Stimulus for land grabbing and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

First, we estimated the potential governmental revenue loss in two sets of public land stocks as follows:

• (i)  
  Short-term revenue loss due to sale of 32 490 parcels, accounting for 8.6 million hectares in the Brazilian Amazon. These parcels are in the process of receiving a land title through sale from the Brazilian government and their sizes range from 50 to 2500 hectares.
• (ii)  
  Future revenue loss in public land designated for potential future sale encompassing 19.6 million hectares. Even though there are 70 million hectares without formal recognition of land rights in the Amazon [13, 14], we used a smaller dataset of areas where the government plans to expand its program to issue land titles. These areas are under direct risk of land grabbing, since the government is signaling it will issue land titles in the future for the landholders. According to this dataset, obtained through the Access to Public Information Law, the 19.6 million hectares includes one million hectares that overlap with potential indigenous land claims.

We estimated the revenue loss by calculating the difference between the market price and governmental price for these areas. We considered the average land market price in 2016 per municipality [15] and four scenarios for governmental land prices established by the new law, summarized in table 1. The two highest governmental prices apply when: (i) the land title beneficiaries want to avoid losing the parcel if they fail to comply with certain labor and environmental regulations after receiving the land title and (ii) the landholder has another property or occupied the public land between 2008 and 2011. For payments in installments and lump sum, the Federal Decree 9304/2018 establishes the percentage of land price to be charged in each case, depending on the parcel size. Since we did not have the parcel sizes in the area allocated for future regularization, we calculated the range of possible values determined by the land law, from 10% to 50% of the minimum governmental land price.

We assessed the risk of future deforestation in the 19.6 million hectares allocated to expand land privatization. Forty-four percent of this area was already deforested as of 2016. We applied the methods used by Barreto and colleagues [16] to estimate the risk of future deforestation in 2017–2027 as a consequence of the advance of the cattle ranching frontier if this area is allocated for private landholdings. We modified the methodology for this study by extending the period analyzed, from 3 to 10 years. Below is a description of the methodology steps:

• 1.  
  We quantified the remaining forest in the 19.6 million hectares based on historical deforestation data from the Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (Prodes).
• 2.  
  We used the Land Change Modeler, available in TerrSet software (version 18.31) to estimate the risk of deforestation in the remaining forest area. The software estimated the association of the deforested area with variables of interest for two periods considered in this study: 1988–2016 and 2000–2016. The variables used to estimate the association were: (a) terrain and (b) distance from the public land parcels calculated in IDRISI software to: (i) rivers, (ii) old deforestation, (iii) recent deforestation, (iv) protected areas, (v) roads, (vi) special areas (conservation units, indigenous lands, military areas), (vi) areas of federal settlement projects, (vii) slaughterhouses and (viii) areas under embargo for illegal deforestation. To calibrate the model, we used the relevance weight (RW) method [17] that estimated the importance of each variable for the deforestation risk map. The most important variables according to RW were: distance from the public land parcels to (i) recent deforestation, (ii) conservation units and indigenous lands, (iii) old deforestation, (iv) areas of federal settlement projects, (v) areas of federal settlement projects, and (vi) slaughterhouses [16].
• 3.  
  We projected the areas of deforestation risk for two possible scenarios: (i) the average deforestation rate of 1988–2016 would continue and (ii) the average deforestation rate of 2000–2016 would continue. The steps to estimate each scenario were as follow [16]:

  • a.  
    We calculated the mean deforestation rate for the 1988–2016 and 2000–2016 periods from the deforestation data detected by PRODES in the Amazon biome.
  • b.  
    We combined the predictor variables with the 1988–2016 and the 2000–2016 land cover maps and generated deforestation risk maps. These maps show the similarity between the remaining forest and the previously deforested cells. The greater the similarity, the greater the risk of this cell being deforested in the future.
  • c.  
    Using the Top Rank tool in TerrSet we allocated the mean deforestation rates calculated in step 3a over the deforestation risk map. The Top Rank selected the cells with the highest deforestation risk until the final result for both scenarios: the 1988–2016 rate and the 2000–2016 scenario.

We estimated the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions for the two future scenarios using the following approach. First, using the function Zonal Statists from ArcGIS 10.3, we calculated for each scenario the total aboveground carbon (AGC) within the cells at risk of deforestation [18]. Next, we converted the AGC to CO₂, by multiplying by 44/12 (units of CO₂ per units of carbon). We assumed that all carbon was compromised by the future deforestation, which means that the CO₂ emissions would occur all at once. Due to the lack of data, we did not calculate the below-ground and soil carbon emissions nor the removals from forest regrowth.

The estimated short-term governmental revenue loss for the sale of the 8.6 million hectares of public lands varies from U$ 5 to 8 billion (figure 1), considering the conversion rate of R$3.72 to US$1.00. The potential future governmental revenue loss for the sale of the additional 19.6 million hectares that may be privatized ranges from U$ 16.7 to 23.8 billion (figure 2). Therefore, in total, the new land policy could lead to revenue losses of U$ 32 billion. This amount corresponds to 7% of the Brazilian gross domestic product in 2018 and more than a hundred times the annual budget of the Ministry of Environment.

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Governmental land prices established by the new law represented in average 1.8%–42% of the land's market value in the four scenarios of future revenue loss. This variation is based on the total discount applied in each scenario and whether the minimum, mean or maximum governmental land price applies in each scenario according to the legislation. Our results demonstrate that even the mean and the highest governmental price scenario are advantageous for the buyer. For instance, by paying 25% or 33% of market value (the mean governmental land prices in future and short-term scenarios, respectively), the title beneficiaries eliminate the risk of losing the property if they fail to comply with social and environmental requirements and can easily profit by selling the land for the market price.

If all the 19.6 million hectares are allocated for future sale, between 1.1. and 1.6 million hectares are at risk of being deforested due to the cattle ranching frontier advance until 2027 (figures 3 and 4). This forest loss could emit 4.5–6.5 megatonnes of carbon dioxide respectively. Such estimates are between three to five times above the targeted annual deforestation rate for the Amazon region by 2020 (339 000 hectares), according to the national climate change policy law.

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The new land policy repeats an old pattern of validating illegal grabbing of public lands and rewards the illegal occupants by selling land below market prices. As in the past, this situation is likely to lead to at least two negative impacts: (i) loss of public revenues in the order of tens of billions of US$ and (ii) new illegal occupations of public lands associated with deforestation and land conflicts.

Beyond the financial and social conflict implications, this scenario is in stark contradiction to other federal and state conservation, human rights, and development policies. According to current Brazilian laws and policies, the allocation of public lands should prioritize granting land rights to indigenous peoples (a constitutional right) and traditional communities, as well as creating new conservation units, which is consistent with the national goals of reducing deforestation.

Thus, since one million hectares of the area allocated to privatization overlaps with potential indigenous land claims, the federal government should exclude such an area from its land privatization program. Even if the government still needs to conduct legally required studies to determine the extent of the claimed indigenous territories, such areas should become temporarily unavailable for other types of land allocation. This measure could prevent conflicts if the government issues private land titles in areas that could be later declared as indigenous territories.

In addition, to allow public scrutiny over decisions with socioenvironmental impacts in the Amazon, it is fundamental that the government continues to disclose spatially explicit datasets of its decisions on how to allocate lands in the region. The continuation of such a transparency practice is uncertain, since the new government attempted to make it easier for public officials to classify public data as secret [19]. The executive order with such provision was revoked after much criticism, but this example raises concerns that some governmental decisions will no longer become easily available to the public.

In addition, a new wave of privatization of public lands in the Amazon could stimulate new illegal occupations over the 70 million hectares of non-allocated forest in the Amazon. The conservation of this area is paramount to meeting Brazil's commitments to the Paris Accord. Thus, to prevent land grabbing and deforestation of such an area, the government should freeze public land sales in the Amazon region, submit the decision about this area allocation for public and scientific review and, if selling part of this area, charge market prices. The two first measures could be done by expanding the use of an existing legal mechanism called Area of Provisional Administrative Limitations (ALAP for its Portuguese acronym), a legal instrument that freezes any type of land allocation over a certain area for seven months [19]. Currently, ALAP only applies to areas being considered for conservation units [20], but the legislation could be changed to allow its use when deciding the most appropriate allocation to any undesignated public forest. Thus, instead of pushing for private landholding regularization in existing forest areas, the federal government should speed up the recognition of priority land claims for indigenous groups, traditional communities and conservation targets to comply with the Brazilian constitution and laws, as well as with Brazil's climate change mitigation goals.