Brazil, struggling against raging forest fires in the Amazon, unveiled on Thursday measures officials said would reduce the impact of land-hungry settlers on the rainforest. Fires started by poor subsistence farmers, many of them settlers, have raged out of control for two months in a vast savannah region of Roraima state, on Brazil's border with Venezuela. The fires are now advancing into the rainforest. Thursday's package of measures included settling landless families in areas of the Amazon which have been deforested. Brazil's military dictatorship began settling the Amazon in the 1960s in a bid to populate the remote, Western Europe-sized rainforest.
Many settlers continue to be sent to jungle areas which are quickly destroyed.
In a bid to slow land invasions by landless groups in the Amazon region, another measure will rule out including in the government's land reform program forested areas which have been invaded by landless farmers. Martins said that the new measures would be easy to introduce, requiring only administrative changes, and added that they would be backed up by funds and training. Brazil has taken several steps in recent months to reduce deforestation in the Amazon region. In January, Congress approved a new law to make it easier for authorities to prosecute environmental offenders including logging companies. In January it announced that an area equivalent to twice the size of Belgium was deforested between 1995 and 1997, with most of the damage taking place in 1995.