Brazil debates weakening forest protection law

 SAO PAULO (AP):

A proposal to help farmers and ranchers in Brazil's vast Amazon rainforest is alarming environmental groups, who say it will speed destruction of the world's biggest natural defence against global warming.

The measure, which was being debated Tuesday in Brazil's Congress, would loosen restrictions on the amount of forested areas that can be legally cut and grant an amnesty to those who illegally felled trees before July 2008. It also would reduce the strip along rivers that cannot be touched and would allow farmers to use hilltops.

Environmentalists say those changes would lead to flooding, silty rivers and erosion, and say the full package would inflict severe damage on the rainforest, an area the size of the US west of the Mississippi River that absorbs the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

About 20 per cent of the Brazilian rainforest already has been destroyed, and 75 per cent of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions are estimated to come from forest clearing as vegetation burns and felled trees rot.

Farmers, though, feel betrayed by the tough rules imposed in the late 1990s. Two decades earlier, Brazil's military dictatorship, seeking to speed development, had encouraged them to enter the Amazon, offering them free land if they would clear up to 50 per cent of their land of trees.