Western Bahia seeks APP total restoration

Valor Economico journal - Sept 2nd 2011
Bettina Barros

The municipality of Luis Eduardo Magalhaes (Bahia state) has launched a campaign for the full restoration of Permanent Protection Areas on farms, the first initiative of its kind in the country. Known by the acronym APP, these areas stretch from the lands bordering water bodies up to the hillsides.
Through a partnership with the productive sector, nongovernmental organizations and the industry, the city hall aims to make green 100% of the APPs of the municipality located within the perimeter of the new agricultural frontier in western Bahia. According to the government, the environmental deficit in this category is small. Out of the 24 thousand hectares that must be preserved in APPs, only 6% need to be recovered by the rural land owners.
This is, at least, what the georeferenced map of the municipality showed, says Fernanda Aguiar, secretary of the Environment of Luis Eduardo Magalhaes, or LEM, as it is popularly know. “We need to recover two thousand hectares in preservation areas”.
The preservation is high because, contrary to other places where deforestation happened to open space for the entrance of cattle, in LEM the soil was prepared for planting. “When the land is prepared for livestock, the first area to be deforested is by the river, so that the herd can drink water", explains Valmir Ortega, of Conservation International (CI), one of the partners of the "100% Legal" project of Luis Eduardo.
The consortium also involves the Association of Farmers and Irrigators of Bahia (Aiba), and the Lina Galvani Institute, responsible for the workshops for the production of over 70 varieties of seeds with family farmers, in such a way as to supply rural land owners with plantlets and offer economic alternatives to underprivileged communities.
At first, focus will be on recovering only the degraded area. But the program anticipates new better resolution satellite images (2.5 meters) to identify, within the 94% preserved, initial stages of degradation and other sources of pressure over the native forest.
As for the hole in Legal Reserves - the percentage of 20% of native vegetation on the property that must be preserved in this part of the Cerrado - one does not speak. The logic was to start with the easiest one and achieve concrete progress. "There all this discussion on the Forest Code going on. For that reason, we do not think this is the time to deal with the Legal Reserve”, says Fernanda.
With so much discussion on the air, calling the productive sector to recover degraded areas at this point is a careful task. Not by chance, Monsanto will be in charge of the convincing job. The US agrochemical multinational company wants to take advantage of the direct channel with its customers to contribute to this "awareness". Through informal talks and workshops, sales people of the company will try to show the benefits of forests to the very pocket of farmers - the riparian vegetation, for example, prevents soil erosion.
"They will use the same sales tactics to raise awareness", says Gabriela Burian, sustainability manager for Monsanto. "In this dialogue on the restoration it will be explained why, what for and how it should be done."In recent years, Western Bahia entered the radar of agricultural investors due to the area potential yet to be exploited. According to the Department of Agriculture of LEM, there are 400 large farmers in the city, and virtually the same number of small farmers. They are dedicated to 235 thousand hectares, especially soybeans and cotton, the flagship in the region.
For this same reason, environmentalists have intensified their actions in the region. In this piece of Cerrado there are still many fragments preserved. The race, therefore, is to avoid unnecessary deforestation like those occurred in Mato Grosso, for example. The second largest biome in the country, after the Amazon, the Cerrado is the birthplace of waters that forms the three major river basins of the country - the Amazon, São Francisco and Paraná/Paraguay