Don’t Count on the Amazon

Can the international community rely on carbon sequestration in the Amazon as a strategy for halting global warming? Don’t count on it, even after Jair Bolsonaro’s grudging green conversion this past week. 

Convincing Bolsonaro to change his tune must have been no small task, judging by the ratcheting up of international diplomatic pressure that accompanied the move. The Biden administration sent Brasília an unequivocal message that it sought to prioritize environment policy. After unproductive backroom conversations with Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, US diplomats reportedly warned that something had to give. There was talk of the difficulty of supporting Brazil’s OECD accession, threats of intransigence in bilateral trade agreements, and Brazil was pointedly excluded from a swing through the region by Washington’s Latin America point man, Juan Gonzalez. Europe, meanwhile, has also spent much of the past year making clear its intense discomfort with agricultural exports from what was once Amazon forest, especially after reports that a fifth of EU soy imports and 17% of its beef from Brazil come from land that was illegally deforested. Portions of the Brazilian private sector have understood the stakes, and brought their own pressure to bear. 

Vague though they may be, Bolsonaro’s commitments were not piddling, including a promise to eliminate illegal clearing by 2030 and achieve net carbon neutrality by 2050. Considering that as a candidate, Bolsonaro was pro-deforestation and that he has spent much of the past two years criticizing the incursions of foreign NGOs on Brazilian sovereignty, this is a significant about-face that should be celebrated. In exchange, Bolsonaro demanded “adequate support” and “just remuneration for the environmental services” Brazil is providing the planet — hardly unreasonable requests, given the scope of the challenge. 

But there are many reasons to be skeptical about implementation. At root, most critiques come down to the fact that Bolsonaro is not a trustworthy interlocutor. The Bolsonaro administration’s commitments demand intensive policing, of a form that extensive monitoring, military patrols, and a host of other emergency policies have failed to achieve in the past, even under presidents who were far more sympathetic to environmental issues. Furthermore, the signals sent by Bolsonaro have been taken to heart: after he took office, deforestation rose 34% year-over-year in 2019 and 9% in 2020. There is little to suggest a deeper change of heart that might undergird Bolsonaro’s new commitments and lead him to invest heavily in a crackdown on the complex dynamics that drive land-grabbing. 

But there is another reason that has little to do with Bolsonaro, and more to do with an actor that we seldom consider a custodian of the Amazon: the courts. For without changes in the way Brazilian courts operate, little is going to change in the incentives for continued deforestation. 

Here, the best summary of the problem is James Holston’s masterful 1991 analysis of legal claims to land in Brazil, which memorably described the “privately owned, labyrinthine, and venal cartulary system of public registries in Brazil, called cartorios,” and a legal system that operated on the basis of “an ad hoc mode of irresolution.”^[1] The combination of venal land registries and an irresolute judicial system permits land to slowly transmogrify in two parallel movements: in the first movement, the land itself is transformed from pristine jungle to clearcut pasture and then farmland, while in a second, parallel movement in the cartorios and the courts, legal title to the land begins fraudulently, is made informal, and finally, is legally recognized. In this manner, decade after decade, the Brazilian agricultural frontier has progressed, seemingly inexorably, relying on shoddy record-keeping and slow judges to transform “free” jungle into profitable grazing land and soy plantations.

Even a more environmentally-committed president than Bolsonaro might have trouble overcoming the legacies of these institutions. Although there has been some reform to both the cartorial and judicial systems in the three decades since Holston published his perceptive study, the efficiency of the courts as a venue for enforcing land protections has improved only marginally. In the meantime, Brazil’s agricultural sector has become an increasingly powerful and influential political player, capable of lobbying Congress for less environmentally friendly laws and statutes. An effective approach to global warming thus requires realism about the ways in which Brazilian courts fail to curb Amazon clearing, and through their irresolution, may even encourage it. 

^[1] Holston, James.  1991.  “The Misrule of Law: Land and Usurpation in Brazil.”  Comparative Studies in Society and History 33: 695-725.

_{Image: Climate Summit, Agência Brasil, Marcos Corrêa/PR}