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FACTBOX-Brazil's proposed new forest code

Wed, 7 Dec 2011 01:25 GMT

Source: reuters // Reuters

Dec 6 (Reuters) - Brazil's Senate voted on Tuesday to relax rules determining how much forest coverage the country's farmers must maintain on their properties, ending years of legal uncertainty for producers but infuriating environmentalists. (See [ID:nN1E7B505G])

Here are the key features of the new forest code, which is expected to be approved by Congress and signed into law by President Dilma Rousseff:

REDUCTION IN FOREST COVERAGE REQUIREMENTS

Brazil has required rural landowners to maintain a minimum amount of forest coverage on their properties for decades, ranging from 20 percent in the southeast to 35 percent for inland savannah areas to 80 percent in the Amazon.

Those percentages are unchanged but growers can now count mandatory coverage of river margins and steep hillsides toward this acreage, reducing the total amount owners with such land will have to preserve.

In a limited number of cases where it is shown to be in the public interest, forest coverage on hillsides can be replaced with other types of vegetation.

EXEMPTION FOR SMALLER FARMS

Properties of between 20 and 400 hectares, depending on the region, will be exempt from any requirement to replace missing forest coverage but are prohibited from any further deforestation. The government says properties in this category make up less than a quarter of total farm land.

A further exemption from the minimum reserve requirements will be made for those who bought an area of land when the law required a smaller area of compulsory coverage. They will have to maintain only the coverage that was required at the time.

FINES SUSPENDED, TWO DECADES TO REPLACE MISSING TREES

Growers who have removed forest beyond the legal minimum, or who were caught out by past changes to these limits must sign up to government programs for the gradual restoration of missing trees over two decades. Fines landowners would face over missing coverage are suspended until this is done, and scrapped once these obligations are fully met.

RENT OR REPLACE

Producers will from now on also have the option of renting or buying a nearby patch of forested land should they not wish to replace forest cover on their own property.

(Reporting by Peter Murphy and Maria Carolina Marcello)