CAR Mutirão serves owners of rural properties in the Cerrado Biome of MG

The Rural Environmental Registration effort began on Thursday (17/10) in the city of Montes Claros (MG) to serve small farmers who have not yet registered their rural properties. The service takes place at the Exhibition Park and is an initiative of the Brazilian Forestry Service in partnership with Emater/MG, the Rural Producers Union, the Rural Workers Union and the State Forestry Institute and is carried out by the contracted company , Hominus Management and Technology.

The effort concentrated in Montes Claros is an initial experience that aims to serve small farmers and family farmers who have not yet been able to register properties with up to 4 tax modules which, in the city, have an area of ​​up to 160 hectares. Interested parties must go to the location with their identity card, CPF and rural property document.

According to Hominus field supervisor, Odenice Rocha, the CAR joint effort project aims to serve 95 municipalities in the Minas Gerais cerrado to cover all those owners who have not yet had the opportunity to register their properties. “Based on this first experience in Montes Claros, we will readapt the logistics of the joint effort to the reality of each municipality to serve all owners pending registration with the CAR,” said Odenice.

Vicência Ribeiro Veloso, 40 years old, was one of the rural landowners who took advantage of the CAR joint effort to regularize her property, in accordance with the Brazilian Forest Code. Vicência inherited part of the property where she was born 1 and a half years ago and, due to her lack of knowledge, she did not know that registration with the CAR was mandatory to access agricultural credits and rural financing. “After I got my inherited land, I never took the initiative to update the registration. But when I saw the advertisement on television saying that all you had to do was come here with the documents, I didn't waste any time. It made my life a lot easier, in 15 minutes I registered my property. Now I can think about improvements”, concluded the owner.

The CAR is a strategic territorial planning tool and is mandatory for all rural properties, with the purpose of integrating environmental information on rural properties and possessions regarding the situation of Permanent Preservation Areas - APP, Legal Reserve areas, forests and the remnants of native vegetation, Restricted Use Areas and consolidated areas, composing a database for control, monitoring, environmental and economic planning and combating deforestation. It was created by Law No. 12.651/2012 and registration in the CAR is the first step towards obtaining the environmental regularity of the property.

The Brazilian Forest Service is responsible, at the federal level, for supporting the implementation, management and integration of the environmental databases of the Rural Environmental Registry with the Managing Bodies of the National Rural Registry System (SICAR) in the States and DF and other organizations Throughout the national territory. The joint effort is made possible by the FIP-CAR Project (Forest Investment Program, FIP for its acronym in English), which operates in the Cerrado Biome.

“With this joint effort, we hope that rural landowners who have not yet registered can be assisted. Our expectation is also to reach producers neighboring Montes Claros, since word-of-mouth has the possibility of mobilizing and gaining the support of everyone who needs this facility for due regularization, which we are offering”, says the Technical Coordinator from the FIP-CAR Project of the Brazilian Forest Service, Lilianna Latini Gomes.

The Environmental Regularization Project for Rural Properties in the Cerrado (FIP CAR Project) is one of the projects that make up the Brazilian Investment Plan and is administered by the World Bank to support developing countries. The Project is executed by the Ministry of the Environment, through the Brazilian Forest Service (SFB).

The CAR task force served 34 people in the morning of the first day of service alone and the expectation is to serve at least 100 owners by the 18th, the end of the registration period in Montes Claros. The second municipality in the Cerrado Biome of Minas Gerais to be included in this work has yet to be defined, but the goal is to clear the entire network of rural properties eligible for registration in the CAR, around 24 thousand registrations by January 2020. Other joint efforts are scheduled to take place in the states of Piauí and Maranhão, with service in 265 municipalities.