Brazilian public land destination: a case study of the Terra Legal federal initiative and the province of Mato Grosso’s Land Institute.

At the turn of the 21st century, we can see that Brazil, the 5th largest country in the world, has been successful in developing a modern export-led agriculture distributed over large areas and also achieved a good economic performance especially through the global economic crisis after 2008. Nevertheless, the country also inherited an archaic land appropriation pattern and absence of control over its public lands – results of the lack of governance over land.

 

In this context, we aim to show in this study that one of the critical components of the lack of land governance that hinders the Brazilian development is the lack of control over the destination of its public lands. For this, we divided this study in 4 sessions, as below.

 

Session 1 traces back the history of the lack of land governance in Brazil, highlighting the regulation blindspots and its adverse effects on land destination. Session 2 brings forward the specific case of Mato Grosso, showing how the confusing institutional framework related to land (including the provincial offices) affected public land destination in very adverse way from a century ago until nowadays. Session 3 focus on a diferent kind of public land destination: the Terra Legal federal program that aims at using occupied federal public land to land regularization of the landholders (providing they meet the necessary requirements), also the results of the program from 2009-2014 will be analyzed to show the program’s sucesses and discuss on how it’s implementation could be improved. Last, but not least, in the brief session 4 some ways forward will be mapped through policy proposals.