Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has approved a controversial law granting land rights to squatters in the Amazon that campaigners fear will result in a further increase in deforestation.
The law is one of the most divisive decisions of Lula’s two terms in office, with the president coming under intense pressure from environmental groups and the powerful agricultural lobby.
Marcelo Furtado, Greenpeace’s campaigns manager in Brazil, said the approval showed that Brazil’s policy on global warming was contradictory.
“On one hand Brazil is setting targets for the reduction of carbon emissions and on the other opening up more areas for deforestation,” Furtado said.
Brazil’s government says more than 1 million people will benefit from the law, which covers 67.4 million hectares of land, an area roughly the size of France. It believes the law will reduce violent conflicts by giving people ownership of the land they live on and will make it easier to track down those illegally felling trees.
But environmentalists — who have dubbed it the “land-grabbers bill” — fear the new rules will offer a carte blanche for those wanting to make money by destroying the Amazon.
They say the law effectively provides an amnesty for those who have devastated the Amazon over the last 40 years. Around 20 percent has been lost, according to environmental campaigners, and deforestation globally causes nearly a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions.
“This measure perpetuates a 19th century practice [of Amazon destruction] instead of taking us towards a new 21st century strategy of sustainable development,” Furtado said.
He said the law — originally intended to benefit impoverished farmers in the Amazon — now benefited wealthy farmers.
The result, he said, was “a law which will not help increase governance [or] social justice but which simply raises the risk of more deforestation.”
Under the new law, small landowners who can prove they occupied lands before December 2004 will be handed small pieces of land for free, while large areas will be sold off at knockdown rates.
The government hopes this will help bring order to a region where land disputes often result in violent clashes and murder.
Human rights groups also criticized the law, saying unscrupulous Amazon ranchers, who often exploit slave labor, stood to gain from the new rules.
Faced with a vocal campaign against the measure, Lula accused “the NGOs [of] ... not telling the truth.”
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