GEO Brasil - UNEP

Parallel to the investigation efforts, the Ministry of the
Environment and IBAMA have carried out a wide revision
of the legislation on forest management since 1998. The
objective is to simplify procedures, reduce bureaucracy and
facilitate the life of the landowner that wants to perform
management. Additionally, the agency has been working in
partnership with state environment agencies, so as to speed
up field investigations and the overall process and also to
facilitate the life of users.
Despite history demonstrating that the population has
participated in forest activity in the Amazon for four
centuries, it took a long time for forest management to
reach the population. Indians and mixed-race individuals
participated in drug exploitation in the interior. Jesuits
mobilised Indians for cocoa extraction. In rubber extraction
there were Indians at first and riverbank populations later
on, the so-called savage and civilised rubber tappers. Indians
and mixed-race individuals harvested guaraná, and rubber
tappers and mixed-race individuals harvested nuts.
The reasons why forest management has taken a long time
to reach communities cannot be attributed only to the
research area, to researchers and institutions responsible
for providing appropriate answers. For over a decade, there
was strong doubt within social community organisations
regarding the risk of promoting management, specially that
of timber, on a community scale. In environmental agencies,
responsible for the elaboration of rules and regulations and
for compliance with them, there was resistance as to the
implementation of forest management in an associative or
community form. There were several difficulties and a great
deal of bureaucracy until the first community management
plans, registered by environmental agencies in the second
half of the 1990s, were approved. Despite the fact that
resistance not yet been removed, there has been great
progress in the last five years. Non-governmental
organisations and the PP-G7 programmeme have begun
financing community forest management projects.
Researchers have become more directly involved with this
issue, mainly Universities (where there are Forest
Engineering courses) and EMBRAPA, through its research
units in Rio Branco, Acre, and in Belém, Pará. Environmental
agencies have become more receptive to this issue, mainly
IBAMA. Legislation has become broader. A specific
regulating instruction for community forest management
was issued for the first time in the end of 1998. For this to
happen, a decree had to be modified, Decree 1282 of 1994.
The revision of this Decree also enabled the simplification
of management regulations for small and medium forest
landowners through the edition of a specific IBAMA
regulation entitled Simplified Management.
In recent years, mainly from the second half of the 1990s
onwards, governmental efforts were undertaken to enable
technical and economic management in some of the
Amazon’s National Forests. These efforts also encountered
difficulties of a legal nature. Nevertheless, it is possible to
observe a growing tendency in the consolidation and
strengthening of a system of public forests used for
production. This involves the Union, the states and even
municipalities. These efforts combined with this tendency
demonstrate the need for a legal instrument that regulates
contracts for access by private agents to public forest
resources. To complement these actions, the Ministry of
the Environment and IBAMA have been striving to widen
the area of National Forests that currently comprises 16.6
million hectares (Table 2).
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