The president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, on Wednesday vetoed a section of Brazil's forestry code that had granted amnesty to those who had cleared the Amazon rainforest illegally, according to the Environment News Service.
The president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, on Wednesday vetoed a section of Brazil's forestry code that had granted amnesty to those who had cleared the Amazon rainforest illegally, according to the Environment News Service.
Sweeping changes to Brazil's forestry code came into effect Thursday. Rousseff made nine vetoes to the code that addressed illegal logging and small landowner rights. Even with the vetoes, the forestry code changes were lauded by the country's pro-agribusiness bloc in Congress. "Farmers have obtained the legal security they needed to produce," Senator Katia Abreu, president of the National Agricultural Confederation and head of the pro-farm bloc in the Senate, told the Associated Press. "This is the end of the environmentalist hegemony regarding environmental issues," Abreu, president of the National Agricultural Confederation and head of the pro-farm bloc in the Senate, told AFP.
Meanwhile, the vetoes did not satisfy Brazil's environmentalists. "The presidential veto slightly improves the text approved by Congress, which was awful, but the result continues to be very bad," Paulo Adario, a Greenpeace expert on the Amazon, told the AP.
Brazil's prior forestry code dates back to 1965. That code limited the use of land for farming and mandated that 80 percent of privately owned land in the Amazon remain intact. The new code lets landowners cultivate riverbanks and hillsides that were previously exempt.