The third pillar of the institutional mission of the Instituto Nacional de Colonização y Reforma Agraria (INCRA) encompasses both administrative and legal aspects of land tenure and, as such, is the most important agency regulating rural real estate markets. Administratively, the institution is charged with collecting and organizing the records of all rural properties in Brazil, including their creation and all subsequent sales, subdivisions and unifications. Legally, INCRA functionaries must review and verify that documents are legitimate and validate the spatial attributes of individual land parcels. This is a gargantuan task that would test the governance capacity of any country but is particularly challenging in a nation of continental dimensions undergoing a massive distribution of land. The decision to organize rural properties into a national land registry, Sistema Nacional de Cadastro Rural (SNCR), coincided with policies to transform the Amazon via migration and settlement. That task might have been completed automatically if the smallholder programmes, which distributed about twelve million hectares, had accurately and precisely recorded those transactions. Unfortunately, that did not happen. That missed opportunity was confounded by a collateral decision to facilitate a land rush that was occurring organically across the Southern and Eastern Amazon. After about 1978, the military government became disenchanted by the smallholder settlement framework due to high overhead costs, low economic return and terrible public relations. Instead, they decided to expedite the transfer of public lands to corporations and influential families with the capacity to invest in productive enterprises at economies of scale. Over…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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