Brazil's government plans to reduce financing for illegal loggers and farmers and support penalties to pare deforestation of the Amazon, Environment Minister Marina Silva told reporters in Brasilia.
Brazilian President Lula da Silva and other officials of state-controlled banks discussed ways to restrain financing to individuals and companies damaging the Amazon, the minister said in Brasilia. Destruction in the Brazilian portion of the Amazon basin accelerated in the last five months of 2007, the ministry said last month.
``There's no intent, at this point, to give amnesty to deforestation offenders or to make the reserve limits more flexible,'' Silva said at the ministry's headquarters in Brasilia. ``What is needed is better realization, not a removal in the current policies to protect the Amazon.''
Preliminary facts show destruction between August and December may have reached as many as 7,000 square kilometers, or the equivalent of 60 percent of the deforestation in the 12 months through July 2007, partly because of increased logging and cattle-raising.
Landowners in the Amazon will have to show that at least half their property remains virgin and that there has been no destruction to the forest on their territory in the past 12 years, Deputy Environment Minister Joao Paulo Capobianco said today. Those who fail to prove that will be forced to replant, he said.
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