.

Researchers have tried to delay the vote on the new code for at least two more years, to give them time to complete a thorough scientific analysis of it and to work out an agreement between Brazilians and the government.

One major flaw of the code, says professor Sergius Gandolfi of the University of São Paulo, is that the proposed reduction and changes in the permanent preservation areas (PPA) and the legal reserve (LR) forests for large properties, “makes no mention of their intentions to restore or reforest the LR on small properties.”

Gandolfi says the drafting of the law lacked transparency. “The urban population, which today represents over 80 percent of Brazilians, was not consulted and was left out. In general, the dialogue that took place was only between environmentalists and ruralists,” he said.

Rebelo denies claims that the reforms only serve narrow interests. "I did not make a report to satisfy a specific corporation, but to serve the interests of the country, which is to reconcile environmental protection with the production of Brazil. And I believe we have achieved these purpose, if not entirely," Rebelo is quoted as saying on Tuesday.

Environmental Impact

Environmentalists warn that if any of these areas are denuded of forest, they will release almost 7 billion tons of carbon stored in native vegetation, equaling 25.5 billion tons of greenhouse gases—13 times more than Brazil’s entire 2007 emissions—according to a study released last November by a coalition of 35 organizations in Brazil called Observatório do Clima (“Climate Observatory”).

A letter cosigned by a group of researchers published in July 2010 in the journal, Science, warns that Brazil could “suffer its most serious environmental decline in a half century, with critical and irreversible consequences beyond the borders of the country."

A report on the Agência FAPESP website—an electronic news agency that reports on science and technology policies in Brazil—says that from a simple analysis of the species-area relationship, one can predict "the extinction of more than 100,000 species, with many losses overriding any commitment to conservational biodiversity.”

"Unfortunately, the reformulation of the code was not made under the aegis of a sound scientific basis, thus, most of the scientific community was not even consulted,” wrote Helena Bonciani Nader of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science and Jacob Palis Jr., former president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, in a letter to Deputy Rebelo.