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Brazil moves closer to legitimizing illegal land-grab in the Amazon mongabay.com May 17, 2009
Under the bill, which passed Brazil's Chamber of Deputies Thursday and is now headed to the Senate, a claimant could gain title for properties up to 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) provided the land was occupied before December 2004. Environmentalists fear the legislation could spark deforestation if it fails to include environmental provisions. "Without environmental guarantees, the message we would be sending the world is that we are giving land titles away with one hand and a chainsaw with the other," Environment Minister Carlos Minc was quoted as saying by AFP. "It would be a license to deforest."
"When there are 300,000 people occupying land irregularly, there is no one to fine and make responsible if they don't respect environmental legislation." Land-grabbing has been a major source of social conflict in the so-called Arc of Deforestation, the frontier where most forest clearing is occurring in the Amazon. Typically land invasions are financed by developers seeking to expand holdings, convert forest for cattle pasture, or capitalize on fast-appreciating land prices (cleared land is worth substantially more than forest). Squatters — often transmigrants from the poor northeastern part of the country — are paid to occupy the land until it can be developed by well-capitalized entities registered in under another name. Private (legal forest reserves) and public lands are targeted. Related Beef consumption fuels rainforest destruction
(02/16/2009) Nearly 80 percent of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon results from cattle ranching, according to a new report by Greenpeace. The finding confirms what Amazon researchers have long known – that Brazil's rise to become the world's largest exporter of beef has come at the expense of Earth's biggest rainforest. More than 38,600 square miles has been cleared for pasture since 1996, bringing the total area occupied by cattle ranches in the Brazilian Amazon to 214,000 square miles, an area larger than France. The legal Amazon, an region consisting of rainforests and a biologically-rich grassland known as cerrado, is now home to more than 80 million head of cattle. For comparison, the entire U.S. herd was 96 million in 2008.
How to save the Amazon rainforest
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