The 17 projects included in the selection notice for the Restaura Amazônia program for rural settlements were announced this Thursday (16), in Brasília.
The initiatives will receive R$150 million from the Amazon Fund to transform degraded areas into productive forestswith the aim of promoting development and food security.
Restaura Amazônia is part of the National Productive Forests Program of the Ministries of Agrarian Development (MDA) and Environment and Climate Change (MMA). According to the MDA minister, Paulo Teixeira, it is the largest productive restoration initiative in a settlement.
“What is being done here is reforestation with productive species, which are more profitable than soybeans and livestock. Açaí, cocoa, palm oil, cupuaçu are ten times more profitable. All of these species have the economic result that proves that the standing forest will be more important than the suppression of the forest for the sale of wood and to produce soybeans and livestock”, reinforces the minister.
According to the ministries, together, the approved projects will be capable of recovering 4,600 hectares in the Amazon region that became known as the Arc of Deforestation, located in an area between eastern Maranhão and Acre. 80 settlements will benefit, covering around 6 thousand families.
The projects are distributed across three macro-regions, the first being formed by the states of Amazonas, Acre and Rondônia, the second by Mato Grosso and Tocantins and the third by the states of Pará and Maranhão. Each will have R$46 million available.
“What we signed here is to make restoration a way of generating jobs, of generating income. Productive restoration means that we have productive forests. And they don’t have to be with exotic species. It can be with native species and we can show that a new cycle of prosperity is possible”, says the MMA minister, Marina Silva.
The resources for investment in the projects approved by the notice come entirely from the Amazon Fund and are non-refundable.
According to Marina Silva, this investment was only possible through donations from countries that observe the results of Brazilian public policies to combat deforestation and climate change. “Every time we manage to reduce CO2 emissions [gás carbônico]that we can reduce deforestation, we can raise resources”, he reinforces.
According to the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), manager of the Amazon Fund, this is one of the notices of the Restaura Amazônia program and, in total, R$450 million will be allocated in investments to recover the green cover of the biome, also covering indigenous lands and conservation units.
“Never before in the country’s history have BNDES and the Ministry of the Environment delivered so much with the Amazon Fund. We, in two and a half years, delivered four times more than everything that was done in the history of the fund”, says Tereza Campello, acting president of BNDES.
Marina Silva recalled that public environmental restoration policies are part of an effort to recover 12 million hectares in Brazil. Currently, according to the minister, 6 million hectares have already been recovered through the replanting and natural restoration process.
The projects included will have a period of 48 months to execute the initiatives, half of which will be for implementation and the other half for monitoring.
Green Paths
During the ceremony to publicize the projects covered by Restaura Amazônia, Tereza Campello also announced the contribution of R$ 146 million from the Amazon Fund to the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra), for land regularization in the Legal Amazon.
The resources will be allocated to the Caminhos Verdes program for georeferencing 33 rural settlements.
“We need to regularize land in the Amazon. There is only one way to do this and that is with public investment, to ensure that bodies can carry out land regularization, can create rural environmental registration and that is what we are doing in this strategic action”, he concludes.
