Karina Custódio*
The “Safe Soil” award recognized the process of land regularization for traditional peoples and communities carried out by ITERPA (Pará Land Institute) and IPAM (Amazon Environmental Research Institute). Awarded on Monday (25), the prize highlights good practices and innovations related to the land issue in Brazil, especially with regard to legal certainty and environmental protection.
The award had three categories and received 143 proposals from all over the country. The prize was awarded in the “Rural land regularization” category. The judging panel was made up of 14 professionals from different fields of knowledge.
“Since 2019, IPAM has been supporting this process through the land governance project, improving management and procedural flows, mapping stages, identifying bottlenecks and rework, and proposing technological solutions aimed at modernizing internal procedures,” says Raquel Poça, a research analyst at IPAM, who was present at the awards ceremony.
She explains that the improvement in land management carried out by the government of Pará places the state among those that have granted the most land to traditional peoples in the Amazon.
“Placing Pará at this level shows that it is possible to combine technology, governance and social responsibility to promote land justice. It’s a step forward that contributes directly to the sustainable development of the Amazon,” says Bruno Kono, president of Iterpa.
The Government of Pará was also recognized in the “Urban land regularization” and “Information management and responsible land governance” categories.
Among IPAM’s efforts in the land regularization process for traditional peoples and communities in Pará are: training family farmers and civil servants in land registry techniques and building spaces for public consultations, such as the State Extractivist Table, as well as efforts to strengthen the State Quilombola Table, a space for dialogue and deliberation on the main land demands of the communities.
In order to facilitate the allocation process, the Technical Note on Harmonization of Quilombola Regularization and Certification Procedures was drawn up, a document that presents a propositional analysis of the integration between these stages of the regularization process.
Land regularization at IPAM
IPAM has already trained more than 100 technicians and civil servants in good land regularization practices, identified the existence of 25 million hectares of public land occupied without regularization and indicated the importance of land use planning for agricultural production in Pará.
In addition to taking the importance of land regularization to international events, such as the COPs (UN Climate Conference) and influencing the inclusion of land use planning in the Amazon Consortium’s strategies.
IPAM communications analyst, karina.sousa@ipam.org.br*
Cover photo: CNJ**