Brazil's unfulfilled Forest Code turns 10
Ten years after its creation, the Forest Code has already shown the potential to bring information about the country, but it has also shown its limitations, some of which had already been pointed out at the time of its constitution. The law still far from being fully complied with and initially highly contested in the environmental spheres is now defended amid attempts to expand on previously highly criticized points. The 2012 code comes in the context of consecutive years of declines in Amazon deforestation and growing political power and agribusiness influence. According to Raoni Rajao, a researcher at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, environmentalists warned that the document would promote a major amnesty, leading to new forest clearings and more amnesties in the future. According to Izabella Teixeira, Minister of the Environment at the time of its construction and approval of the code, the legislation came about after negotiations between environmentalists, agribusiness and the family farming sector. Rajao agrees with the idea of the pact around the code. "But the question is: was this pact fulfilled?," he asks. "It wasn't, and it happened exactly how civil society and the scientific community warned [about large deforestation amnesties]." In the years that followed the entry into force of the new code, the Amazon, in particular, began to show increasing deforestation trends until it exploded, recently, under the Jair Bolsonaro government and reached more than 13,000 km2 devastated in the last measurement made by Inpe. (August 2020 to July 2021 period).