Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has approved a controversial law granting land rights to squatters in the Amazon that campaigners fear will result in a further increase in deforestation.
The law is one of the most divisive decisions of Lula’s two terms in office, with the president coming under intense pressure from environmental groups and the powerful agricultural lobby.
Marcelo Furtado, Greenpeace’s campaigns manager in Brazil, said the approval showed that Brazil’s policy on global warming was contradictory.
“On one hand Brazil is setting targets for the reduction of carbon emissions and on the other opening up more areas for deforestation,” Furtado said.
Brazil’s government says more than 1 million people will benefit from the law, which covers 67.4 million hectares of land, an area roughly the size of France. It believes the law will reduce violent conflicts by giving people ownership of the land they live on and will make it easier to track down those illegally felling trees.
But environmentalists — who have dubbed it the “land-grabbers bill” — fear the new rules will offer a carte blanche for those wanting to make money by destroying the Amazon.
They say the law effectively provides an amnesty for those who have devastated the Amazon over the last 40 years. Around 20 percent has been lost, according to environmental campaigners, and deforestation globally causes nearly a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions.
“This measure perpetuates a 19th century practice [of Amazon destruction] instead of taking us towards a new 21st century strategy of sustainable development,” Furtado said.
He said the law — originally intended to benefit impoverished farmers in the Amazon — now benefited wealthy farmers.
The result, he said, was “a law which will not help increase governance [or] social justice but which simply raises the risk of more deforestation.”
Under the new law, small landowners who can prove they occupied lands before December 2004 will be handed small pieces of land for free, while large areas will be sold off at knockdown rates.
The government hopes this will help bring order to a region where land disputes often result in violent clashes and murder.
Human rights groups also criticized the law, saying unscrupulous Amazon ranchers, who often exploit slave labor, stood to gain from the new rules.
Faced with a vocal campaign against the measure, Lula accused “the NGOs [of] ... not telling the truth.”
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I