ABSTRACT
Today, over 5 percent of the Amazon biome in Brazil is occupied by agrarian reform settlements (ARS). Over 160,000 families were granted lots in more than 1,900 settlements by the federal government from 1995-2011 alone (Schneider and Peres 2015). Settlers were initially granted lots on the condition that they clear half of the area and put it into productive use, for which they received a transitional stake for basic needs, inputs and housing. Revisions to the national Forest Code in 1997 responding to global alarm with the pace of deforestation in the Amazon restricted clearing to 20 percent of properties, but these restrictions were only weakly enforced. (In 2012, a rollback in the Code weakened such regulation even further, particularly on small properties such as those found in ARS.) Recent research has shown that deforestation within ARS accounts for over 55 percent of original forest cover, over double that found on neighboring properties, and has become one of the principal sources of continuing deforestation in the Amazon (ibid.).
