The Economist

The pickup trucks left before dawn. Their occupants—six military police and nine agents from Brazil’s national parks service—wore bulletproof vests. Their target was an illegal gold mine deep in the Amazon. To save the rainforest, Brazil’s new government is trying to catch the criminals who cut it down.

First, though, it must find them. Satellite images had revealed the location, 140km from Itaituba, a city in the state of Pará. After seven hours of driving, two men on a motorbike spotted the convoy and sped off to alert the miners. The trucks gave chase, but got stuck in knee-deep mud. Five kilometres from their target, the forces of law and order had to turn back.

Since Lula came back to power, he has started to enforce the law again. He raised icmBio’s budget by 55% and brought back his tough former environment minister, Marina Silva. On February 8th her ministry launched an operation to drive more than 20,000 illegal miners from Brazil’s largest indigenous territory, home to the Yanomami tribe. The more policing operations succeed, says Ms Silva, the more the “pendulum will swing”, until the risks of lawbreaking outweigh the rewards.

However, “if enforcement is the only card we have to play, we are going to lose,” says Bruno Matos of icmBio. “Most miners can barely read or write, they don’t have any other option,” says Ronaldo, a pump operator at a wildcat mine that The Economist visited. Cracking down on illegal mining without putting anything in its place will cause “a social calamity”, warns Gilmar de Araújo of a local mining union.

Land-grabbing has become an industry. It is known as “grilagem”, after the trick of putting a phoney title deed in a box of crickets (grilos), whose droppings and nibbles make the paper look much older than it is. Land-grabbers invade public land, deforest it, and sell it to ranchers. When the ranchers move on, they resell it to soya farmers. Brazil’s land titling system is such a mess that no one can keep track. In some parts of Pará, reports Mr Araújo, overlapping claims add up to five or six times the disputed area.

Clearer property rights would let owners invest for the long run, rather than stripping land and flipping it. They would also make it easy to identify who should be paid for conserving land, or fined for spoiling it. A study by João Paulo Mastrangelo and Alexandre Gori Maia of the University of Campinas found that when there are no overlapping claims for Brazilian land, it is less likely to be deforested and more likely to be used lawfully.

Read the full text: https://www.economist.com/international/2023/02/27/the-biggest-obstacle-to-saving-rainforests-is-lawlessness