Compromise or deadlock?

BRAZIL'S gridlocked Congress often ends up passing contentious laws only after the combatants collapse in exhaustion. So it is with the revision of the Forest Code, a set of rules that, despite the name, apply to all privately owned rural land, not just plots in wooded areas. The code, originally approved in 1965, requires owners to keep native vegetation on parts of their land—80% in the Amazon, less elsewhere—and in erosion-prone and biodiverse areas such as riverbanks and mangrove swamps. But it was long ignored.

Since harsher penalties and enforcement were introduced in the late 1990s the ruralistas, as Brazil's powerful farming lobby is known, have been trying to revise the code. On April 25th, after 13 years of arguments, rewrites and stalling, the final text landed on the desk of the president, Dilma Rousseff. It was far from the version she wanted. Two government defeats in the ruralista-packed lower house meant it contained few of her own previous revisions or those of the more green-friendly Senate.