SNA (New York) — Brazil President-Elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared last week that “the devastation [of the Amazon] will be a thing of the past.” He has his work cut out for him. Outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro presided over the destruction of an unprecedented proportion of the precious rainforest, crucial to human survival, during his four years in office.

Lula further promised that “the crimes that happened during the current government will now be combated. We will rebuild our enforcement capabilities and monitoring systems that were dismantled.”

Bolsonaro’s policies of slashing regulations and environmental protection budgets, and establishing close relationships with illegal land grabbers, reversed successes which had been achieved during Lula’s first premiership, which lasted from 2003 to 2011. Deforestation rates soared 52% during Bolsonaro’s term of office, meaning that about 34,000 square kilometers of rainforest was destroyed.

In April 2021, Bolsonaro approved a further reduction of Brazil’s federal environmental budget by about 24%. According to Climate Observatory, a coalition of Brazilian civil society organizations, even this reduced amount has often been redirected to other areas, or in some cases not spent at all.

Indeed, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, a governmental organization based in Brasilia, was revealed to have spent less than half of its 2022 enforcement budget aimed at stopping illegal farming, mining, and logging in the Amazon. These reduced budgets solidified a trend toward lax enforcement that had become apparent in 2020 and resulted in a 20% drop in punishments for illegal deforestation.

According to some observers, the lack of punishment for wrongdoers was part of an informal deal between the Bolsonaro government and landowners to expand their holdings into publicly owned parts of the rainforest.

Currently, 51% of the Brazilian Amazon is government protected land; about 35% is privately owned; and the remaining portion is legally considered to be “vacant or undesignated public lands.” This latter term covers an area two times the size of France that is not earmarked for either rural settlement or for conservation.

The lion’s share of new deforestation in the Amazon occurs in these so-called “vacant” parts of the rainforest, where farmers and larger commercial enterprises are expanding.

The San Francisco-based research group Climate Policy Initiative suggests that the huge increase in Amazon cattle farming (70% of newly deforested areas became ranches) is more about a massive land grab than about the actual needs of the beef industry. Ranching is a shortcut to land ownership under Brazilian law.

The Bolsonaro government even tried to help out ranchers and farmers by passing what the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) described as the “land grabbing bill,” which would have legalized about 2,000 square kilometers of additional land acquisitions, and in the process displace some indigenous people.

Critics also argue that the primary objective of the bill was to serve the interests of large-scale agribusiness.

Romulo Batista, spokesperson for Greenpeace Brazil, declared this March that “agribusiness, land grabbers, and the Bolsonaro government are trying to use all the influence they have in the Brazilian Congress to rush through dangerous laws that will dramatically increase deforestation in the immediate future. These direct attacks to the Amazon pose an existential threat to the rainforest and to the global climate.”

Bolsonaro’s polices have also come under fire from abroad.

Joe Biden, when he was a candidate for US president in September 2020, declared that there would be “significant economic consequences” unless Brazil “[stopped] tearing down the forest.” However, there was little US policy action since Biden was elected.

Also, two months ago, during Brazil’s presidential election process, the European Union made its view clear by banning timber and agricultural products which are linked with Amazon deforestation.

But Bolsonaro’s approach does have its political supporters.

Senator Carlos Favaro, one of the president’s allies, defended the “land grabbing bill” as necessary to protect the rights of small farmers, not necessarily the major corporations, who have moved into the Amazon in previous decades.

Indeed, the political right has gained a new foothold in rural areas, particularly among such farmers, as confirmed by Bolsonaro’s strong electoral performance in these regions during last month’s presidential and congressional elections.

Unsurprisingly, the agribusiness lobby was also an emphatic supporter for Bolsonaro. Individual donations made by industry leaders, from logging magnates to industrial ranchers, accounted for about 80% of his campaign financing in his narrow loss to Lula.

Lula’s campaign to reinstate measures to protect the Amazon will benefit, however, from that fact that Bolsonaro was never able to pass the “land grabbing bill” into law, meaning that the way forward is relatively clear of major legislative obstacles.

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