Temer finalizes project that hands over Brazilian land to foreigners.
After oil, Michel Temer's sell-out impetus has reached Brazilian agriculture; the sale of land to foreigners—currently prohibited by a law that attempts to prevent large tracts of land from falling into the hands of people from outside Brazil—is very close to being authorized by Michel Temer's administration; the government is working on the final details of a bill to allow the sale of Brazilian land to foreign companies and investors; the issue, which was considered off-limits during Dilma Rousseff's government, has been directly addressed by the Chief of Staff, Eliseu Padilha; the goal is for the text to be voted on by Congress after Carnival.
247 - Currently prohibited by Brazilian law, the sale of land to foreigners is very close to being legalized by Michel Temer's administration. The government is working on the final details of a bill to allow the sale of Brazilian land to foreign companies and investors. The issue, which was considered off-limits during Dilma Rousseff's government, has been directly addressed by the Chief of Staff, Eliseu Padilha. The government intends for the bill to be voted on by Congress after Carnival.
The information is from Reporting by André Borges and Fabrício de Castro in the State of São Paulo.
"The text stipulates that foreign investors may purchase up to 100 hectares of land (approximately 1 km², or three times the area of a city like Belo Horizonte) for production, and may also lease another 100 hectares. In this way, international investors would have 200 hectares of land at their disposal."
"The sale of land to foreigners has been causing controversy for some time. Until 1998, a 1971 law allowed foreign companies based in Brazil to buy land in the country. In that year, the Attorney General's Office (AGU) interpreted that national and foreign companies could not be treated differently and, therefore, authorized the purchase."
This, however, heightened critics' fears of a "foreign invasion" of the country, a sentiment that intensified from the mid-2000s onwards, with the increased Chinese appetite for acquisitions. In 2010, for example, the Chinese Chongqing Grain Group announced its intention to invest US$300 million in the purchase of 100 hectares in western Bahia to produce soybeans. In some sectors, the criticism was that such deals involve the control of large areas by groups subordinate to the strategy of a foreign power, which might not always follow the logic of the Brazilian state.
Faced with this pressure on land ownership, a new opinion from the Attorney General's Office (AGU), in 2010, reinstated restrictions on this type of property, prohibiting international groups from gaining control of agricultural properties in the country. In 2012, a bill was introduced in Congress modifying the restriction, but its progress is stalled.