The Amazon rainforest is considered one of the world’s most important natural defenses against global warming because of its ability to absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide.However, due to deforestation, it is estimated that about 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been lost and the forest continues to shrink steadily. Currently Brazil houses more than 60% of the Amazon rainforest.
For decades, Brazil’s forests, including the Amazon, have benefitted from strict regulations that recognized the importance of protecting the world’s largest equatorial forest. In fact, Brazil’s 1965 Forestry Code (“Forest Code”),has been considered one of the world’s toughest environmental laws. See Law 4.771, 15 September 1965. Online studies suggest that the Forest Code has dramatically slowed deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.
However, the Brazilian government until recently rarely enforced the code and authorities are still underemployed and lack the resources needed to fully enforce the regulations. There are just 1,400 federal environmental police to cover Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, which occupies an area about the size of half of the United States. In 2008, the Brazilian government began using satellite imagery to track the destruction and deploy environmental police into areas where deforestation was notably happening. With the advancement in enforcement methods, deforestation within the Amazon hit its lowest recorded level from August 2010 through July 2011.
As the above graph illustrates, the annual deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen since the 1980’s with the most dramatic decrease following 2004.
Over the past several years there has been a major push for revisions and changes to Brazil’s 1965 Forestry Code. As a result, in 2012, the Brazilian Congress passed important legislation amending provisions of the 1965 Forestry Code. The proposed amendments loosened environmental protection and regulation that had existed previously under the 1965 Forestry Code.
The proposed bill immediately created worldwide debate and placed an enormous amount of pressure on the Brazilian government. Environmentalists, the Brazilian Academy of Science, and even the Catholic Church have all stepped forth in opposition of the proposed bill. Avaaz, a world-wide activist group, collected more than two million signatures of people from dozens of countries demanding a total veto of the bill by Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff. These groups all want to ensure continued protection of the Amazon forest and contend that the proposed legislation will lead to increased deforestation and destruction of the Amazon.
Those who support the bill said it gives long-needed help to smaller farmers and ranches forced off the land by strong environmental restrictions. In addition, supporters contend that lessening environmental restrictions on landowners will lead to higher production of food, crops, and other resources for Brazil and ultimately promote economic growth. More specifically, advocates of change have found that current forestry regulation has undermined investment in the agriculture sector, which accounts for more than 5% of Brazil’s GDP.
In response to the struggle between environmental protection and economic growth, President Rousseff line item vetoed 12 articles within the bill and proposed 32 alterations to language within the bill. As a result, towards the end of 2012 a new Brazilian “decoded” Forestry Code was passed into law.
The original version of the bill passed by the Brazilian Congress in April 2012 attempted to greatly reduce environmental protections that had been in place for over 70 years. It would have allowed areas of the country, which had been illegally logged before 2008, to be opened up to farming with little regard to replenishing what had been removed. The most contentious part of the bill removed restrictions on maintaining strips of forest along river-banks and allowed farming closer to the rivers, reducing some distances from 100 meters to as little as 15 meters.
However, the new forest code does come with some protection. The new forest code requires landowners to participate in a registry, whereby they declare the location of their holdings to the Brazilian government. This enables authorities to better distinguish between legal and illegal deforestation and track compliance with environmental regulations. Landowners who fail to comply in turn face penalty.
The revised code also requires large landowners to reforest land they had illegally cleared but conversely waters down similar protection regulations for smaller farmers. This exception for smaller landowners is in response to President Rousseff’s goal to help aid smaller, poor farmers and ranchers in the Amazon and throughout Brazil.
Although a revised Forestry Code has ultimately been adopted in Brazil, much opposition still exists. Those advocates opposing the amended Forestry Code contend that the detrimental impacts to the Amazon are already becoming clear. Some indicate that deforestation rates have shot up nearly 28% from August 2012 to July 2013.
Recently, Brazil’s lead public defender, an independent government advocate charged with protecting the rights of citizens under the Brazilian Constitution, brought constitutional challenges to 39 provisions of the revised forest code. At the heart of the argument is the Brazilian government’s constitutional duty to protect an ecologically balanced environment for the benefit of current and future generations.
The 2014 constitutional challenges to Brazil’s amended Forestry Code will set important precedent for Brazilian environmental law and generally for the protection of arguably the worlds most important forest system. It will be interesting to see what the future holds concerning this legislation as there is a difficult but important balance to find between sustainable economic growth and environmental responsibility.