Institutional innovation for the solution to Amazonia's land ownership problems: the case of the internal affairs department in Mato Grosso
Bastiaan P. Reydon et al.
The serious land ownership problem which the country is experiencing today stems from the process of occupation implemented by the Portuguese at the beginning of the 16th century. The set of legal and institutional solutions, no matter how much they attempted to address the problem, mostly only aggravated the situation. Historically, the land ownership situation in Brazil has been marked by the existence of formal regulation, but not applied across the board, making the rules of land access somewhat fragile and inchoate. The aim of the 1850 Land Law was to regulate property through: planning of territorial appropriation in Brazil; end of squatter?s possession; land registration; transformation of land into reliable collateral for loans. However this is not what happened: land, both rural and urban, has largely unreliable legal guarantees and an absolute lack of regulation over its use. Up until now, there has been no cadaster for private property or even public land (vacant or otherwise) let alone any form of social regulation of its use. Therefore, with this situation, land is capable of being used as the owners deem appropriate, ranging from speculative use to production or even predatory activity. Even now we have no real notion of the land that belongs to the State through the various mechanisms in existence; not even the vacant lands defined in the Land Law have been itemized in detail.
Event: Symposium on Land Consolidation and Readjustment for Sustainable Development
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