development & cpr management - final paper
TRANSCRIPT
Masters in International Development | PSIA Development and Common Pool Resource Management
Name : Edwin Johan Santana Gaarder Student number : 100047222
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PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON Reforming the property rights regime to incentivise rainforest conservation in Brazil
The region defined in Brazilian legislation as the Legal Amazon accounts for 60% of Brazilian territory.1 Its surface area of 5.139.741 km2 is larger than the total surface area of all EU member countries and contains 67% of the world’s total tropical rainforest cover.2 Average population densities in the Amazon biome, moreover, are the country’s lowest, ranging from 1 to 2,5 inhabitants per km2, making it one of the few remaining frontier regions in Brazil and the world (see map).3 Prior to official colonisation efforts by the Federal Government in the 20th century,
population densities were even lower: in 1500, for example, the indigenous population in the Amazon is estimated to been no higher than 5 million people.4 As a consequence of persistent low population densities over the course of almost five-‐hundred years of Brazilian history, one of the main concerns of Brazilian central governments has been to exert control over territories claimed in the Amazon, a difficult task given the dense vegetation, hostile climate, high transport costs and limited human capital that characterise the region. Although early governments claimed jurisdiction over most of the territory within the current borders – basing themselves on exploration carried out by their subjects – there had always been a significant lack of State presence in vast swathes of the Amazon.5 Protecting the integrity of Brazilian territory – which was threatened by French and Dutch invaders in the colonial period and by neighbouring countries (Bolivia, Peru) in the late 19th century – has therefore been a guiding principle of successive governments, and granting conditional property rights to plots of land has been one of
1 Marco Antonio Gonçalves, The Brazilian REDD Strategy: How the country has achieved major deforestation in the Amazon, http://www.mma.gov.br/estruturas/182/_arquivos/reddcop15_ingles_182.pdf, 2009, (accessed Monday 20th April 2015). 2 ibid. 3 IBGE, Censo 2010, http://censo2010.ibge.gov.br/en/, 2010, (accessed Monday 20th April 2015). 4 Boris Fausto, História do Brasil, São Paulo, Brasil, Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2006. 5 State presence, here, is understood as the establishment of an effective administrative apparatus, the presence of military forces, or even the residence of loyal citizens in the territory. Indigenous inhabitants do not fall into the last category, as few of them ever recognised the authority of post-‐1500 Brazilian governments.
Source: IBGE | Censo 2010.
Masters in International Development | PSIA Development and Common Pool Resource Management
Name : Edwin Johan Santana Gaarder Student number : 100047222
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the main policy instruments used to attain this objective. In the colonial period, for example, full property rights to land in Brazil were granted to settlers, free of charge, on the condition that the land be cultivated and a tithe paid to the Order of Christ.6 In addition to land that was granted or sold under this arrangement, the 1850 Land Law regularised all informal occupations of land that had occurred prior to 1850, beginning a process of retroactive regularisation of informal settlements that has been repeated, on a periodic basis, to this day.7 Given the sheer abundance of land in the Amazon region – and the opportunities that exist, therefore, for settlers to occupy lands that are not being used by others for productive purposes – such retroactive regularisation entails almost no costs for the actors involved. On the contrary, settlers are better off when they acquire enforceable property rights from the government, whilst the government benefits from an increased ability to exert administrative and legal control over the acquired territories and thus consolidate territorial claims. Although the likelihood of invasions and other territorial disputes was reduced over the course of the 20th century as a result of improved global governance and international legislation, Brazilian Federal and State governments still face severe challenges to their sovereignty from drug traffickers, illegal logging enterprises and other mafia-‐like groups in the Amazon region. The establishment of an effective property rights regime therefore continues to be crucial to improving the governance of this immense, sparsely populated region.
Today, interest in the Amazon region is spearheaded by profit-‐seeking individuals and enterprises as well as the government, each one seeking to secure its stake in the region’s natural resource wealth. Lucrative private-‐sector activities in the region include logging, with a view to selling timber, and the use of land for agricultural activities like soybean farming or the raising of cattle. In addition to its claim on tax revenues from the aformentioned activities, the government has an interest in granting land in the region to landless rural labourers (represented by the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST) who constitute an important vote bank in Brazil. The government also faces strong pressure from environmental groups to protect and conserve the rainforest and its ecosystems. The Amazon rainforest is host to a quarter of the world’s terrestrial species, is responsible for 15% of global terrestrial photosynthesis and acts as an engine of the global atmospheric circulation, regulating evaporation, condensation and precipitation.8 Domestic and international pressure to perpetuate the environmental services provided by the rainforest – as well as its biological heritage – therefore come to bear on the decisions of the Brazilian government. The problem, however, is that many of the above activities can be considered rival: if one logging company cuts down trees in the Amazon and sells the timber, those same trees will not be available to another company; if one farmer occupies land in the Amazon in order to cultivate soy, that same land will not be available to a cattle rancher. Although environmental services are not rival in the same way – everyone can benefit equally, and at the same time, from carbon sequestration, climate regulation and biodiversity – rivalry does exist between different uses of land. Logging and agricultural activities, for example, are incompatible with the conservation of original rainforest cover for the provision of environmental services. The
6 Bernardo Mueller, Lee Alston, Gary D. Libecap and Robert Schneider, Land, Property Rights and Privatization in Brazil, The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Vol. 34, Special Issue, Summer 1994, pp. 261-‐280. 7 ibid. 8 Yadvinder Malhi et al., Climate Change, Deforestation and the Fate of the Amazon, Science, Vol. 319, 169, 2008.
Masters in International Development | PSIA Development and Common Pool Resource Management
Name : Edwin Johan Santana Gaarder Student number : 100047222
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government is therefore faced with the monumental challenge of designing rules that strike a balance between the competing interests described above (redistributive, corporate, political, international, environmental), even though it is not itself impartial. In other words, if the design of rules for the use of natural resources in the Amazon is conceived as a strategic game, the government is not an exogenous factor in the game but an endogenous one, a player with its own strategies (legislate, monitor, enforce) and pay-‐offs (votes, formal/informal revenues, international reputation).9 It is important to note, moreover, that although the government is being referred to here as a monolithic entity, in reality there are many internal constraints to its actions, including the need to live within its means (budgetary constraints). This brings us to the second massive challenge in the regulation of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil: the sheer size of the territory and of individual plots of land. In most cases, it is practically impossible to exclude others from using the land, because fencing costs are too high for private owners of the land, or because monitoring and enforcement costs are too high for the government. As things stand, therefore, the government has not been able to design a set of rules (or sub-‐game) that can be fully enforced on the ground and that incentivises individuals and companies to respect all of its (often conflicting) objectives. In the absence of fully enforceable rules, players fail to internalise the environmental and social costs of deforestation and continue to behave according to individual interests, which is unsustainable in the long run. This phenomenon is known as the tragedy of the commons.10
Notwithstanding the above, some rules do exist to regulate the use of natural resources in the Amazon and annual rates of deforestation have been falling rapidly over the past decade (see graph). It will therefore be useful, in this section, to present a brief description of the Plano de Ação para Prevenção e Controle do Desmatamento na Amazônia Legal (PPCDAm), a programme which has been in force since 2004 and which most observers claim to be responsible for recent
9 Lee Alston and Bernardo Mueller, Property Rights and the State, in Claude Menard and Mary Shirley (eds.), Handbook of New Institutional Economics, Heidelberg, Germany, Springer-‐Verlag, 2008, pp. 573-‐590. 10 Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, vol. 162, 13 December 1968, pp. 1243-‐1248.
Source: INPE (http://www.obt.inpe.br/prodes/index.php)
Masters in International Development | PSIA Development and Common Pool Resource Management
Name : Edwin Johan Santana Gaarder Student number : 100047222
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reductions in annual rates of deforestation. The PPCDAm was designed to address deforestation from three main perspectives:
(i) land tenure and land use planning; (ii) monitoring and enforcement of compliance with environmental legislation; (iii) promoting sustainable use of natural resources.
An evaluation of the PPCDAm in 2011 attributes most of the recent success to the second branch of the programme (see chart).11 Under this branch, two new satellite systems were introduced – known as Deter and Degrad – which are capable of generating real-‐time information on deforestation and forest degradation and thus serve as the basis for targeted enforcement activities by the Federal Police and other competent agencies. In addition, between 2004 and 2008, the authorities created 25 million hectares of protected areas (Unidades de Conservação or UCs) and 10 million hectares of indigenous lands in the Arc of Fire – the frontier along which most deforestation has historically occurred (see map on next page).12 This clarification of the legal status of the land, together with effective monitoring and enforcement, has acted as a barrier to large-‐scale illegal deforestation in the frontier region, at least in the short run. Recent evidence, however, suggests that deforestation may be adapting to these new constraints by exploiting weaknesses in the system. 60% of newly deforested areas in 2009 were smaller than 25 hectares and were therefore below the minimum area that can be detected by the Deter satellite system. 13 Once they were detected by Prodes – the older satellite system that generates images of a higher resolution (6 hectares) on a more infrequent basis – it was often too late to identify and
11 PPCDAm, Avaliação do Plano De Ação Para Prevenção e Controle do Desmatamento na Amazônia Legal, http://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/3046/S33375A9452011_pt.pdf?sequence=1, 2011, (accessed on Monday 20th of April 2015). 12 ibid. 13 ibid.
Source: PPCDAm, 2011
Completion rate of activities 100% Completion rate of activities 75%-‐99% Completion rate of activities 50%-‐74% Completion rate of activities 25%-‐49% Completion rate of activities 0%-‐24%
Land tenure and land use planning Monitoring and Enforcement Sustainable Use Total
Masters in International Development | PSIA Development and Common Pool Resource Management
Name : Edwin Johan Santana Gaarder Student number : 100047222
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punish the perpetrators.14 Deforestation, moreover, has recently been less concentrated in the Arc of Fire. Greater dispersion means that it has become more costly to travel to suspect areas and enforce legislation.15 It is important to note, moreover, that increases in the effectiveness of monitoring and enforcement activities coincided with an unprecedented period of GDP growth in Brazil (2000-‐2010), during which the government experienced a windfall in tax revenues. It is to be expected that the resources available to carry out these activities will become scarcer now that the country has entered a period of economic stagnation. In this context, it is significant that rates of deforestation have hovered around 5.000 km2 per annum over the past three years – including a constant, or perhaps growing share from within UCs and indigenous lands – suggesting that the PPCDAm is experiencing diminishing returns to monitoring and enforcement activities. In order to make further gains or prevent a relapse, therefore, it will be necessary to refocus attention on land tenure issues and the incentive structures that arise from the prevailing property rights regime. Only if there are strong incentives for individuals to use natural resources within the Amazon region in a sustainable way, and if the need for costly central government intervention is limited to affordable levels, will deforestation rates be brought down in the long run.
Which brings us, at last, to the system of property rights that prevails in the Legal Amazon today. This system defines land according to three main categories:
14 ibid. 15 ibid.
Source: Varela et al (2006) (http://projects.inweh.unu.edu/inweh/display.php?ID=5364)
Masters in International Development | PSIA Development and Common Pool Resource Management
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• Protected Areas (31% of the Legal Amazon).16 These include indigenous lands (dark green) and UCs. UCs are further subdivided into:
- Áreas de Proteção integral (green), within which all extractive activities are forbidden;
- Áreas de uso sustentável (light green), within which some extractive activities can be carried out by economic actors, subject to the approval by the government of a sustainable natural resource management plan.
Evidence shows that indigenous lands constitute the most effective barrier to illegal deforestation in these areas, because indigenous populations act as a low-‐cost, early warning system that helps the authorities to detect deforestation and target enforcement activities accordingly.17 In the UCs, by contrast, costly monitoring and enforcement by satellite systems and non-‐residents are needed to prevent illegal deforestation and ensure that extractive activities comply with sustainable management plans.
• Private lands (ca. 21% of the Legal Amazon).18 These are lands over which formal titles have been acquired by individuals or companies who:
- purchased their title from other private owners or from the government; - benefited from Reforma Agrária, the national land redistribution programme; - benefited from retroactive regularisation of informal land occupations.
These lands are subject to the Forest Code (Código Florestal or CF) which stipulates that 80% of privately owned plots of land in the Amazon biome must be set aside as a Legal Reserve (Reserva Legal or RL), meaning that original forest cover in these areas cannot be cleared. Title-‐holders are expected to provide information to the Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro Ambiental Rural or CAR) on the size, location and boundaries of their plots, as well as the areas within that plot that have been set aside as a Legal Reserve. This information is used by the authorities to monitor compliance with the CF. However, as of 2011, only 1% of rural properties had been registered in the CAR.19
• Terras Públicas Não Destinadas (TPñD) or Terras Devolutas (ca. 45% of the Legal Amazon).20 The legal status of these lands has not changed since the colonial period. Although they are technically ‘public lands’ (i.e. belonging to Federal or State governments), they are not demarcated or destined for any particular purpose, (e.g. conservation, sustainable use, private ownership, etc.). This leaves them vulnerable to informal occupation (posse) by two types of actors:
16 Ibid. 17 Daniel Nepstad et al, Inhibition of Amazon Deforestation and Fire by Parks and Indigenous Lands, Conservation Biology, Vol. 20, No. 1, 65–73, 2006. 18 Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM), A Grilagem De Terras Públicas Na Amazônia Brasileira, Brasília, MMA, 2006. 19 PPCDAm, 2011. 20 IPAM, 2006.
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- grileiros, who forge documents in collaboration with logging companies, agribusinesses, local politicians, bureaucrats and notaries, in order to obtain de facto rights over the lands, which which can then be sold for considerable profit;21
- small-‐scale farmers and other members of the local, rural population who can exercise their rights under the 1988 Constitution to acquire formal title over Terras Devolutas if certain conditions are fulfilled, including residence on and agricultural use of the land (which can be no larger than one ‘rural module’) for a continuous period of one year.22
Legitimação de posse is the legal practice of regularising informal occupations of the second type. There are still some legal uncertainties over whether land occupations of the first type – acquired by means of grilagem by former or current occupants at some point in the past – are illegal or informal, meaning that claims are examined on a case by case basis.23 In practice, therefore, only the Law on Environmental Crimes (Lei de Crimes Ambientais) protects Terras Devolutas from untrammelled deforestation by grileiros.24
The property rights regime described in the previous paragraph emerged as a result of the first-‐order problem addressed in the beginning of this paper, which corresponds roughly to the “second institutional level” outlined by Williamson (see above).25 How do the “formal rules of the
21 Grileiros are those who engage in grilagem, the practice of faking documents in order to obtain property rights over land. The term originates from the historical use of crickets (grilos) to make documents look old and authentic. 22 A rural module is a measure of the size of a plot of land, which is defined by municipal governments. 23 IPAM, 2006. 24 Sparovek et al, A Revisão do Código Florestal Brasileiro, Novos Estudos, Vol. 89, March 2011. 25 Oliver E. Williamson, The New Institutional Economics: Taking Stock, Looking Ahead, Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XXXVIII, September 2006, pp. 595–613.
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game” arise? UCs, Legal Reserves and indigenous lands are rights and obligations created by the government in response to the demand from domestic and international pressure groups for rainforest conservation and the protection of indigenous rights. Existing private property rights over agricultural land, on the other hand, (as well as the periodic, retroactive regularisation of informally occupied lands) safeguards the economic interests of the agricultural sector. The redistribution of land through INCRA, in its turn, is a way of responding to the democratic demand for lands by the landless rural labourers, who constitute a significant vote bank for the government. Taken together, all of these measures allow the government to extend its administrative control over the area, reinforce its jurisdiction and strengthen its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in the region. The problem, however, lies in the third institutional level defined by Williamson, which he refers to as the “play of the game”.26 Given the rival, non-‐excludable nature of land and natural resources in the Amazon region, it is almost inevitable that the interested parties described above – armed with their respective ‘rights’ – come into conflict with each other. Although, in theory, the Brazilian judiciary has at its disposal a number of tools that can be used to adjudicate between these parties and resolve such conflicts, the inaccessibility of certain areas in the Amazon region and the lack of State presence there mean that it is difficult to obtain accurate information on disputes, and therefore to pass judgments and enforce decisions. The result is that actors often find themselves competing for attention from the State, or attempting to establish faits accompli which are hard to reverse and are therefore candidates for retroactive regularisation. The use of grilagem to obtain titles that are later recognised, either de facto or de jure, is a good example. Another example is the strategy used by the MST and rural landless workers to occupy private lands and claim them under the land redistribution programme run by INCRA, a phenomenon that has been described in detail by Alston, Libecap and Mueller.27 Since retroactive regularisation of property rights is only carried out if there has been continuous, productive use of the land (whereas forested areas are in practice not considered to be in ‘productive’ use) informal occupation often leads to deforestation.28 Private owners of legal title to lands are, in turn, often left with only one effective strategy to prevent their lands from being expropriated under the land redistribution programme, which is to preempt informal occupations and clear the forest themselves, even if this entails a reduction in Legal Reserves below the level stipulated by the CF.29 Because of the failure of the government to collect environmental fines, this is often a less costly option than allowing lands to be occupied by the MST: between 2009 and 2013, for example, R$15,4 billion in fines were charged by the authorities but only 1,8% of the total amount was ever received.30 Which brings us to another conflict, between environmental pressure groups and the agricultural interests who believe themselves to be engaged in a rush for land. Araújo and Barreto discuss one facet of this
26 ibid. 27 Alston, Libecap and Mueller, Land Reform Policies, The Sources of Violent Conflict and Implications for Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Vol. 39, 2000, pp. 162-‐188. 28 Araújo et al, Property Rights and Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, Ecological Economics, Vol. 68, 2009, pp. 2461–2468. 29 ibid. 30 Araújo and Barreto, Estratégias e fontes de recursos para proteger as Unidades de Conservação da Amazônia, Belém, Pará, IMAZON, 2015.
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conflict: the phenomenon of informal land occupations within UCs and indigenous territories.31 In several cases examined by the authors, the authorities have shown themselves willing to recognise such occupations as faits accomplis and retroactively regularise them, on the assumption that such occupations were carried out in ‘good faith’. This has the obvious effect of undermining the PPCDAm’s strategy of using UCs and indigenous lands as a barrier against deforestation in the Arc of Fire.32 The 2012 revisions to the CF are another example of how faits accomplis have been used by agricultural interests to lobby for a change in the “formal rules of the game”. The agricultural lobby argued that the cost of compliance with the old CF – which would, in a large number of cases, have entailed ‘reforesting’ rural properties in order to meet the 80% RL requirement – were too high, and were thus able to obtain an amnesty on ‘environmental debt’ incurred before 2008 for all properties between 20 and 440 hectares.33
Conflicting Parties Rules of the Game Play of the Game
Grileiros Government
Formal property rights over land above one ‘rural
module’ cannot be acquired through ‘productive use’ +
residence
Acquisition and use of land above one ‘rural module’ (logging, agriculture) is subject to purchase
agreement + environmental license
Local government actors and notaries are coopted by grileiros (through informal payments) and provide fake
documentation
Long delays in monitoring and enforcement mean it is difficult to trace original act of grilagem
Lands are sold to new occupants who are not directly implicated in grilagem and have made investments in
the land
It is difficult to evict informal occupants so government is incentivised to retroactively regularise occupations
Rural, landless labourers /
MST
Landowners with title
Property rights can be acquired through ‘productive use’ of
‘unused’ private land.
CF: 80% of private land must be conserved (RLs)
RLs are considered to be ‘unused land’
Rural landless labourers clear forests in order to demonstrate ‘productive use’
Owners clear forest in order to preempt occupation by rural landless labourers
Owners violate the RL requirements of the CF but no real costs are incurred.
Environmental interests
Agricultural interests
Indigenous lands and UCs cannot be cleared for purposes of agriculture
CF: 80% of private land must be conserved (RLs)
Deforestation is a means of acquiring / securing formal property rights (see above)
Monitoring and enforcement are weak. Fines are not collected.
Informal settlers and owners are incentivised to clear forests for personal gain and to secure property rights.
Environmental laws are not respected. Corrective measures are costly.
The government is incentivised to retroactively regularise in order to ensure administrative control and legal jurisdiction over the territory and its inhabitants.
31 ibid. 32 PPCDAm, 2011. 33 Soares-‐Filho et al, Cracking Brazil’s Forest Code, Science, Vol. 344, 25th April 2014, pp. 363-‐364. “Environmental debt” refers to the actual RL on private lands minus the RL requirement defined by the CF.
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Name : Edwin Johan Santana Gaarder Student number : 100047222
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It seems clear, therefore, that insufficient capacity to regulate the ‘play of the game’ and ensure that rules are followed is leading to strategic behaviour by actors, who seek to establish faits accomplis that they can then use as evidence for the need to retroactively redefine the ‘rules of the game’ in their favour. The expropriation of private land which is then transferred landless rural labourers under the Reforma Agrária, the retroactive regularisation of settlements in Terras Devolutas and Protected Areas, the changes to the Código Florestal in 2012 that forgave environmental debt incurrer prior to 2008, all of these are examples of how the ‘rules of the game’ have been changed in response to the strategic actions of those ‘playing the game’, who consciously choose not to abide by the rules given the low risk of detection and punishment by the authorities. Although it is not within the scope of this paper to provide detailed recommendations on how to ensure that players abide by the rules in the future, it seems clear that top-‐down monitoring and enforcement will never be efficient and effective enough to deter players from acting in this way. Instead, an incentive structure needs to be designed that will encourage players to respect established property rights and abide by rules of their own accord.
In order to achieve this objective, it is imperative that the legal status of all lands be well defined and assurances provided that this status will not be retroactively changed in the future. With this in mind, Araújo and Barreto strongly recommend that the retroactive transformation of Protected Areas into private lands should be made illegal.34 Insofar as private lands and Terras Devolutas are concerned, accurate information on existing property rights and compliance with environmental legislation should be made available on a priority basis. Landowners in possession of titles should be encouraged to register in the CAR through positive and negative incentives (RLs that are registered in the CAR could be exempted from expropriation under the land redistribution programme, for example, or the sale of timber or agricultural products from land that is not registered in the CAR could be restricted or subject to penalties on domestic or international markets). The status of informally occupied lands, should be clarified once and for all. For informal properties that have respected the conditions established by the Constitution (i.e. smaller than one rural module, inhabited by the owners and used for agricultural purposes, in compliance with labour legislation) this requires registration as a rural property, demarcation through the use of GPS and issuance of title. The main instrument used to carry out this process so far has been the Programa Terra Legal, a sub-‐programme of the PPCDAm that seeks to regularise small properties settled before 2004. However, its registration targets are still far from being reached (see chart).35 To make matter worse, the Programa Terra Legal does not collect information on regularised properties’ compliance with the CF, nor does it register them in the CAR, even though synergies between the two registration processes could result in significant savings for the State. Another recommendation, therefore, would be to merge the process so that registration in the CAR (and compliance with the CF) becomes a precondition for obtaining land title, thus using property rights as an incentive for compliance with environmental legislation. On a broader note, it is also necessary to streamline the bureaucratic process in order to make registration and the supply of information less costly for property rights holders. The creation of a
34 Araújo and Barreto, 2015. 35 PPCDAm, 2011.
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unified registration system that can be easily accessed by all government entities (Federal, State, Municipal, IBAMA, Federal Police, etc.) will be crucial to ensure that overlap and contradictions are avoided and uncertainties minimised. Lastly, it is important to ensure that lands occupied as a result of grilagem be subject to a rigorous evaluation, which assesses the land for extant environmental assets and possible environmental damage caused by the occupant, estimates the economic value of those portions of the land that are being put to productive use and considers the relative feasibility and desireability of regularisation (under certain conditions) as compared to expropriation. This process should pay particular attention to the issue of moral hazard, seeking to ensure that illegal practices are not rewarded at the expense of the State.
In the short run, funds from the Fundo Amazônia (made up of donations from Norway and Germany under the REDD+ scheme) should be used to complete these one-‐off registration efforts as soon as possible. All remaining lands should immediately be given a legal status and a attributed a specific purpose (e.g. conservation, indigenous territory, land for sustainable use) with a view to eliminating the category of Terras Devolutas, hitherto the prime candidates for informal occupation. In the long run, the Fundo Amazônia should be used to provide incentives for private owners of land, traditional communities and those who engage in sustainable economic activities in forested areas to conserve the rainforest and to act as monitors and stewards of the land that has been assigned to them.36 Further research is needed to develop a sustainable funding mechanism for the Fundo Amazônia (international donations, general taxation, sale of carbon credits) and an effective way of managing payments for environmental services (PES), but it is in the interests of all actors that such a mechanism be developed soon, since PES constitute the only monetary incentive that can effectively compete with the rents from logging and agricultural production. In the meantime, it is important to make sure that a well-‐defined property rights system is in place when PES finally become available, in order to avoid strategic behaviour that could undermine environmental and economic objectives in the long run. This paper has sought to describe the current property rights system and the inadequacies of
36 Marcus Peixoto, Pagamento por Serviços Ambientais: Aspectos Teóricos e Proposições Legislativas, http://www12.senado.gov.br/publicacoes/estudos-‐legislativos/tipos-‐de-‐estudos/textos-‐para-‐discussao/td-‐105-‐pagamento-‐por-‐servicos-‐ambientais-‐aspectos-‐teoricos-‐e-‐proposicoes-‐legislativas, 2011, (accessed on Monday 20th of April 2015).
Performance of the Terra Legal programme (number of properties processed)
Performance of the Terra Legal programme (number of hectares processed)
Target Registered Demarcated (GPS)
Titled Target Registered Demarcated (GPS)
Titled
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monitoring and enforcement activities by the Brazilian government, despite recent improvements. It has argued that the property rights system that applies to land in the Amazon needs to be reformed, in order to build on these improvements and create an incentive structure that encourages actors to refrain from illegal deforestation. Some tentative suggestions have been made regarding the possible design of such an incentive structure, and it is hoped that these ideas could be developed further through targeted research, bearing in mind the possibility of future integration with an international or domestic PES system. Through enhanced effort, in-‐depth analysis and well designed policies, it is believed that deforestation rates in the Legal Amazon can continue to be reduced, generating opportunities for sustainable development and preserving the environment for future generations.
Works Cited
Alston, L., and Mueller, B., Property Rights and the State, in Menard C. and Shirley M. (eds.), Handbook of New Institutional Economics, Heidelberg, Germany, Springer-‐Verlag, 2008, pp. 573-‐590.
Alston, Libecap and Mueller, Land Reform Policies, The Sources of Violent Conflict and Implications for Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Vol. 39, 2000, pp. 162-‐188.
Araújo et al, Property Rights and Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, Ecological Economics, Vol. 68, 2009, pp. 2461–2468.
Araújo and Barreto, Estratégias e fontes de recursos para proteger as Unidades de Conservação da Amazônia, Belém, Pará, IMAZON, 2015.
Fausto, B., História do Brasil, São Paulo, Brasil, Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2006.
Gonçalves, M.A., The Brazilian REDD Strategy: How the country has achieved major deforestation in the Amazon, http://www.mma.gov.br/estruturas/182/_arquivos/reddcop15_ingles_182.pdf, 2009, (accessed Monday 20th April 2015).
Hardin, G., The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, vol. 162, 13 December 1968, pp. 1243-‐1248.
IBGE, Censo 2010, http://censo2010.ibge.gov.br/en/, 2010, (accessed Monday 20th April 2015).
IPAM, A Grilagem De Terras Públicas Na Amazônia Brasileira, Brasília, MMA, 2006.
Malhi, Y., Climate Change, Deforestation and the Fate of the Amazon, Science, Vol. 319, 169, 2008.
Menard C. and Shirley M. (eds.), Handbook of New Institutional Economics, Heidelberg, Germany, Springer-‐Verlag, 2008, pp. 573-‐590.
Mueller, B., Alston, L., Libecap, G.D. and Schneider, R., Land, Property Rights and Privatization in Brazil, The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Vol. 34, Special Issue, Summer 1994, pp. 261-‐280.
Nepstad, D., Inhibition of Amazon Deforestation and Fire by Parks and Indigenous Lands, Conservation Biology, Vol. 20, No. 1, 65–73, 2006.
Peixoto, M., Pagamento por Serviços Ambientais: Aspectos Teóricos e Proposições Legislativas, http://www12.senado.gov.br/publicacoes/estudos-‐legislativos/tipos-‐de-‐estudos/textos-‐para-‐
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Name : Edwin Johan Santana Gaarder Student number : 100047222
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