BRAZILIAN President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva granted official recognition to 800 square miles of indigenous lands today, protecting swathes of the Amazon from commercial exploitation.

The move — following a campaign promise from the Workers Party leader — marks a reversal of his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro’s policy of opening up Brazil’s interior to mining and logging. 

Mr Bolsonaro pledged that “not one more centimetre” of Brazilian land would be designated as indigenous territory and changed regulatory laws to weaken protections for indigenous areas — driving a 195 per cent increase in deforestation from 2019-21 and what Workers Party leaders have described as a “genocide” of the Yanomami people by invasive gold miners. The Lula administration deployed thousands of armed police and environmental protection agents in February to try to clear gold miners from their lands.

Lula recognised six ancestral lands, the first demarcation since Bolsonaro’s moratorium in 2018. The two largest are in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical forest and considered a vital carbon sink whose deforestation has a global impact on rising temperatures.

The land remains under the federal government’s jurisdiction, but the designation grants indigenous peoples the right to use it in their traditional manner. Mining activities are prohibited, and commercial farming and logging require specific authorisations. Non-indigenous individuals are forbidden from engaging in any economic activity on indigenous lands.

Lula has made environmental sustainability a key plank of his reform agenda, also re-establishing the Food Acquisition Programme, a scheme which buys up food from small, sustainable producers and distributes it through schools, public-sector canteens and to citizens deemed food insecure.