After 20 hours of debate, a vote on the controversial measure in the Chamber of Deputies was postponed Thursday until next week. The bill would then move on to the Senate.

"We are running the risk of legalizing this country's environmental tragedies," Green Party legislator Aluizio dos Santos Junior said during the heated debate in the Chamber of Deputies.

At issue is a reform of the 1965 law regulating forestry. The current law forces land owners that have forest on their property to keep part of it intact.

Farmers and ranchers must also protect environmentally sensitive areas such as river banks and hillsides.

A reform of the law, which has been discussed for more than a year, is being pushed by Brazil's powerful agribusiness sector, which is chafing under the country's strict environmental rules and is eager to increase the amount of land it can use.

Brazil is a major world exporter of grains -- including wheat, rice and corn -- as well as soybeans, coffee and beef, and posted record exports worth 80 billion dollars over the past 12 months, according to government figures.

The demands of the current law "are extreme: they want a free Amazon and the farmers to pay for it. We must reform the law to continue producing food for Brazilians and the world," said Chamber of Deputies legislator Luis Carlos Heinze.

Brazil, the world's fifth largest country by area, has 5.3 million square kilometers of jungle and forests -- mostly in the Amazon river basin -- of which only 1.7 million are under state protection. The rest is in private hands, or its ownership is undefined.

Massive deforestation has made Brazil one of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters.

But the pace of deforestation peaked in 2004 at 27,000 square kilometers a year, and in 2010 it dropped to 6,500 square kilometers.

The government hopes the proposed reform would force private owners to re-forest land they have already destroyed -- 90 percent of rural property owners are out of compliance with their obligations to maintain forest, according to Deputy Aldo Rebelo, who introduced the bill.

But environmentalists say that the bill that reached the floor for debate would grant so many exemptions it would make render the measure useless.

"This text is a passport for deforestation," Paulo Adario with the activist group Greenpeace told AFP.

Debate over the forestry reform has created splits across the political spectrum, and President Dilma Rousseff's control over her party on the issue appears in question.

Rousseff pledged during her campaign to make no concessions that would result in further deforestation or threaten Brazil's international environmental commitments.

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News