The Legal Reserve compensation, foreseen in the Forest Code as a mechanism for environmental regularization, has been used extensively by agribusiness in western Bahia. However, part of these compensation areas falls precisely on territories historically occupied by traditional and peasant communities, converting a preservation instrument into a strategy of green land grabbing.
This is one of the main conclusions of the article. Making environmental compensation visible. Biased data transparency and agribusiness strategies in the Bahianese agricultural frontier of the Cerrado, published in Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography (available on this link, in English)
Authored by researchers Pierre Gautreau, Eve Anne Bühler, and Ludivine Eloy, the study tracked Legal Reserve compensation chains and identified overlapping situations with community territories, revealing weaknesses in the transparency of the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) and failures by the State in protecting these territories.
In an interview with the Tô no Mapa website, Gautreau, one of the study's authors, details the main research findings and explains the importance of territorial data produced by the communities themselves through the platform.
Gautreau is a geographer and researcher at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in France. He works in the field of political ecology, researching agribusiness, environmental regulation, territorial conflicts, and the digitalization of environmental policies in Latin America, with a special focus on Brazil. Check out the interview:
How did the interest in researching the agricultural frontier of western Bahia and the relationship between CAR (Rural Environmental Registry) and traditional communities arise?
Pierre Gautreau: My background is in political ecology, especially regarding how Latin American societies formulate the environmental question and the conflicts surrounding it. In recent years, I have been studying how the digitalization of environmental policies modifies power relations, conflicts, and forms of regulation.
In the case of western Bahia, we were interested in understanding how the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) interacted with agrarian and social dynamics in a region marked by the rapid adoption of the CAR by agribusiness and by historical land conflicts. There were already known cases, such as that of Capão do Modesto, in Correntina, and we wanted to map and quantify this process more broadly.
The article mentions "green land grabbing." How does this mechanism work in practice?
Pierre Gautreau: Green land grabbing occurs when powerful actors, especially large corporations, use the argument of environmental conservation to act on territories historically occupied by communities.
In practice, companies register areas as compensated Legal Reserves in territories where peasant or traditional communities have lived for decades, sometimes for more than a century. Then, they restrict access for these populations with fences, armed guards, or other control mechanisms.
Beyond the material impact, there is an important symbolic effect: these communities are portrayed as environmental polluters, while the company presents itself as a modern and responsible agent. This is very functional for international markets, where consumers and investors cannot verify what happens on the ground.
What were the main impacts identified on the communities?
Pierre Gautreau: The first impact is the concrete loss of access to land and natural resources. The company needs to demonstrate that it is "conserving" the area, and this often means preventing the return or continued presence of communities.
The second impact is discursive: traditional practices, such as the use of fire in agricultural management, are being criminalized. There is a false narrative that traditional communities degrade the Cerrado, when we know that these uses can have a controlled impact and be part of the historical construction of the landscape.
This leads to social delegitimization and weakens the political capacity of these populations to defend their rights.
When land grabbing through illegal activities extends to territories that are not yet formally recognized by the State, does the vulnerability of communities intensify?
Pierre Gautreau: Without a doubt. Formal recognition legally strengthens communities and expands their tools for defense.
But one of the most serious issues we've observed is that many affected communities don't even appear in the public debate. With the data from Tô no Mapa, we realize that the number of impacted territories is much greater than the best-known cases.
There are communities that have already declared their territorial boundaries, but which do not have the same capacity for political mobilization or institutional support. In these cases, the helplessness is even greater.
How important was the data from Tô no Mapa in arriving at these results?
Pierre Gautreau: It was crucial. To identify and quantify the impact of compensation on community territories, it is not enough to know that a community exists in a given municipality. It is necessary to know the boundaries of the territory.
Tô no Mapa offers precisely that: territorial polygons constructed from the self-declaration of the communities themselves. This allowed for cross-referencing CAR data with areas that are actually claimed and occupied, something that maps based solely on points would not allow.
The platform plays a very important role because it gives territorial scale to the presence of these communities and increases their visibility for research and public advocacy.
The article also criticizes the transparency of the CAR. Where is the main problem?
Pierre Gautreau: The CAR (Rural Environmental Registry) offers partial transparency. It shows that a property is regularized, but it doesn't always allow for easy identification of where the compensated Legal Reserve is located.
During the research period, it was necessary to develop a very specific geoprocessing methodology to reconstruct these compensation chains. Today this has improved, but we still believe that the system should allow, with a simple click, to automatically visualize where the compensated area is located.
This transparency is crucial not only for environmental oversight, but also for verifying whether companies are violating the rights of traditional communities while presenting themselves as sustainable in the international market.
During the research, there was an update to the CAR (Rural Environmental Registry). What changed and why is this relevant?
Pierre Gautreau: When we began the research, the CAR data did not allow for a simple identification of the relationship between a property and its compensated Legal Reserve. It was necessary to develop a geoprocessing methodology to reconstruct these chains from the intersection of different layers, such as properties, APPs (Permanent Preservation Areas), and reserve areas.
Between the submission and publication of the article, there was a positive update to the database. This change made it easier to identify these links, something that previously required a veritable cartographic "hacking" effort.
This is relevant because it reinforces one of the study's central recommendations: the platform needs to make immediately visible where the compensated Legal Reserve is located for each property. Currently, when a property does not have the reserve within its boundaries, the user should be able to automatically locate the area used for compensation with a single click.
This transparency is essential so that researchers, public bodies, communities, and even international buyers can verify whether environmental regularization is not being carried out at the cost of territorial and human rights violations.
Originally published in portal Tô na Mapa