Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is wrestling with a tricky public-relations problem: how to settle the most important rainforest-protection debate here in decades on the eve of hosting one of the world’s highest-profile environmental conferences. The debate, which focuses on how Congress should rewrite Brazil’s 1965 Forest Code, is unlikely to give Rousseff a green success on eve of the June 20-22 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. That’s because the two forest-code-revision bills being considered would, according to a top government research institute, result in forest loss amounting to an area half the size of the U.S. state of Maine. The issue is amnesty. Both forestry-code bills, one authored by Brazil’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, and the... [Log in to read more]
