Impacto da concessão florestal na geração de emprego local: caso de Itapuã do Oeste, Rondônia

Abstract

In the humid tropics, the system of forest concessions has become the main mechanism for access to public forest resources. In Brazil, the forest concession was inaugurated as a public policy in 2006 through Law No. 11,284 of March 2, also known as the Public Forest Management Act. It had as one of its assumptions the generation of jobs in remote forest areas of Amazon. In order to assess if this impact has been effective around the first areas of forest concession in the country, the municipality of Itapuã do Oeste (Rondônia) was used as a case study. The impact of public policy was verified through the Synthetic Control technique for the period from 2002 to 2015. The impact on the generation of forestry jobs was felt starting in 2014, four years after the beginning of the operation of the concessions and was related to conjunctural factors, such as emergence of new concessions areas in Rondônia, contractual changes through federal resolution and compliance with local workers' qualification requirements. The municipality of Itapuã do Oeste benefited from increased jobs by concentrating the processing of the wood and receiving the demand for labor caused by other municipalities with forest concessions, but without the same structure. From this point of view, the planning of forest concessions in the Amazon would need to obey a regional perspective and in line with national and state development plans that overflow the sphere of environmental entities that now manage the concessions.