The arrival of agribusiness and the expansion of soybean plantations have profoundly transformed the Brazilian Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse tropical savanna. There, where until twenty or thirty years ago the native vegetation of El Cerrado thrived, there is now an endless sea of soybean plantations around large fazendas. Deforestation and the rapid advance of agribusiness have not only unbalanced the region’s ecosystems but also violently impacted the territories, habitats, and lives of the communities living there. Five multinational corporations are responsible for 57% of the deforestation associated with soybeans. For example, Bunge has established an empire in southern Piauí State with the support of the Brazilian government, investment funds, local administration, and a significant amount of violence from grileiros—local land grabbers who seize land from communities, falsify documents, establish agricultural operations, and speculate on land through speculative transactions.

Text: Clara Roig, based on a reportage by Ale Cukar published in Revista 5W.
Photographs: Edu Ponces / RUIDO Photo

Soybeans look innocent, round, almost white, with a small black scar on their side. They are just the size of a chickpea and are preceded by a whirlwind of loves and hatreds. Geraldo Pessoa keeps them in an old jar with a bit of water to soften them. On the banks of the stream near his house, he takes a handful and throws them. When some fish approach and eat, it’s his moment to cast his line and wait for a bite. Sometimes luck strikes, and that handful of soybeans turns into dinner fish.

Geraldo gets this bait thanks to friends and family who work on one of the many soybean farms surrounding his community’s territory. There, where until twenty or thirty years ago the native vegetation of the Brazilian Cerrado thrived, there is now an endless sea of soybean plantations.

El Cerrado is Brazil’s second-largest biome after the Amazon and the world’s most biodiverse tropical savanna. It covers 200 million hectares in eastern Brazil. Since the early 2000s, nearly 20 million hectares of native vegetation have been deforested — 10% of its total area — due to agricultural expansion, specifically soybean plantations. This conversion to pasture and agriculture has caused the region’s average temperature to increase by almost 1 degree Celsius and the relative humidity of the air to decrease by 10% between 2006 and 2019. Today, only 53% of the native vegetation remains.

Geraldo arrived about 30 years ago with his family in Barra de Lagoa, a small community in the state of Piauí, northeast Brazil. Until two or three decades ago, the landscape Geraldo knew was an expanse of shrubs and medium-sized trees with twisted shapes, scattered across the highs and lows of the plateaus that cross the territory, and watercourses marked by large trees growing on their banks. “With the arrival of agribusiness projects on the plateaus, the waters of Riozinho and Brejo da Lagoa, which we used for drinking, cooking, washing clothes, and fishing, became contaminated with pesticides from soybean plantations brought by rain and wind. The flooded soils of Brejo da Lagoa also began to dry up.”

Deforestation and the rapid advance of agribusiness have not only unbalanced the region’s ecosystems and affected the key role of El Cerrado savanna as a water supplier for eight Brazilian hydrographic basins, but also violently impacted the territories, habitats, and lives of traditional, peasant, quilombola (Afro-Brazilian), and Indigenous communities. All this so that a few hands could generate great profits and populations millions of kilometers away could eat cheap meat almost every day.

“Life used to be difficult, but there was plenty of hunting and fishing, and we had small farms and orchards,” explains Geraldo.

The Matopiba Project

Soybeans have the good or bad luck of being a very protein-rich legume. Nowadays, around 80% of the soybeans produced worldwide are used to produce feed for poultry and pigs. Most of Brazil’s soybeans are exported to China and the EU. Spain is the EU country that imports the most soybeans associated with deforestation.

In Brazil, soybeans began to be planted in the 1940s as a rotational crop with wheat. However, it wasn’t until the 1970s, when soybeans entered the global industrial agriculture machinery, that trees began to be felled and roads opened to convert the Amazon rainforest into vast monoculture fields of soybeans and pasture for livestock. Today, five multinational corporations, known as the ABCD — ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfus — along with the Chinese company COCFO, control 50% of soybean exports from Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. In Brazil, Bunge and Cargill have created large empires that control the entire supply chain from production to storage, transportation of seeds across the Atlantic, soybean processing at various entry ports, and distribution in European countries and China.

In 2006, when the Brazilian government had already built the necessary infrastructure to export production from the new fields in the Amazon with nearly 20 million hectares deforested, the large grain and oilseed producers and traders signed a moratorium committing not to further expand soybean cultivation in the Amazon rainforest due to strong social and media pressure to preserve one of the planet’s most important ecosystems. The result was as spectacular as perverse: deforestation of the Amazon rainforest associated with soybean expansion dropped from 30% to 1% between 2006 and 2017, but shifted to El Cerrado. Outwardly, the multinational corporations presented themselves as great environmental defenders; but in reality, they simply moved their headquarters.

In fact, large landowners and agribusiness companies found an agricultural frontier in the north-central part of the country, specifically in the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia. Although the lands were originally unproductive, thanks to the Brazilian government’s investments in scientific and technological research institutions, soybean plants were genetically modified to improve adaptation to tropical climates, and chemical fertilizers were used to correct predominantly acidic and low-fertility soils.

The government invested in energy, communication, and transport infrastructure, and provided subsidies, tax incentives, and bank credits. It also made deforestation legal in El Cerrado. Brazil’s Forest Code states that in El Cerrado, landowners can legally deforest up to 80% of their lands, allocating only 20% for conservation. Additionally, there are very few protected areas: only 8% of the biome has any official protection, and less than 3% is under strict protection. This means that, in practice, most of the deforestation of the savanna complies with Brazilian law.

Thus, El Cerrado became a coveted frontier, responsible for approximately 10% of the national cereal production. In 2015, the Matopiba Project was approved by government decree, with a potential for 73 million hectares of cultivation. The miracle of soybeans became possible on an altar of sacrifices.

With the soybean moratorium, the multinationals presented themselves as great defenders of the environment, but in reality they only moved their headquarters to El Cerrado.

A bird’s eye view of deforestation in the Brazilian Cerrado. © Edu Ponces / RUIDO Photo

The land belongs to those who speculate

In this process of converting El Cerrado into a monoculture field, the inhabitants of El Cerrado (diverse racially and socio-culturally) have been rendered invisible, while entire communities have been harassed, threatened, and displaced. The Matopiba project was developed under the idea that El Cerrado had a demographic void or that the inhabitants living there mattered much less than the supposed development of the region.

“The conflicts began when the land grabbers called grileiros arrived and harassed us. They never show the [land ownership] documents or they are fake, and they threaten and intimidate the neighbors. Here we have heard gunshots several times. They also come with their lawyers and their security personnel to give us a deadline to leave,” explains Geraldo Pessoa, from Barra de Lagoa.

Land grabbers in Brazil are those who forge documents to illegally take possession of others peoples’ land: they engage in “grilagem,” or land grabbing. The word comes from “grilo,” which means cricket in Portuguese, because this insect plays a key role in this modus operandi: the land grabbers forge a property title and leave it inside a box with crickets for a while so that the action of the insects gives it the sepia color of old documents. With these fake titles, and probably some bribery, they register the property in their name. They then forcibly evict the peasants from the occupied territories with threats and violence, take two tractors, link them with a chain, and move them together to drag all the vegetation. What remains of the land is burned, and that’s it: the new “owners” have a gleaming farm to offer on the land markets.

In the tiny community of Angelim, in southern Piauí, Raimundo Rodrigues is used to encountering land grabbers. Now he can identify them from afar. They are usually white men, who bring forms and claim to come in peace, in the name of the State that sends them to give the peasants the title to the lands they occupy, and that they only need to sign. But in reality, they are workers from security companies hired by the fazendas surrounding the community, such as Norte Sul Segurança Privada (NSSP). The first time Raimundo had to face the land grabbers was in 2010, and since then the harassment has not stopped. For months, they came three times a week, sometimes twice a day, with their weapon clearly visible.

Most of the time, the lands in dispute are the so-called “terras devolutas” or “returned land”, this is, lands that the Portuguese crown had granted to nobles, sailors, or soldiers for services rendered during the colonial period and were either never occupied or were abandoned. Peasant, quilombola, and indigenous communities settled in these abandoned lands. Today they are considered public land, and although the communities have lived there for generations, they only have the right to possession since it is very hard for them to prove a property title. Today, these areas are the only remaining oases of biodiversity.

“We live in an area that they want to use as a reserve, because the law says that they can deforest 80% of their territory if they conserve the other 20%. Thus, they want to expel us from our land to use it for conservation. They already told us so,” explains Raimundo.

In the “baixão” of Angelim, where José Luiz and Raimundo live, only agroecological farming exists, done in the same way as their ancestors did. They plant rice and beans, vegetables, greens, and fruits in a farming system respectful of seasonal cycles. In this way, they have kept the land productive and the ecosystems intact, but access to water is becoming a serious problem, contaminated by agrochemicals.

“Previously, my mother and grandmother used to fish a lot in the river, but now there are much fewer fish, and we are afraid to drink that water,” explains Raimundo. “We can’t use it for anything, not even to wash clothes. You can bathe in it, but it makes you itch. Deforestation is very close, and they use a lot of agrochemicals. You can see the agrochemical plane passing by and you can smell it.”

Although the fazendas (large farms) are generally owned by Brazilian citizens, behind the deforestation, the pollution of ecosystems, and the human rights violations of communities, there are large agribusiness companies and foreign investment funds. Kamanjir, one of the fazendas around Angelim, was once state land until Euclides De Carli—the most notorious land grabber in the region, a terrorizer of communities—claimed them with fake papers and a good dose of violence. Now it is another farm in a legal dispute over possession while it continues to produce monoculture. The De Carli group, as documented by researchers from the Brazilian Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, managed to sell big plots of land to large agribusiness companies (such as Radar/Tellus, Insolo, and SLC) and major financial funds.

“Given Bunge’s monopoly in Piauí, it is not an exaggeration to say that all deforestation carried out in the region benefits its business. Unless Bunge takes clear steps to prevent it, all recently deforested areas in the region will likely become soybean plantations that will enter Bunge’s supply chains,” explains the Brazilian Network for Social Justice and Human Rights.

“Given Bunge’s monopoly in Piauí, it is not an exaggeration to say that all deforestation carried out in the region benefits its business”, explains the Brazilian Network for Social Justice and Human Rights.

Life in the community of Angelim passes quietly for the Pessoa family. © Edu Ponces / RUIDO Photo

The financialization of the land

The global financial system has played a key role in the expansion of agribusiness commodities such as soy and sugarcane in Brazil. In the early 2000s, the amount of credit in the financial system at very low interest rates motivated financial actors to invest in commodity markets or futures. These assets were considered safe investments: the growing world population and the development of the middle class in countries like China and India, with new eating habits, would keep global demand for commodities rising. Investment in commodities drove fierce agricultural expansion. In Matopiba, between 2000 and 2014, the area planted with soybeans and sugarcane increased by 253% and 379%, respectively.

The amount of money transferred to the commodity financial market created a bubble and decoupled commodity prices from real demand. With the 2008 financial crisis, the bubble burst and commodity prices plummeted. However, the price of land in Brazil continued to rise. Financial actors shifted their investments from the commodity market to the land market, where the expansion of monoculture served to justify the increase in land prices, regardless of the production itself. This was accompanied by government measures in 2017 that facilitated speculation and access to credit for agricultural operations in the financial markets.

An example of this business model is Radar Imobiliária Agrícola S/A, established through a partnership between the American pension fund TIAA and Brazil’s leading sugar production company, Cosan. The purpose of Radar is to generate income through land investment, which involves acquiring land at low prices, establishing agricultural operations on that land, and subsequently selling it, often in speculative operations. This land acquisition becomes even more lucrative when the land is usurped from the communities “for free.” But these perverse processes of clandestine capitalism do not consider the high environmental costs or the severe human rights violations.

Meanwhile, Raimundo continues planting and cultivating the small plots of land his community occupies, while, driven by necessity, they are forced to work for their oppressors on some of the fazendas. “Here you have no way to survive, you have to work at something else. I have been working on a fazenda for nine years. It’s the way for my children to study in the city, in Filomena, and to buy other things we need.”

Financial actors shifted their investments from the commodities market to the land market, where the expansion of monoculture served to justify the increase in the price of land, regardless of the production itself.