Approved by the Senate in a vote on Wednesday (21), Bill 2.159, nicknamed “The Devastation Bill”, could exacerbate the loos of vegetation. This is a threat to 32.6% of Indigenous lands and 80.1% of Quilombola territories (areas where descendants of enslaved Black people live) in Brazil, according to a technical note published by the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA, in Portuguese).
This is because the proposal restricts the need for environmental licensing to territories whose title process (in the case of Quilombos) or homologation (in the case of Indigenous lands) has not been completed. In addition, these populations will no longer be consulted and will be excluded from processes that directly affect the areas where they live.
When a road cuts through a territory inhabited by Indigenous peoples, it changes the lives of many people. “The first impact when such a project reaches the territory is the loss of vegetation,” says Kleber Karipuna, executive coordinator of the Brazilian Articulation of Indigenous Peoples (Apib, in Portuguese) and resident of the Uaçá Indigenous Land, in the Amazonian state of Amapá, crossed by the BR-156 highway, with construction work carried out in the 1970s.
“There were 69 kilometers of vegetation lost and loss of use of that ancestral area, previously a space for traditional, cultural and cosmological activities. Once a project like this is approved, [the territory] is no longer used,” he says.
Brazil currently has 259 Indigenous lands whose demarcation process has not been concluded. As for the Quilombola territories, according to official data from the Brazilian Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra, in Portuguese), only 384 titles have been issued, and 1,937 areas are in the process of being titled.
As a result, the number of Quilombola territories not titled and, therefore, excluded from licensing in the current version of the text is 1,553.
“As the Brazilian state is slow in taking measures and concluding the recognition of these territories, all the traditional lands pending homologation or titling will be unprotected, so that they will be considered non-existent for environmental licensing, impact assessment and the requirement for conditions to prevent, mitigate or compensate for socio-environmental impacts,” the statement reads.
Threats
Approved in the Senate, the Devastation Bill will now be sent to the Chamber of Deputies. Defended by pro-agribusiness parliamentarians, the bill changes the rules of an important mechanism for defending natural resources, environmental licensing. Currently, any potentially polluting undertaking or activity must undergo a series of studies, including the participation of affected communities, to obtain a license.
If the proposal is approved in all instances, this rule will change. Livestock and small-scale farming activities, for instance, will be exempt from this procedure, as if they are not harmful to the environment and surrounding populations. In addition, the bill simplifies the licensing rules for viaducts, bridges, hydroelectric plants, dams and gas stations.
As well as having his territory impacted in the 1970s, when the Uaçá Indigenous Land had not yet been ratified, Kleber, through Apib, accompanies the many other cases of Indigenous lands coping with all kinds of threats. Pesticide contamination used on neighboring plantations, fishing difficulties due to the installation of hydroelectric dams or the destruction of sacred places, such as cemeteries, are all on the list of violations of these peoples’ rights.
The new bill makes these threats even worse for the inhabitants of lands that have already been homologated or titled, that is, the demarcation process has been completed.
The proposal envisages that licensing bodies without legal competence to rule on the issues in question will disregard the conclusions of public bodies with due legal competence. Thus, it would be possible for the decision of a state environmental department to prevail over the decision of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai, in Portuguese), on a matter of interest to Indigenous peoples.
“It’s a project that practically ends all environmental progress Brazil has made over the years,” says Kleber.
Activists at risk
Indigenous lands protect more than 115 million hectares of native vegetation in Brazil, which corresponds to more than 20% of the country’s preserved forest.
A study published in 2023 by the MapBiomas platform indicates that indigenous territories are among the main barriers against the advance of deforestation in Brazil. In the last 30 years, these areas have lost only 1.2% of their native vegetation, while private areas have lost 19.9% of their native vegetation cover.
Quilombola territories are also among the best-preserved areas, having lost only 4.7% of their native forest between 1985 and 2022.
In the Ribeirão Grande/Terra Seca Quilombo, in Barra do Turvo, São Paulo state, the 77 families in the area are suffering the consequences of farming activities. The water the community uses is now contaminated by fecal coliforms from buffaloes raised in the region. Other communities in the surrounding area face the consequences of pesticides applied to banana plantations.
According to Nilce Pontes, coordinator of the Agroecological Network of Women Farmers (Rama, in Portuguese) and the National Coordination of the Articulation of Black Rural Quilombola Communities (Conaq, in Portuguese) for the state of São Paulo, the lack of land titles for the quilombos attracts invaders to the region. “Although they’ve all been recognized, the expropriation process hasn’t been completed. Thus, there are a lot of outsiders exploiting the communities,” she says.
For Kleber, as well as erasing the progress made by traditional peoples in guaranting their rights, the bill denies the historic debt “that the Brazilian state owes Indigenous peoples, for not ensuring, within five years of the 1988 Constitution, the full right to demarcate Indigenous lands.”
