After ten years of the Forest Code, 0.01% of rural properties adhere to regularization

by

The victory went to the ruralist congressional caucus when, on May 25, 2012, a new Forest Code was sanctioned by then-President Dilma Rousseff.​

Despite having reduced environmental protection requirements, the new legislation provided for an instrument to enable rural landowners to comply with the new rules: the CAR (Rural Environmental Registry). The tool, to be implemented by the states in partnership with the federal government, would dictate the steps towards the recomposition of illegally deforested areas on rural properties.

Ten years later, only 28.6 thousand of the 6.5 million registered properties were analyzed, according to data from the SFB (Brazilian Forest Service), which represents less than 0.5% of the properties.

But the final objective of the register is even further away: after the analysis and validation of the registers, comes the phase of adhesion to the Environmental Regularization Program.

According to the SFB, 52% of the 6.5 million registered people have already asked to adhere to environmental regularization. However, only 1,169 terms of commitment were signed across the country, which corresponds to 0.01% of registered properties.

The data were extracted from the annual report “Where Are We in Forest Code Implementation?”, published at the end of the year by the Climate Policy Initiative, and are also cited in an internal SFB report to which the Sheet had access.

The agreements were signed in four states: Pará, Mato Grosso, Rondônia and Acre. In addition to these, only two other states have a technological solution implemented for environmental regularization: Bahia and Mato Grosso do Sul, which use self-declared commitments and were not included in the analysis of the Climate Policy Initiative.

THE Sheet found that the computational module that allows the management of environmental regularization has not yet been implemented by the SFB in the states that depend on federal technical support.

The operational system of environmental regularization allows the elaboration of the term of commitment so that the rural owner adapts to the law, making, for example, the recomposition or compensation of deforested areas of Legal Reserve (land quota that must be conserved with native vegetation, with rates that vary according to the biome) and the recovery of Permanent Preservation Areas (the APPs, which correspond to river banks, hilltops and slopes).

The sluggishness worsened with the relocation of positions made in the last year through decrees 10,662/21 and 10,827/21 by the Ministry of Agriculture – responsible for the CAR system since the SFB was transferred from the environmental portfolio, at the beginning of the Bolsonaro government.

With the new decree, the SFB’s information technology board stopped working with a focus on CAR management and started to meet demands from the entire Ministry of Agriculture, which led to overload and instabilities in the system, according to state government sources.

The so-called streamlined analysis tool, which allows for the automation of the evaluation of records through georeferencing, has been paralyzed since March, according to the Sheet found out.

Technicians who use Sicar (Rural Environmental Registration System) say they fear the collapse of the registration management system. Sought by the report, the Ministry of Agriculture did not comment.

Among the properties registered throughout the country, there are 4.7 million hectares of APPs that need to recompose their native vegetation and 37.9 million hectares in the case of Legal Reserve areas, according to the SFB.

“In states where the main activity is livestock, the resistance [à regularização ambiental] seems to be even greater, since the recovery of the areas depends on the fencing of the areas and the producer has no interest in recovering the vegetation in a productive way, with agroforestry systems”, evaluates the report of the Climate Policy Initiative.

The CAR registration receipt is a legal requirement for access to rural credit and agricultural insurance, but the condition does not imply the validation phase. As an incentive to implement the CAR, the 2020/21 Crop Plan provides for an increase in the credit limit by 10% for producers whose registrations have been validated (not only registered).

Despite this, the government’s internal assessment is that the benefits do not compete with the costs of regularization and with the low effectiveness of inspection actions, which do not enforce what was established by law. The diagnosis was produced at the beginning of the year by the SFB in partnership with Giz, a German technical cooperation agency.

Lack of landowner engagement, meager regularization agreements, lack of institutional capacity, incomplete state regulations and legal uncertainty complete the bottlenecks in the SFB diagnosis.

While the implementation of the main instrument of the Forest Code suffers from management obstacles in the Executive, Congress receives new attempts to make the legislation more flexible. In the Chamber, there are 90 bills in progress related to amendments to the Forest Code. In the Senate, two projects already have a favorable report for voting by the Agriculture Committee.

One of them, authored by Senator Irajá (PSD-TO), proposes to change the most controversial provision of the Forest Code, which came to be judged by the Federal Supreme Court: the amnesty for illegal deforestation in rural properties. By law, the deadline for the property to negotiate environmental regularization, without being punished, is 2008. The senator proposes to extend this deadline to 2012.

For the lawyer and senior consultant on socio-environmental law at the IDS (Democracy and Sustainability Institute), André Lima, the Forest Code needs to move in the opposite direction: implementing, rather than amending the law.

“It is necessary to immediately cancel the registrations of properties overlapping with indigenous lands, conservation units and public forests, to remove any expectation of the right to land regularization in these areas whose laws prevent regularization”, points out Lima.

It also proposes that the CAR be used to remotely, automatically and at scale hold environmental offenders to account.

“Just as the system of accountability for traffic offenders operates today in an agile and effective way”, he compares. The IDS proposals will be taken to a public hearing convened by the Senate for the morning of this Wednesday (25), for the tenth anniversary of the CAR.

You May Also Like

Recommended for you