After pushing bills against Indigenous land rights and the protection of native grasslands, the Brazilian Congress may approve a proposal that hits the core of the country’s main environmental legislation: the Forest Code. The proposal was supposed to be voted on in early May at a Senate committee, but was postponed amid the national commotion over the unprecedented floods in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, which killed more than 160 people. “We hope that this disaster, unlike other disasters, will have a more permanent effect on Congress in terms of approving projects that set the environment back,” Maurício Guetta, legal adviser at Instituto Sociambiental (ISA), an NGO that advocates for environmental and Indigenous rights, told Mongabay. “But normally what we see is that at first there is this self-restraint, but then the bills are taken up again.” The Rio Grande do Sul flooding, one of the country’s worst environmental tragedies, may not be enough to prevent the approval of the bill, which aims to reduce the amount of primary forest that landowners in the country’s Amazonian region are required to preserve. Known as the legal reserve, it currently stands at 80% of a property’s total area, but would be reduced to just 50% if the new bill passes. The proposal is part of the so-called Destruction Package, a set of 28 measures pushed by the agribusiness caucus that includes the “time frame” provision (marco temporal in Portuguese), which threatens the demarcation of Indigenous territories, the “Poison Bill,”…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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