Researchers from the Laboratory of Environmental Services Management (LAGESA) and the Centre for Remote Sensing (CSR) evaluate and point out the problems and risks of the Bill of Law (PL) 510/2020 on the Senate agenda. They warn that the project amnesty criminal occupations of public lands and might legitimate future invasions, it also puts at risk important forest areas with great economic and sustainable potential.
According to the researchers, estimates show that only in the Legal Amazon the changes introduced by the PL would absolve the criminal occupation of more than 5,700 pieces of public land that took place between 2012 and 2018, and would further justify the invasion of another 16,000 areas included in the INCRA base, which currently have no evidence of significant agricultural use. All of this because PL 510/2021 regulates occupations that occurred until 2014 (currently the title permit goes until 2011), allows bids that do not meet this timeframe, and gives preference to acquisition by the current squatters.
Even more serious, the initiative would pave the way for the disorganized occupation of 43 million hectares of land, of which 24 million are from public forests that could be tendered for sustainable exploitation of wood and other products of low environmental impact and financial return for the country as a whole.
As claimed by the researchers, unlike socially including producers and modernizing the land regularization process via remote sensing, as its defendants say, the PL 510/2020 would in fact facilitate access to public lands by medium and large producers, increasing the risks of fraud and titling of large tracts of land that until then have been occupied by small producers and traditional populations.
Click here to read the full policy brief (in Portuguese).