Brasília, February 25, 2004 (Agência Brasil - ABr) - By the end of March the government will submit a bill to Congress on Public Forest Management. The idea is to put an end to the process of illegal occupation and inadequate use of Brazilian forests. According to the director of the Ministry of Environment's National Forests Program, Tasso Azevedo, the government wants to establish clear rules to provide assurance to those who want to invest in sustainable forest production.
In an interview on National TV's NBr News, Azevedo explained that the bill will define guidelines for forest concession contracts and rules for concessions. According to him, nowadays people occupy an area, request ownership of the land, receive the deed, and often do not use the area correctly, which can be characterized as "land privatization." With the new law the government intends to change this situation. "From now on, whoever uses an area will have to pay for it and follow criteria for the use to be sustainable," Azevedo said. One of the big problems in the Amazon region is the property issue. 24% of the land is private, and 29% is composed of protected areas that encompass conservation units and Indian lands. The other 47% are areas that are public, devolutionary, or contested, and they are the site of deforestation, illegal occupation, and squatting.
The bill will define how to manage the public forests for production. This may occur through transforming them into sustainable use Conservation Units, such as extractive reserves. The public forests can also be assigned a social function, as in the case of forest settlements for agrarian reform and use concessions for the private sector The criteria for this type of concession will be specified in the bill. According to Azevedo, the government will define which areas will be for protection and which will have a social function; the rest will be the object of concessions.
For land concessions some rules will be adopted, such as guarantees of forest conservation, democratic distribution of wealth creation, and an efficient and supervised process, as well as insertion of the forest in the process of regional development. Concessions will be granted for the production of wood, non-wood products such as fruit, oils, resins, and essences, and for service activities, such as tourism.
The bill will also define the form for public announcements inviting bids on concessions. If the current text of the bill is approved, the best price for use of an area will not be a criterion to determine the winner of the bidding. According to Azevedo, what will be considered is the project that causes least environmental impact, the one that contains a technically adequate proposal and guarantees socio-economic benefits. In addition to these criteria, the announcements will be submitted to public consultation, and areas should be approved ahead of time by the Ibama (Brazilian Environmental Institute). The bill also stipulates that the period for land concessions should never be less than five years or a production cycle and should never exceed 60 years.
The Amazon region is responsible for 90% of wood production in Brazil. Throughout the national territory there are 64 national forests, as well as various extractive reserves and state forests in which the forest cover is either native or planted. In Minas Gerais there are 500 thousand hectares of planted public forest, and the Amazon contains 350 million areas of planted public forest. According to the Ministry of Environment, 4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is generated by the forest productive chain, and the sector accounts for 8% of Brazilian exports.
The director of the National Forests Program explained that the bill is one of the measures to control deforestation and promote the development of these areas. In March the government will announce a package of measures that have been under discussion in the Inter-Ministerial Commission to Combat Deforestation . Among the measures are ones related to the organization of property, such as the creation of a Unified Rural Property List. (DAS)
