Brazilian Congress adopts controversial land use law
Source: Reuters
Brazilian Congress adopts controversial land use law
Thu Apr 26, 2012 2:23am EDT
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By Maria Carolina Marcello and Peter Murphy
BRASILIA, April 26 (Reuters) - Brazil's Congress voted late on Wednesday to ease rules mandating the amount of forest farmers must keep on their land, delivering a long-sought victory to the country's powerful agriculture lobby and a political defeat for President Dilma Rousseff.
Though the bill will require millions of hectares of already cleared land to be replanted, environmentalists say it makes it too easy for farmers, responsible for much of the deforestation of the Amazon and other swaths of environmentally sensitive land in recent decades, to comply with regulations that stipulate how much forest they must preserve.
Rousseff still has the option to veto the bill, one of the most controversial to pass Brazil's Congress in recent years. The bill was supported by some of her party's lawmakers and members of its multi-party coalition, even though the president had previously vowed to veto earlier versions of the law that contained provisions perceived as too lenient on farmers who have cleared woodlands to make way for crops.
The final law, which was changed dramatically from a hard-bargained version her government was backing, will leave it up to federal states to decide how much forest needs to be replaced along riversides, making it possible for big farming states to make only minimal demands of growers.
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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/26/brazil-land-law-idUSL2E8FOG3420120426
