Sad news for the Amazon Rainforest

The Brazilian Congress yesterday approved a reform of its forestry code, making it easier to clear land in the Amazon for agriculture, passed by a large majority, although yet to be approved by the Senate or signed into law by the President.

The new code will grant an amnesty on fines to landowners who were involved in illegal deforestation on their property before July 2008, if and the farm is 400 hectares or less in size. It would also retroactively legalise the clearing of land that is used for agricultural purposes, tree plantations, or rural and eco-tourism, if it was deforested before July 2008.

In its current form, the forest code sets out how much of their land farmers can clear. Eighty percent of the forest must be left intact on property in the Amazon jungle, 35 percent in tropical savannah zones within what is known as the "legal Amazon" – which encompasses the nine Brazilian states partially or totally covered by rainforest – and 20 percent in the rest of the country.

Perhaps more significantly in environmental terms, however, is the fact that the new law on land use will also affect the use and abuse of the forest from now on: reducing the amount of forest that farmers have a legal responsibility to preserve, while allowing the cutting down of trees along rivers, on hilltops and hillsides.

In a particularly sad turn of events, on the same day as the parliamentary vote, a married actitivist couple, leaders of a nature reserve in Nova Ipixuna in the northern Amazon state of Pará. According to their family, the two environmentalist farmers had received death threats for their activism against illegal tree felling in the area.

According to Greenpeace ecologist Paulo Adario, "Brazil woke up to the news of the murders of two leading environmental activists, and it's going to bed with the murder of the forest code."

According to Aldo Rebelo, the Communist Party parliamentarian who introduced the law, he is acting in Brazil's "national interests", and making it possible to legalise 90 percent of rural properties that are in violation of the regulations. It will also allow the massive agri-businesses that dominate the economy to make larger profits.

A total of 700,000 hectares were deforested in Brazil's Amazon jungle in 2009 and 2010, the lowest level of destruction since records on deforestation began to be kept in 1988. But a government report whose preliminary results were released on May 19 stated that from August 2010 to April 2011, deforestation rose 27 percent with respect to the same period the year before, with the destruction especially concentrated in the soy-growing western state of Mato Grosso – a phenomenon that the government blames on expectations that an amnesty would be approved.

Of Brazil's 5.3 million square kilometres of jungle, 1.7 million square kilometres are currently protected.

See what we do to protect the Amazon Rainforest in Peru.