•  rio de janeiro
• Thursday, May 26, 2011
• Inter Press Service

The same day that the lower house of the Brazilian Congress approved a reform of the forestry code that would make it easier to clear land in the Amazon jungle for agriculture, a husband and wife team of activists who spent years fighting illegal deforestation in the rainforest were murdered. After several delays, the revised forest code was approved by the Chamber of Deputies late Tuesday, by a vote of 410 to 63, with one abstention.

Introduced by Communist Party lawmaker Aldo Rebelo, the reform of the 1965 forestry code is, in the view of environmentalists, the first major defeat for President Dilma Rousseff, as the parties allied with her left-wing Workers' Party did not vote in a bloc with it on this question.

'This vote represents the biggest setback to Brazil's environmental legislation in decades,' Raul Silva Telles do Valle, assistant coordinator of the Socioenvironmental Institute, told IPS. 'It's a law that looks to the past, not the future,' WWF-Brazil's conservation director Carlos Alberto de Mattos Scaramuzza told IPS.

If the revised forest code is approved by the Senate and signed into law by Rousseff, it will make it impossible for Brazil to meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets, do Valle said. The new code would grant an amnesty on fines to landowners who illegally chopped down forest on their property, as long as the deforestation took place before July 2008 and the farm is 400 hectares or less in size.

The new law on land use would also reduce the amount of forest that farmers must preserve, while allowing them to cut trees along rivers and on hilltops and hillsides. 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.

Rousseff has threatened to veto the amnesty portion of the law. The vote symbolically coincided with the shooting deaths of José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva, 52, and Maria do Espírito Santo, 51, leaders of the Projeto de Assentamento Agroextrativista Praialta Piranheira, a nature reserve where they had worked for 24 years, fighting illegal deforestation for charcoal production and cattle-raising.

Their family said they were ambushed on Tuesday morning by gunmen in the municipality of Nova Ipixuna in the northern Amazon state of Pará. The two environmentalist farmers had received death threats for their activism against illegal tree felling in the area.

'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,' Greenpeace Brazil ecologist Paulo Adario told the press.

Do Valle said the congressional vote and the double murder were the work of 'the same political movement that sees environmental conservation as a barrier to growth - the most retrograde' sectors of agricultural producers who 'defend an 18th century model' of production

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.

But the law is not enforced. Rebelo argues that the amnesty on fines would make it possible to legalise 90 percent of rural properties that are in violation of the regulations.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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