- A bill that would reduce the amount of primary forest that landowners in the Brazilian Amazon must preserve may lead to the deforestation of an area twice the size of Rio de Janeiro state.
- The bill has been tailored for the interests of the agribusiness lobby by permitting an increase in legal deforestation and would bring regulation of the Amazon closer to that of the heavily deforested Cerrado savanna biome.
- For environmental organizations, its potential approval would undermine Brazil’s stated goals of reducing carbon emissions and putting an end to deforestation by 2030.
After pushing bills against Indigenous land rights and the protection of native grasslands, the Brazilian Congress may approve a proposal that hits the core of the country’s main environmental legislation: the Forest Code. The proposal was supposed to be voted on in early May at a Senate committee, but was postponed amid the national commotion over the unprecedented floods in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, which killed more than 160 people.
“We hope that this disaster, unlike other disasters, will have a more permanent effect on Congress in terms of approving projects that set the environment back,” Maurício Guetta, legal adviser at Instituto Sociambiental (ISA), an NGO that advocates for environmental and Indigenous rights, told Mongabay. “But normally what we see is that at first there is this self-restraint, but then the bills are taken up again.”
The Rio Grande do Sul flooding, one of the country’s worst environmental tragedies, may not be enough to prevent the approval of the bill, which aims to reduce the amount of primary forest that landowners in the country’s Amazonian region are required to preserve.
Known as the legal reserve, it currently stands at 80% of a property’s total area, but would be reduced to just 50% if the new bill passes.
The proposal is part of the so-called Destruction Package, a set of 28 measures pushed by the agribusiness caucus that includes the “time frame” provision (marco temporal in Portuguese), which threatens the demarcation of Indigenous territories, the “Poison Bill,” which slashes regulations on pesticides (both already signed into law), and a bill that loosens environmental licensing rules.
Despite its stated public commitments, the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has had little luck pushing its environmental agenda through Congress, where it has repeatedly come up short against the powerful agribusiness lobby.
Lawmakers are also analyzing a bill that would leave all the country’s non-forestry vegetation unprotected, affecting an area twice the size of the U.K., and another that could slash the budget of IBAMA, the federal environmental protection agency, by 25%.
Reducing Amazon’s legal reserve, however, is one of the most critical measures of the package. If approved, it could be adopted by municipalities and states where more than 50% of the total area is covered by conservation units, Indigenous lands, and areas under the control of the armed forces. Currently, the Forest Code already foresees this kind of flexibility, but only for states with more than 65% of their area covered by conservation units and Indigenous Lands — military areas do not count, and only state governments can authorize the change.
“In addition to the risk of increasing deforestation, you have another absurdity, which is opening up the possibility for the municipality to carry out the environmental zoning and defining the size of the legal reserve,” Nilto Tatto, leader of the environmental caucus in Brazil’s lower house of Congress, told Mongabay. “This is even unconstitutional,” he added.
According to the Forest Code Observatory, a nonprofit network tracking the progress of the legislation, the bill could lead to the deforestation of 8.5 million hectares (21 million acres) in 38 municipalities across three Amazonian states, an area double the size of the state of Rio de Janeiro.
“Without a doubt, the approval of the bill would mean the nonfulfillment of Brazilian goals, such as zero deforestation by 2030 and the commitments assumed in the Paris Agreement,” Guetta said.
Brazil’s Ministry of Environmental and Climate Change said the bill’s approval may “contribute considerably to reaching the point of no return for the Amazon Rainforest,” referring to the stage at which the forest would transform into a drier and less biodiverse ecosystem.
The bill brings the regulation of the Amazon closer to that of the Cerrado savanna biome, where the legal reserve is only 20% and where, unlike on Amazon, deforestation remains out of control even after Lula took office in 2023.
Under such loosened regulation, deforestation control falls under federal and state governments responsible for issuing clearing permits, under which rural producers can legally deforest their areas. According to Brazilian environmental news outlet ((o))eco, half of the 1.1 million hectares (2.7 million acres) of deforestation that took place in the Cerrado in 2023 was legal.
“The environment knows no legal boundaries. For environmental purposes, whether it is within the legal limits or not makes no difference. The impact is the same,” Guetta said.
The bill, authored by the Senator Jaime Bagattoli of the ruralist caucus, was tailored to address agribusiness concerns over the European Union’s antideforestation law, which will ban imports of deforestation-linked products. Major agribusiness associations, such as the National Agriculture Confederation (CNA) and the Brazilian Association of Soybean Producers (Aprosoja), say that while Europeans can demand a zero-illegal deforestation policy, banning products grown in legally deforested areas would constitute an assault on Brazil’s sovereignty.
In his proposal, Bagattoli argues the legal reserve is an obstacle to the development of Amazonian municipalities, and that the bill will help their economic development. “It’s a short-term vision of making the most of resources in a short space of time, even if in the medium and long term the activity itself is at risk because of climate change,” Tatto said.
If approved by the Senate’s Constitution and Justice Committee, the bill must pass through the Environmental Commission before going to the lower house.
Banner image: Extensive cattle ranch Estância Bahia, in Água Boa, Mato Grosso state. Image © Daniel Beltrá/Greenpeace.
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