The dangers of legalising public land theft in Brazil : agribusiness, deforestation, and the melting pot of future pandemics

• The destruction of natural ecosystems and habitats, the homogenisation of landscapes and increased urbanisation, all of which threaten wildlife and facilitate their contact with domestic animals and humans. Although the mutation of microorganisms and viruses into pathogenic forms that reach humans is not new, the industrialisation of rural areas has accelerated the advent of new pathogens and their ability to spread throughout the world.
• The expansion of the agribusiness model, mainly through industrial breeding and the production of domestic animals - such as poultry and pigs- whose genetic uniformity and high density facilitate mutations with a higher rate of virus transmission.

The type of land use, the concentration of land and natural resources, the massive destruction of ecosystems, and the increased homogenization of landscapes, should all be key elements considered in the debate on the current health crisis and human resilience.

The great public land robbery

• Authorises the immediate privatisation of about 40 million hectares of federal public patrimony -an area bigger than the whole of Germany- through the legalisation of holdings on public lands occupied unlawfully until the 22 of July 2008, with up to 2,500 hectares of these in the Legal Amazon. For the first time, legal entities such as corporations and large landholdings have been also beneficiaries of public patrimony, not only historical occupations by small and medium farmers, as allowed by an older law. Through payments well below market value, with government subsidies of between 50% and 90%, this legalisation of land grabbing represents a loss to Brazil's public patrimony of between US$ 3,3 and US$ 3,7 billion dollars in the Amazon alone, as estimated by the research institute Imazon;
  
  
• Destroys the national land reform policy and facilitates the auctioning of land reform settlements in the land market, thus inducing an agrarian counter-reform in the country. On one hand, the law weakens the infrastructure, technical assistance and credit policies destined for the settlements. On the other hand, it fosters the land market with individual titling and the anticipation of the sale of plots (of up to 440 hectares in the Legal Amazon), which can be offered after only 10 years. Before, settled families could only sell their plots after 10 years from the issue of the final titles, and to have these could take as long as 20 years – a measure to allow the settlements enough time to be properly set up and to avoid the reconcentration of land through the market. Now, after only 10 years of the provisional property title issued with the creation of the settlement, the plots can be sold. Currently, this applies to almost 80% of the total existing settlements (37 million hectares). Only in 2017, the Land Institute issued 123,000 individual titles, a record in relation to previous governments, whose average between 2003 and 2016 was around 20,000 titles per year.

• 42 million ha of federal public forests and about 22 million state-owned undesignated forests;
• 141, 5 million ha of "vacant land” (16.6% of the national territory);
• 37 million ha of land reform settlements, which authorise the early sale of plots and their reintroduction into the land market.