Brazil S Extractive Reserves

This title was first published in 2003: Despite their growing political significance, the linkages between local resource management and the global political economy are often poorly understood. This book addresses these linkages in a grounded analysis of extractive reserves : areas in Brazil set aside for local populations who depend on natural resources for their livelihood. Extractive reserves are the result of the struggle of the rubber tappers for control over their natural resources and worldwide concern with the conservation of the Amazon Rainforest. The author examines their significance for Brazil as a pioneering legislative and policy initiative to combine conservation with productive use of natural resources, to recognize common property rights to natural resources, and to support traditional populations’ modes of production. Extractive Reserves in Brazilian Amazonia examines the formation and institutional sustainability of the reserves, and in so doing provides a valuable insight into the relationship between local institutions and the wider socio-political and economic context with regard to forest management.

Very often, the reports and commentaries come from outside the countries and peoples of the region, while much of the thinking about Amazonia from within is not widely known or accessible.

At the meeting of the International Tropical Timber Organization held in Bali in 1990, ITTO adopted the target of ensuring that all tropical timber marketed internationally should, by the year 2000, come from forests that are managed sustainably. This study is an attempt to determine whether the member countries of the ITTO have a legal and administrative basis for managing their production forests in ways which will allow these forests to contribute to biological diversity conservation. It also attempts to assess the extent to which such management is already applied on the ground through member country studies. A set of guidelines on ways in which management of production forests could be improved is included.

The Brazilian Forest Code (FC) requires all private rural properties to maintain a fixed proportion of their area in natural vegetation as a “legal reserve” whose proportions are differentiated by biome. Landowners have often ignored the law. Regaining full compliance would require costly restoration in areas converted. Recent changes to the FC provide that landowners may “compensate” their legal reserve shortages by purchasing surplus compliance obligations from other properties. This paper discusses critical policy issues regarding Environmental Reserve Quotas or Cotas de Reserva Ambiental (CRA). We examine the relative environmental effectiveness of the CRA, its efficiency in resource use and social justice, as well as potential implementation hurdles. Allowing for compensation with off-site conservation can enable both more efficient, and less fragmented agricultural production, as well as forest conservation, compared to the default on-farm conservation proposition. CRA as a means for compensation has great intuitive appeal, yet controversy exists regarding its implementation. We review international experience with similar economic instruments, as well as Brazilian studies simulating the potential results of the CRA. Interviews with leading actors regarding the instrument complement the literature review. We finish with a synthetic assessment of the implications of our results for policy implementation.