New forest law may doom South American jewel

BRAZIL'S farmers are a force to be reckoned with. Rightly so. For good or ill, they are the first people in the world to master prairie-style agriculture in the tropics. They have made their country a leading exporter of soya, beef, chicken, sugar, tobacco, bio-ethanol and orange juice.

So when they come up against environmentalists we can expect fireworks. That is why the debate in Brazil over a proposed reform of its prime conservation legislation, the Forest Code, has proved so fraught. And why a deal on the code, likely to be signed off by the Brazilian House of Representatives this week and sent to President Dilma Rousseff for final approval, is so important.

As it stands, the code requires farmers to leave at least 20 per cent of their land uncultivated, and 80 per cent in the Amazon. These figures are not up for negotiation, but the reform does include a controversial amnesty that will let famers continue to farm illegally cleared land.

Outside Brazil, we have heard a lot from environmentalists about how the reform will water down the code. WWF says it "could see vast areas of tropical forest in the Amazon and elsewhere destroyed".

This seems unlikely. The new code won't change the 80-per-cent rule. And the doom-laden rhetoric ignores the good news that Brazil has reduced Amazonian deforestation rates by a remarkable 75 per cent since 2004, or that half its land area is in publicly protected reserves.

So what do the farmers say? K?tia Abreu, the feisty president of the Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock, insists that Brazil's increasing economic development ? in considerable part a result of its booming agribusiness ? is finally bringing the rule of law to the jungle. The reform of the Forest Code is, she says, part of that process.

Currently, most of her members are outlaws. Nine out of ten farmers do not obey the code. Abreu points out that the code was imposed arbitrarily by a military government in 1965 and has never been subject to democratic vote. The new code is designed to bring farmers within the law by absolving them of their past crimes, provided they agree to replant some of the illegally felled trees or to permanently preserve land elsewhere. However, the restitution will only be partial, and that's where the real dispute with greens arises.

A rigorous enforcement of the existing code would, Abreu says, require farmers to give up 70 million hectares of land. Under a deal done in recent months, the land earmarked for restitution will be just 30 million.

"Vast areas" won't, as WWF claims, be cut down. But 40 million hectares will no longer have to be restored. "It's a compromise. It's not what I would choose, but I am forced to agree, and I accept it," says Abreu. She adds that billions of dollars of agricultural output will be lost under the deal.

It is not just in the Amazon that reforms to the Forest Code are causing concern. Last year, I visited the Cerrado , a rich savannah grass and woodland ecosystem 15 times the size of England, wrapped round the Amazon rainforest and almost as rich in species. Or it was. While the Amazon is being saved, the Cerrado is being ploughed up at a prodigious rate to grow soya, corn, cotton and much else. Half has gone already, the rest is mostly rough pasture. Few Brazilians consider it worth saving.

Most of the Cerrado farmers I met admitted that they did not abide by the Forest Code. Maybe they will knuckle down to the new one, especially if legislators fulfil their promises to prevent traders buying from illegal farms. We should not kid ourselves this will save the Cerrado, though. More likely, by requiring farmers to protect more of the land within their boundaries, it will encourage them to buy up more of the unploughed Cerrado to maintain their output. Nothing in the code prevents that.

I have sympathy for the farmers. Most are not environmental demons. My hunch is that, despite the protests of WWF, the amended code may help save the Amazon. But Brazil's other ecological jewel, the Cerrado, looks increasingly doomed.

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