On a sad day for environmentalists, Wednesday (29) began with Ricardo Salles, Minister of the Environment, introducing a decree whose goal is to weaken environmental org ICMBio, and ended with Congress voting in favor of relaxing the forest code.
The turnaround, however, came at the end of the day, when Senate President Davi Alcolumbre (DEM-AP) said he would not vote on the provisional measure forest code. The measure’s contents have led to a standoff between Congress and the Senate.
In a vote led by ruralists, the House approved by 243 to 19 votes a measure that, in practice, will allow forests to languish deforested for a more extended period.
The ruralists managed to retain the most controversial parts of the measure. The Forest Code of 2012, still in force today, promoted the recomposition of forests that had suffered before 1965 when a law recommended 50% of preservation of the Amazon and 20% for the other vegetations of the country.
Ruralists stretched the deadline for demobilization based on the years when biomass was explicitly cited in the law. In the case of the cerrado, the beginning of its participation will be considered as 1989. In the case of the pampas and the Pantanal, it will be 2000.
According to the Forest Code Observatory, the new measure will mean that 5 million hectares of native vegetation (twice the state of Sergipe) will no longer be reforested, compensated or regenerated.
Translated by Kiratiana Freelon