January 10, 2012 Carlos Peres and Maurício Schneider review the
environmental and socioeconomic costs of Brazil's agrarian
resettlement schemes, which have run from the 1970s as part an
effort to to encourage migration from densely settled areas to
low population regions. The largest, run by the Institute for
Rural Settlement and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), has moved nearly a
million families to settlements encompassing 85.8 million
hectares of mostly forest land. The impact on forests has been
substantial — by 2004 15 percent of all deforestation in the
Brazilian Amazon had occurred in INCRA areas. The proportion has
since climbed, with some INCRA settlements reaching 70 percent
forest loss. Fragmentation due to colonization in the Brazilian
Amazon. Image courtesy of Google Earth But while the programs
drive deforestation, the economic benefits for settlers are less
than clear, according to the authors. "The environmental and
monetary costs associated with these resettlement schemes are
rarely outweighed by the