The implementation of public policies is one of the pillars of IDH Brazil’s landscape approach, which supports the goals set forth in the PCI Regional Compacts through its environmental and land tenure regularization agenda. These demands are recurrent in the municipalities in which the compacts are implemented and they directly impact access to credit and the development of local production chains, for example.
Alex Schmidt, manager of public policy implementation at IDH, met with the Secretary of Agriculture of the municipality, Leonir Sell, and representatives of local associations to discuss the progress and agree on the next steps of this agenda in Juruena. The primary agenda was the work on land regularisation in the Vale do Amanhecer settlement.
This project will be carried out by means of direct collaboration between IDH and the municipal government, which has already signed an agreement with INCRA for the establishment of the Municipal Land Regularization Hub, as foreseen in the Titula Brasil Programme. This means that the municipality is qualified to carry out the initial actions and stages of the land regularisation process.
“This partnership between the local government and IDH is very important for the municipality because it will directly benefit many families who are waiting for the ownership deeds to their land,” said Sell.
In this context, IDH supports, through specialists, the georeferencing of the settlement, where 250 families live in an area of approximately 14 thousand hectares, with high potential for Brazil nut extractivism.
The work to collect information in the field will begin in the coming weeks and will rely on the support of the local government team and local associations, with results expected by the end of the year. In addition, IDH also prepared and validated together with Sema-MT the mapping of the municipality with all the information related to the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), which will also be delivered to the local government, thus enabling the CAR of each of the plots in the Vale do Amanhecer settlement to be carried out.
Schmidt said the decision-making phase in terms of land regularisation continues to be under the responsibility of INCRA, but the municipality is now in a position to initiate and speed up some processes by unblocking initial bottlenecks. “With this project, IDH is able to support various goals set out in the Juruena Valley PCI Compact, which go beyond regularisation, creating opportunities for the development of family farming production chains, facilitating inclusion in programs and projects, and enabling access to credit”, Schmidt exemplifies.
It is expected that all this knowledge can be shared at the Farmer Support Centre (CAP), which is currently under discussion with a view to being set up in the municipality.
IDH intends to use the lessons learned from this project in Juruena to scale up support to other municipalities within the PCI Compacts.