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.”
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS