A law approved this month by Brazil’s Congress aspires to end this mess—but at a price. It would grant title to all landholdings up to 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) occupied before 2005 in the Amazon, comprising an area the size of France, and ban further land claims. The law entrenches injustice: it risks rewarding people who used violence to obtain land, including large landholders who occupy almost 90 per cent of the area under discussion. Brazilian greens want to limit the measure to smaller plots, and to ban their resale for ten years.

Yet that risks defeating the object. Better for the government to complement this attempt to end battles over privately owned land with a decision to take the rest of the Amazon into public ownership, as parks or reserves. Countries with rainforests also need to have due regard for their preservation and for the Indians who live in them when allowing mining and oil exploration. The lack of such procedures was behind a bloody clash in Peru this month.

Lay down that axe and you will get cash

At the moment it makes economic sense to cut down trees: those who do so can sell the timber and turn the land into farms or ranches. So the second idea for saving forests lies in changing economic incentives by paying people not to chop down trees—an idea known in the ghastly jargon of climate-change diplomacy as “reduction of emissions from deforestation and degradation” (REDD). Since many rich countries felled their forests as they developed it seems fair that they should pay some of the cost of this.

... contd.