Unclear Land Rights and Deforestation: Pieces of Evidence from Brazilian Reality

The change from forests to pasture or agricultural land is still the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil today. Although Brazil was previously able to reduce its level of deforestation from 27,000 km2 (2004) to 5000 km2 (2012), since 2014 deforestation has increased once more, reaching more than 10,000 km2 in 2021, and is expected to reach record peaks in 2022. There is enough evidence that deforestation occurs mostly on undesignated and unregistered land, as it is used as a speculative asset and/or in a productive way, but the appetite for more land grabbing is still worrisome. The literature shows that the availability of this kind of land in Brazil is between 50 and 100 million hectares, so the risk of perpetuating this pattern and destroying the remaining forests is rather large. This article’s main aim is to show how the Amazon’s deforestation reached its lowest levels mainly due to a combination of strong command-and-control policies and an institutional setting that was able to enforce them. However, most important were the policies designed for the protection of the forest and its communities, which played an important role by clarifying property rights and setting responsibilities for the forest’s preservation, but also creating the legal and institutional conditions to enforce the existing legislation. From this perspective, we analyzed how these different settings affected the decisions of players with respect to deforestation. The first section shows the Amazon’s deforestation patterns and the links to its causes—mainly the existing policies. The next section shows the legal and institutional instruments that enabled the reduction in deforestation at the beginning of the 21st century. The third section shows how the nation clarified the legal rights to land and how it diminished deforestation. The fourth provides evidence as to how those instruments were dismantled, provoking an increase in deforestation. Finally, a synthesis is presented with proposals for recovering the previous results.