Brazil announced on Friday it will create a landholder registry and send 700 more federal police to the Amazon River basin in a new effort to monitor and prevent deforestation in the environmentally sensitive region.
The initiative is designed to identify illegal deforestation and will ban the sale of livestock and produce grown in illegal deforested areas, with violators subject to fines and loss of credit from government institutions. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva approved the initiative by decree on Friday.
REGISTRATION
The measures require rural property owners to reregister their holdings in the Amazon to ensure compliance with Brazil's strict environmental laws. Land owners who failed to reregister would no longer be eligible for government loans and other benefits.
"This registry will permit us to create a common database which will permit us to identify the rural areas which require action against deforestation," said Environment Minister Marina Silva, who is not related to president, at a news conference in Brasilia.
After three years of substantial reductions in the pace of rain forest destruction, preliminary numbers suggest Amazon deforestation is speeding up, driven by rising agricultural commodity prices and relatively dry weather this year.
Silva said the registry would be carried out initially in 32 municipalities responsible for 45 percent of all deforestation last year and other municipalities could be added later on.
POLICE
The environment minister also announced the government would send 700 federal police to the Amazon to aid the roughly 1,700 environmental protection agents, police and soldiers already in the region fighting illegal deforestation.
Brazil has some of the toughest environmental laws in the world and land owners in the Amazon are required to keep 80 percent of their land as forest reserve.
But the regulations are routinely flouted and hard to enforce in a region larger than Western Europe and where land ownership is often unclear.
The Amazon lost a total of 14,000km2 of forest cover between August 2005 and last year, and officials said they expected the deforestation rate to drop by about a third between August last year and this July, to about 9,600km2.
But preliminary number suggest that destruction in some states nearly doubled between July and September over the same period last year.
The environment minister said the upswing was only about 10 percent.
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