IPAM (Amazon Environmental Research Institute) was present on Friday (5) at the last day of the 2nd National Meeting of Land Bodies to discuss and support the debate on land regularization in the country. Held in Teresina (PI), the event ended with the presentation of a letter drawn up by the participating states with guidelines for the federal government to move forward on the issue.
For Raquel Poça, a research analyst at IPAM, the event served mainly as an exchange of experiences between the states of the Legal Amazon and the Northeast. The first edition of the meeting was held in Belém (PA), in December 2024, and was also supported by IPAM.
The meeting was seen by the participants as a space for learning and articulation, aimed at sharing good practices, in which mistakes and successes regarding land regularization were debated by the state governments.
According to Patrícia Daros, director of the Vale Fund, the debate around regularization is an important issue for Brazil, since the lack of land ownership creates legal uncertainty, which deters possible investments in the country’s bioeconomy and carbon market. “There is insecurity because there is no regulation and legal certainty for these investors. There’s no point in creating a financial instrument if we can’t attract big business because it’s afraid,” he says.
Raquel Poça explains that, in the context of the bioeconomy, land regularization is necessary both for attracting business and for green economies to develop. However, this is not the only concern surrounding the issue. The researcher says that without land security, there is also a fragility involving indigenous peoples and traditional communities in the territories.
“We have consolidated data that indigenous peoples and traditional communities are the ones who preserve and maintain these forests the most, and this plays an important role in regulating the climate. Without the security of the land, we expose these populations to a legal fragility of territory and they become vulnerable to contracts that are not positive from the point of view of the contribution of resources that would be returned to them,” he says.
Main challenges
Participants at the event mentioned integration between the bodies involved as the main objective in the debate on land regularization. In the opinion of Moisés Savian, secretary of Land Governance at the Ministry of Agrarian Development, the biggest challenge now is to organize the land bases and unify them on a national platform.
“This is one of the main challenges: to organize this base and unify it into a single process for the country so that the regularizations that come out from now on are regularizations that won’t affect other titles that have already been issued or areas that have already been allocated,” he explains.
According to Poça, land regularization, as it stands today, is the result of a process of territorial disordering that has existed since the formation of Brazil – and for this reason, the main challenge is to unify these demands. Savian goes on to explain that the country has been occupied since colonial times and has had its land divided up at various times, such as in the case of the sesmarias, plots of land granted by the Portuguese Crown to people who undertook to exploit them; and during the military dictatorship, when the government issued titles, mainly in the Amazon, to encourage occupation of the region.
Letter from Teresina
As well as promoting a dialogue between the bodies that deal with land regularization in the states, one of the premises of the meeting is the delivery of the Teresina Charter. In the document, the state representatives collectively point out their demands, with the aim of guiding public policies and the actions of the federal government. For Savian, the letter helps the Union to know whether or not it is on the right track.
According to Rodrigo Cavalcante, director-general of Interpi (Piauí Land Institute), the idea of the 2025 charter is to make a comparison with the previous edition, from 2024, signed in Belém. He adds that the text should include which demands from the first charter have not been met and what has or has not evolved since then – calling for the items that have not been met to be revisited by the federal government.
Cavalcante advocates a focus on integration – a demand that, according to him, is recurring. “It’s clear that something has moved forward, one example is the federative Sicar (Rural Environmental Registration System), but we still need to expand the integration of state bodies with the federal government,” he says.
The Iterpi director also cites as items that will be included in this year’s charter greater cooperation between the branches of government, especially between the executive and the judiciary; and the financing of public policies involving land regularization, since some states still don’t have a source of income to carry them out and need support from the federal government.
Bruno Kono, president of Iterpa (Pará Land Institute), argues that, as well as reinforcing the pending demands, the new charter will also bring discussions that directly involve the federalism of land regularization. “The Charter of Piauí comes precisely to reinforce these desires of the states, especially in the sense of integrating and collaborating with the federal government to advance the land regularization agenda,” he says.
The president of Iterpa also cited advances since the Belém Letter. One of them is Sinarf (the National Land Regularization System), which allows states to access the federal government’s portfolio of public services.
Future of land regularization
According to Moisés Savian, the government is due to announce measures involving the land issue. The main bet is that, in the next few months, a presidential decree will be issued creating the National Land Governance Policy.
According to the secretary, the policy will create governance bodies:
- a national council that brings together the government and civil society to discuss challenges involving land regularization, such as the CAR (Rural Environmental Registry), violence in the countryside and the fight against land grabbing;
- a management committee that brings together federal land agencies, such as the Ministry of Agrarian Development, INCRA (National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform), FUNAI (National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples) and the Ministry of Management and Innovation to deal with the issue at a national level; and
- an executive committee for the state bodies, which implement the policies.
In Savian’s opinion, the creation of bodies doesn’t solve the problems as a whole, but it does create the conditions for a “federative dialog” with the participation of civil society. The proposal is currently being processed by the Civil House.
In addition to future public policies, Patrícia Daros advocates that the issue also be debated at COP30, the 30th United Nations Conference on Climate Change, in November this year. The director of the Vale Fund is calling on state representatives to take the issue to Belém.
“When I look at the issue of land regularization, I think it’s very important to bring this issue to Belém, to show that there is a group of people concerned about legal certainty and that this is a major concern for investors coming from abroad. Bringing this issue to the COP is fundamental, because we can deal with this ‘ghost’ that everything here is a zone. No, there are serious institutions taking care of this. Take advantage of the COP and bring this agenda to the table,” he said.
*IPAM journalist, anna.rodrigues@ipam.org.br