More than 1 million people have been given land to farm in the Brazilian Amazon since the 1970s (Image: Andre Vieira/Polaris/eyevine)

Smallholder farmers resettled to rainforests by the Brazilian government have played an unrecognised role in deforestation there – something researchers worry is continuing unabated.

Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff boasted in Washington DC last month that her government had reduced annual forest loss by two-thirds in the past decade, and would end it altogether by 2030.


Yet while overall deforestation has fallen, Brazilian researchers today reveal that the country’s officials are still organising the large-scale migration of poor farmers who have been wrecking the rainforest.

While the government has clamped down on illegal forest clearance by big landowners running cattle ranches and soya farms, its social resettlement schemes to allocate land to the rural poor are doing more damage than previously estimated.

“Irrefutable evidence”

The researchers looked at four decades of satellite images of forest cover around the homes of more than a million migrants in some 1900 Amazon settlements established by the government’s National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) since 1970.

They found “irrefutable evidence of rapid deforestation” after the settlers arrived.

Within the settlement areas, which cover roughly the size of the UK, half the trees have been lost, says lead author Maurício Schneider, a researcher at the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the National Congress in Brasilia.

The resettlement areas cover 5.3 per cent of the Brazilian Amazon, but have been responsible for 13.5 per cent of deforestation since 1970.

“Agrarian settlements have been widely hailed as a socially responsible strategy to allocate land to the rural poor,” says Schneider. “But INCRA’s policy of giving settlers just a few hectares forces them to convert every inch of land to agriculture. Our research shows that the result is severe deforestation at the taxpayer’s expense.”

INCRA officials, who were unavailable for comment ahead of the paper’s publication, have often argued that deforestation occurs before settlers arrive.

But Schneider says the findings refute this.

Unsustainable practices

Charles Clement of Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, says: “INCRA abandons the settlers as soon as they arrive. They seldom get guidance about how to manage Amazonian forests, so they try to practise the farming methods they grew up with. But they soon discover that the soils cannot sustain these methods, which leads them to carry out more deforestation.”

Overall, Amazon deforestation is much reduced from a decade ago, says Schneider. But he and co-author Carlos Peres, of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, worry that the deforestation from resettled smallholder farmers will go on unabated.

“The enforcement of environmental legislation tends to turn a blind eye to smallholders,” says Peres.

Even though INCRA launched a green settlement programme aimed at curbing illegal deforestation by settlers in 2012, its effectiveness is yet to be assessed, Schneider says.

To really address the problem, he adds, the government should stop moving people into forested areas. One solution would be to switch settlement schemes from existing forests to former forests that are now degraded pastures.

Much of the Amazon forest has regrown after being cleared before European colonists arrived, but we should not bet on forest recovery this time round.

“Pre-Columbian farming methods left soils more resilient and they included trees, so forest species could return rapidly to the plots,” says Clement. “None of these conditions hold in modern farming.”

Journal reference: PLOS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134016