ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMES IN THE BRAZILIAN NATIVE CHARCOAL PRODUCTION CHAIN

Abstract

The charcoal production chain in Brazil over the last century has always been linked to labour analogous to slavery. After actions by the Ministry of Labour and Employment, this crime has diminished, but it is still part of a system of illegalities that range from land grabbing, to the waste of raw materials, the approval of fraudulent forest management projects, to poor supervision and a high level of corruption on the part of environmental management institutions. With the Complementary Law 140/2011, the competence to manage forests comes under the federation states, which has meant that local political interference has made environmental management bodies nothing more than caretakers for the illegal production of timber and native charcoal. The charcoal makers as the weakest actors in the production chain and without proper protection from the state, since their profession is not even recognized and they wear PPE that makes it difficult to carry out their work, continue to produce native charcoal independently as a means of survival. This work is part of the doctoral thesis defended by the author at the Open University (UAb), Lisbon, on 19/01/2022 and sought, by searching of semi-structured interviews with 23 charcoal burners (their names have been omitted), to understand a little more about how they are involved in the illegal exploitation of Brazilian forests, in the Amazon, in the Cerrado and Pantanal.