Source: OneWorld
Press Release
New threat to Amazon as Brazilian legislators lay siege to forest law
The Amazon is facing an urgent new threat as legislators allied to agribusiness interests and landowners seek to drastically weaken conservation requirements of the country’s Forest Law.
Brazil’s Forest Law determines how much land the landowner can deforest and how much must be kept as a "legal reserve". Currently in the Amazon, the law states that 80% of a property has to remain forested by law but under new proposals, this could be reduced.
Brazil's deforestation track record has improved dramatically in the last few years, and even with very patchy enforcement, the Forest Code has been credited with playing major role in bringing down deforestation in the Amazon from the levels that horrified the world in the 1980s.
Any change in the law could have an impact on Brazil’s ambitious plans to slash deforestation rates and have the knock on effect of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. This would make the country’s action plan on climate change impossible as it relies on continued reductions in deforestation related emissions.
Sarah Hutchison, forest programme manager for Brazil at WWF-UK, said: “The Brazilian government implemented progressive measures to start to address the impacts of deforestation, but these proposed changes to the legislation will have major implications for the future of the Amazon rainforest.”
The attack on the Forest Code could come to a head today (June 29) in the Congress, with the so-called “ruralist block” (congressmen representing agribusiness and landowners) trying to push for the law to be made more flexible, a move that could result in increased deforestation. In a parliamentary special commission report they claim that this law is holding back economic prosperity.
If the Special Committee on Forest Law Change accepts the report, it will then go to the parliament for a vote which is expected to back the need for changes. A presidential veto of the change is considered unlikely in the charged atmosphere of the run-up to Brazilian presidential and legislative elections that will take place in October.
According to WWF, Brazilian agribusiness needs to increase its productivity levels rather than continuously deforest new land that is often later abandoned. A report presented by WWF, Greenpeace and other NGOs in May point to the Forest Code not being a barrier to agricultural growth and economic prosperity.
It looked at one of the legal reserves required under the Forest Code - the Permanent Preservation Areas - that are required to protect the margins of waterways, and vegetation on steep slopes, on hilltops and in high altitude areas. A detailed analysis conducted by the respected agricultural college of the University of Sao Paulo showed that the existence of these reserves has a negligible impact on agricultural production in some of Brazil's leading coffee, grape, rice and fruit producing areas. And this does not take into consideration the important role these reserves play in protecting river and water quality, and reducing soil erosion and the risk from landslides and floods.
While Brazil has had some success reducing deforestation in the Amazon, other lesser known natural habitats are also under threat if the Forest Law is amended. They include the endangered Atlantic Forests and high savannah areas of the Cerrado, headwaters of many significant Amazon tributaries and the source of the springs for the Pantanal wetlands and Paraguay River.
If the amendments become law, effective control of deforestation will pass from strong Federal legislative control to a piecemeal state by state approach. Under this scenario, a strong upsurge in deforestation is expected, raising again the spectre of “the Amazon is burning” which became a celebrated cause internationally and helped form the basis of a structure of international environmental conventions and institutions.
“Discussions should have been based on science, not on oblique and distorted arguments,” added Carlos Alberto de Mattos Scaramuzza, conservation director of WWF-Brazil. “The scientific community has been very little consulted in the preparation of the parliamentary special commission report.”
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