Ten years later, the Forest Code showed the potential to bring information about the country and has also been demonstrating its limitations, some of which had already been pointed out at the time of its constitution.
The law — still far from being fully complied with and initially highly contested in the environmental spheres — is now defended amid attempts to expand on previously highly criticized points.
The 2012 code comes in the context of consecutive years of declines in Amazon deforestation and growing political power and agribusiness influence.
According to Raoni Rajão, a researcher at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais), there was already a warning at the time that the document, as it came into force, would promote a major amnesty, leading to new forest clearings and more amnesties in the future.
The researcher recalls that, at the time of approval, there was a split in environmental civil society. While one party argued that the code could not advance the way it was, the other accepted the idea of ”passing a ruler” in the past and initiating a zero illegal deforestation mentality.
According to Izabella Teixeira, Minister of the Environment at the time of the construction and approval of the code, the context began at the end of the FHC administration, already with signs of polarization between the environmental area and agriculture.
Teixeira says that, in the discussions in Congress, there was not a robust environmental bench, compared to the agro. Political agreements were negotiated, in addition to the management of the internal dispute between the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture. There was also pressure from lobbies across the country.
“Environmentalists don’t like to talk about it, but we didn’t have the vote to face it. And I had to make alliances, with the Planalto Palace [governo Dilma Rousseff] helping to lead this, with part of agribusiness and family farming”, says the former minister. “Obviously the law has imperfections. It’s about the negotiation process, what’s possible.”
Rajão agrees with the idea of the pact around the code. “But the question is: was this pact fulfilled?”, he asks. “It wasn’t, and it happened exactly what civil society and the scientific community were warning about. [sobre grandes anistias a desmatamento].”
In the years that followed the entry into force of the new code, the Amazon, in particular, began to show increasing deforestation trends until it exploded, recently, under the Jair Bolsonaro government and reached more than 13,000 km² devastated in the last measurement made by Inpe. (August 2020 to July 2021 period).
Roberta Del Giudice, executive secretary of the Forest Code Observatory, says that, at the time the new code was being built, it seemed that it was possible to guarantee greater environmental protection. She gives as an example the “ladder” rule, according to which the size of the APP (Permanent Preservation Areas, such as river banks) varies according to the size of the property.
“Today we have a permanent preservation area of five meters. Five meters does not provide effective protection for water quality or for the formation of ecological corridors, it is very little”, says the researcher.
There was also a weakening of the pact made during the construction of the code, says Teixeira. One of the points that would have led to this would be the action in the STF (Supreme Federal Court) of civil society organizations questioning the constitutionality of the code – the court considered most of the law constitutional, including the amnesty for environmental crimes prior to 2008.
The former minister says that a second point of weakness in the current code occurred when, at the beginning of the Bolsonaro government, the Brazilian Forest Service — and, consequently, the CAR (Rural Environmental Registry) — moved from the Ministry of the Environment to that of Agriculture. .
“A dysfunctional model was created, which is strictly concerned with property regulation, without having any intelligence on land use, biodiversity conservation, climate security and socio-environmental aspects.”
In recent years, President Jair Bolsonaro has bet on speeches that question the growing destruction in the Amazon. In addition, he openly defends mineral exploration in indigenous lands, areas with extremely high levels of conservation, in addition to their socio-environmental importance.
“The code really changed perspective,” says Del Giudice. “The anti-environmental discourse of recent years makes this code the best possible piece in this scenario. We still face a systematic attack in the National Congress with bills that reduce legal protection.”
Congress passed a bill that amends the code and authorizes municipalities to define the size of the area to be protected around rivers. The text was sanctioned by Bolsonaro.
But the document generated much more information about the country, thanks in large part to the CAR. Although there are already old initiatives involving the rural cadastre, the idea was only universalized with the Forest Code, says Raoni Rajão. “We cannot ignore that a base with 6.5 million producers has emerged.”
The UFMG researcher, however, points out that there has been a stagnation, including technological, of the processes related to CAR. There is, for example, a long delay in validating the records made, which makes it difficult to progress to the next stages, such as environmental regularization processes.
Isabella Teixeira says that another important point of the code was to make it possible to obtain information used in the restoration design of the Brazilian climate target, which was presented in 2015 for the signing of the Paris Agreement.
According to Rajão, it is now necessary to overcome the problems of regulation and implementation of the code (such as the recovery of areas on private properties), in addition to aligning with other policies that affect the environmental issue. One of them is bank credit for use in agribusiness, for example.
“The producer goes and deforests, and the bank doesn’t ask if he has a license to do that. Why not? I can’t finance something linked to a potential crime, and today it’s very easy to know if a specific area is being deforested or not. “, says Rajo.
Regardless of the current situation of application of the code, the deforestation bill is already felt. For example, in the highly degraded and deforested southern portion of the Amazon, the rainfall period has already been profoundly altered, losing a month of rainfall and, consequently, impacting agricultural production —which, for decades, had been predicted.
