Brazil court halts government land reform program over abuse | Landportal
▻https://www.landportal.info/news/2016/04/brazil-court-halts-government-land-reform-program-over-abuse?platform=h
A Brazilian court has ordered the government to suspend its agrarian reform program, citing evidence that instead of helping the poor it was used to hand out free land to thousands of politicians, business owners and wealthy individuals.
The TCU, as the country’s audit court is known, was unanimous in its criticism of the flagship reform program during a plenary on Wednesday, calling for a “complete restructuring” of the agency responsible for settling impoverished Brazilians on farmland.
The decision to halt the program marks another blow to the government of leftist President Dilma Rousseff, who is facing impeachment proceedings over allegations of concealing fiscal overruns in the federal budget.
Rousseff’s possible ouster comes as Brazil’s is locked in a crisis fueled by a massive corruption scandal involving state-run oil company Petrobras and a widening investigation that has reached her inner circle.
The National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform, or INCRA, was set up in 1970 to help narrow the wealth gap in Brazil, one of the world’s worst, by reallocating to the poor idle or under-utilized land, which is still disproportionately in the hands of the rich.
The court estimated in a 72-page report seen by Reuters that since 2014 more than 479,600, or a third, of all allotments of land across Brazil’s 26 states and the federal district were improper and could cost taxpayers as much as 41 billion reais ($11 billion).