Rainforests provide a public good. The world should pay to conserve them
slicing down and burning the rainforest. Not only did he make no effort to stop them; he went out of his way to hobble the agencies charged with policing environmental crimes. His ejection by voters last year gave the Amazon a much-needed respite.
His successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, actually cares about conservation. As we report this week, gun-toting federal agents are once again making a serious effort to shut down illegal mining operations and blow up their equipment. But muscle, on its own, is not enough.
To establish something resembling the rule of law in the Amazon, Lula is trying to clarify who owns it. This is long overdue. Currently, at least 22 separate Brazilian agencies register land claims there.
They barely talk to each other, so vast swathes of the forest are subject to overlapping claims. And a whopping 29% of the Brazilian Amazon is “undesignated", meaning it is public land but no one has decided whether it should be a nature reserve, an indigenous reserve, or something else. Deforestation tends to be worst in areas where property rights are hazy.
A lack of clarity about who owns a plot of forest makes it harder to assign blame for torching it. And a tradition of local officials tolerating land-grabbing encourages more of it. Ranchers seek to establish facts on the ground by chopping down trees, burning the undergrowth and putting cows on the newly created pasture.
Many hope that even if their actions are illegal, they will eventually be recognised as the owners of the land, because this has often happened in the past. Lula is trying to change these incentives. He is pushing to designate undesignated land as protected, and to integrate all the property registers into one coherent system.
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