The social and Environmental effects of agribusiness in Brazil

Luísa Souza
21 min readMay 22, 2020

Brazil is a country with an economy that is largely reliant on its agribusiness. Currently, our main exports consist of agricultural commodities produced in large-scale industrialized farms. Brazilian agribusiness is highly praised in the national discourse. This praise comes from politicians, from the mainstream media and even from TV and radio ads such as those that often appear in Brazilian television with the slogan “agri is tech, agri is pop”.

In fact, the amount of money involved in Brazilian agribusiness is astounding being responsible for generating 23.5% of the country’s GDP in 2017. This money comes mostly from the production of soy, sugar cane, cattle, coffee, corn and cotton, which are primarily destined for exportation.

Despite all the hype, is this model of agribusiness the best way to produce food and other agricultural commodities in economic terms? And what happens to the equation when we consider factors such as food security and socioeconomic factors into it?

When we question our current agribusiness model based on large rural properties that produce agriculture commodities through monoculture farming with the extensive use of machinery, pesticides and synthetic petrochemical fertilizers, we are often faced with detractors that deny that there is any viable alternative that can be implemented in the country or in the world itself.

The most common objection is the claim that it is impossible to feed such a large population through small-scale farming, especially if it is organic. But when we take a look at our current state of affairs, it becomes evident that the dominant model of agribusiness is not what is feeding Brazil and the world.

Brazilian industrial agribusiness is currently in possession of 900,000 farms, which occupy 75% of the country’s arable lands. Even within the national agribusiness, there is a large inequality in terms of how land is distributed. Around 1,5% of landowners own 53% of the country’s arable land.

Meanwhile, family farms occupy less than 25% of the country’s arable land, amounting to a total of 4.4 million farms. Yet, 70% of the food consumed in Brazil comes from family farms. According to a report released in 2004 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), family farming produces about 80% of all the food consumed in the world despite occupying less land than large-scale agriculture.

If family farming is currently responsible for most of the food production in Brazil and the world despite occupying less land than large-scale industrial farming, one cannot argue that the agribusiness model predominant in Brazil is a necessity if we are to feed our population. In fact, it is one of the main threats to food security we face in the long term.

This model was developed and promoted after the second world war due to two main factors. First, we have the discoveries made by the German chemist Justus Von Liebig, who demonstrated the importance of nitrogen and certain minerals to plant growth.

At that time, many advances were also made by the chemical industry as a result of the war effort. These advances allowed for the mass production of phosphate and petrol-based fertilizers and pesticides. The alliance between Liebig’s discoveries and these new technologies as well as the implementation of new machinery in agriculture allowed for mechanized mass-production of agricultural goods in large rural properties, giving rise to a radical paradigm shift known today as the Green Revolution, a name that couldn’t be less ill-fitting when we consider its consequences.

Another important factor associated with the Green Revolution which arrived later is the development of genetically engineered organisms designed to develop characteristics such as resistance to pests, to droughts and increased productivity.

During the 50s, the Green Revolution spread quickly over the United States and Europe. Through the next decades, it spread over much of the world in a still ongoing process, reaching Brazil in the 60s and gaining momentum in the 70s. This process concentrated power in the hands of a few wealthy landowners and caused a series of social and environmental consequences.

Agribusiness and the soil

One of these consequences is the degradation of the soil. In the last 40 years alone, around a third of the world’s arable soil was lost. With an increasing demand for food as the world population grows and as eating habits change, this situation is clearly unsustainable, and would remain so even without a growing population. This degradation is provoked by many factors. One such factor is the action of the sun and the rain upon unprotected soil, the first of these killing essential microorganisms while the later provokes erosion and washes away nutrients, which end up in rivers, lakes and the ocean.

Another factor is the revolving of the soil by machines, which buries topsoil while deeper layers are moved to the surface. The aerobic bacteria that live in the topsoil are killed due to the lack of oxygen, while anaerobic bacteria that can be found in deeper layers are killed by the excess of oxygen and exposure to the sun. Heavy machinery also compacts the soil, which further degrades it while making it more difficult for plants to bury their roots in it and decreasing the soil’s water absorption capacity, which increases the frequency and intensity of floods.

The excess of fertilizers and pesticides also degrade the soil by killing microorganisms that live in it and are largely responsible for its fertility. Artificial fertilizers tend to come in diluted form so its nutrients can be quickly absorbed by plants. In the quantity they are released, however, they provoke an intense level of activity in these microorganisms that end up killing a large part of them, reducing the soil’s fertility in the long term.

Besides, much of the nitrogen that make up the composition of fertilizers is washed up by the rain before it can be absorbed by the plants, contaminating rivers and oceans, and creating dead zones in the oceans in some cases such as the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Pesticides and herbicides also contaminate bodies of water and the groundwater that many people rely on for drinking water and for irrigating crops.

It is also worth mentioning that industrial agriculture was created and developed in temperate zones where the climate and soils differ from those in tropical countries such as Brazil. Tropical soil tends to have less nutrients, and frequently own their fertility to the recycling of organic matter contained in plants, a process that is aided by humidity and heat.

The type of soil predominant in the Amazon rainforest is a great example of this. While poor in nutrients, it can sustain a highly productive forest Through the cycling of nutrients contained in its biomass with the aid of high levels of humidity and heat. When the forest biomass is removed so it can give place to monocultures fed by artificial fertilizers, the soil quickly degrades after a few harvests.

This is what has been happening as agribusiness moves deeper into the forest in order to produce monocultures of commodities such as soil and to raise cattle. And when it comes to the Amazon forest, we are already aware of many agricultural methods that are both sustainable and productive. One such method consists of agroforestry systems that use the ecosystem’s natural properties in order to create food systems with a focus on forest products such as fruits, latex and nuts, which can be quite profitable as well.

Apart from degrading the soil and the environment, this model of agribusiness is also responsible for many negative social consequences. Some of these consequences come from environment degradation itself such as the contamination of water bodies that people rely on for drinking water, agriculture and fishing among other things.

While the natural environment should be preserved for its own sake, it provides us many benefits which are compromised when it is damaged. Nature is not only a source of resources, but also one of leisure, tourism, learning and beauty. Biodiversity also benefits us by aiding research that can lead to new forms of medicine, construction materials and the manufacture of a wide array of products.

When we destroy biodiversity and extinguish plant and animal species, we are depriving ourselves of these benefits, as well as some which we might not even be aware of.

Agribusiness and water

The predominant model of agribusiness also affects the water cycle and contaminates rivers, lakes, groundwater and the ocean. In Brazil, agribusiness uses more water than all of the country’s residences and its industries together, being responsible for 70% of the country’s use of water.

Much of the water it uses is wasted, since it is often applied with inefficient irrigation methods that cause most of it to be evaporated instead of being absorbed by the soil and used by plants. The lack of vegetable cover, which is the norm in agribusiness, also increases drastically the amount of wasted water, since green cover holds water and helps to maintain humidity.

Also, monoculture farming retain much less water than natural systems or diversified polyculture systems which contain more biomass. As a result, the expansion of agribusiness wastes water and affects the water cycle by reducing the amount of rain and the level of rivers and lakes.

When we substitute functioning ecosystems with monoculture farming, we are faced with increasingly intense droughts that affect the lives of people and agriculture itself, which needs increasing amounts of irrigation in order to function. With degraded soils and less and less water available, the situation becomes clearly unsustainable. We can get a glimpse of the consequences of such carelessness by looking at the collapse of many past civilizations that destroyed the natural vegetation of their bioregions and then succumbed during periods of intense droughts.

Water is not only needed for agriculture but also for residential use and to maintain industries running, which account for about 27% of all water used in Brasil. The ways that our model of agribusiness affects the water cycle become more alarming when we take in account the fact that over 90% of the energy produced in the country comes from hydropower. This means that a water crisis might also provoke an unprecedented energy crisis. Meanwhile, agribusiness is quickly expanding through the Amazon rainforest, which holds much of the country’s water reserves and plays a key role in the earth’s water cycle.

Pesticides and human health

The effects of pesticides on human health represent another consequence of the dominant model of agribusiness. Brazil is currently among the main consumers of pesticides in the world. According to a report conducted by the Oswaldo Cruz foundation, Brazilian agriculture utilizes around 7.3 litres of pesticides per capita every year.

Many pesticides that are used here have been banned in Europe, and more than 450 new pesticides were registered in 2018 alone. To make things worse, the amount of pesticides that can be applied to a given area according to our current legislation is extremely high. In the case of some products, this amount is up to 5,000 times higher than what is permitted in the European Union.

Those that are most affected by pesticides are farmers that apply them. According to the dossier on pesticides produced by Abrasco (Brazilian Association of Collective Health), 2,052 people have died from acute poisoning from pesticides between 2000 and 2009, the vast majority of the affected being farmers. The fact that most cases go unreported also needs to be accounted for, which means that the actual number of people affected and killed by pesticides might be much higher.

Another issue is that many farms do not follow the rules for the application of pesticides. The amount of pesticides applied is also very often superior to what is established by the country’s legislation, which is already quite high. The heat of the tropics also makes it hard for workers to use protective vests when temperatures are high and the sun is strong, since such vests puts them at the risk of heat strokes.

As serious as this is, the harmful consequences of pesticides are not limited to farmers. When they contaminate rivers, lakes and groundwater that many people rely on for drinking water, other people end up being contaminated as well. Consumers of products that are produced with the use of pesticides are also affected and can experience a range of conditions that can go from cancer and muscular atrophy to hydrocephalus.

Currently, much of the food consumed in the country is contaminated by pesticides. A study that was conducted in 2017 by the Residues and Pesticides Laboratory (LRP) of the Biological Institute of São Paulo at the request of Greenpeace found pesticides in around 60% of the food products that were analysed.

The study also found irregularities such as excessive application of pesticides or the presence of pesticides that cannot be legally applied to a given product in 36% of the products that were looked at. From the 23 different pesticides that were found, 10 are illegal in most countries, and one is illegal in Brazil.

Many of the products also contained a mixture of different pesticides that can provoke what is known as the “cocktail effect”, which means that when mixed they can produce effects that no pesticide involved can produce individually. Now, there aren’t many studies available analyzing the consequences of such combinations, which means that we are not well aware of all the risks involved.

Agribusiness and conflicts for land

Environmental degradation, loss of arable land and water resources and contamination by pesticides are not the only negative social consequences associated with agribusiness in Brazil. There is a wealth of problems tied to the concentration of land and power in the hands of a few, as well as with the way that agribusiness has been expanding over the years and increasing this concentration while generating disputes among powerful landowners and other sectors of Brazilian society.

As already mentioned, national agribusiness is in possession of 3/4ths of the country’s arable land, with most of this land concentrated in the hands of a few landowners. Besides, a document released in 1999 by Incra (National Institute of Colonization and Land Reform) shows that more than 100 million hectares of land are a product of “grilagem”, a process that involves forging documents and taking over public land or the land of others, which often involves the use of violence. Now, 20 years later, the amount of land appropriated is even higher.

This process, which is largely carried out by owners of large rural properties, leads to conflicts for land which have led to many deaths. The main victims are people associated with social movements, especially environmentalists, activists associated with movements that fight for land reform, indigenous activists and quilombolas (Afro-Brazilian residents of quilombos, settlements that were first established by runaway slaves). Most assassinations are carried out by hired guns known as “jagunços”, who are often policemen or retired policemen.

The violence produced by these conflicts has been increasing over the last few years as Brazilian agribusiness expands its influence over the economy and national politics, where it has more representatives than any political party.

According to the Pastoral Commission of the Land (CPT), 1079 instances of land conflicts occurred in 2016, while 771 such occurrences were registered in 2015. This represents a 40% increase in a single year. As a result, 49 people were killed in 2015 and 61 in 2016, which was the highest number of deaths in 25 years apart from 2003, when 73 people were killed by such conflicts. In 2018, this number fell to 28 deaths.

CPT claims that the reduction in the number of deaths represents a strategic change rather than a reduction of the intensity of conflicts for land. 54% of those killed in 2018 were social movement leaders, compared with 22% of those that were killed in 2017. The focus on movement leaders indicate an attempt to demobilize such movements by targeting key members. Another characteristic of the 2018 murders is that a large part of the violence targeted communities that already have their rights to their lands legally recognized, which shows that the agribusiness is increasingly attacking indigenous reservations and conservation units along with other conflict-generating agents such as miners and loggers.

Indigenous peoples have been among those most affected by the violence and theft of land caused by agribusiness. According to the Missionary Indigenous Council (CIMI), 68 indigenous people were murdered in 2017 as a result of this violence, compared with 56 murders in 2016. Some organizations claim the numbers are higher. One instance of such an organization is the Special Secretary of Indigenous Health (SESAI), which places the number of such murders in 2017 at 110 people.

Most murders occur in indigenous lands which haven’t been demarcated by the government. The right to own their land is supposed to be guaranteed to indigenous peoples by the 1988 Brazilian constitution. A given population will have this right officially recognized once their land has been demarcated. Unfortunately, this process has been extremely slow even in the case of lands where the occupation of these spaces by the indigenous peoples who claim them is easy to prove.

CIMI also reported that there are 1,296 areas that are waiting for the process to be finalized. In 530 of those areas not a single administrative measure was taken by the government.

This process is hampered by lobbying that is being done by many groups interested in exploiting resources that are currently in indigenous lands. These groups include the mining industry, the logging industry and agribusiness. The main threat to the demarcation process is the agribusiness lobby, represented by the Agricultural Parliamentary Front (FPA), which currently has 225 congressmen and 32 senators in office.

By the end of 2017, there were 33 anti-indigenous legislative projects being proposed. 17 of these projects aimed at changing the process of land demarcation for indigenous populations. The FPA also supports what is known as the “temporal limit” (marco temporal in Portuguese), which is the thesis that indigenous lands that were not occupied by indigenous people when the new constitution was proclaimed in 88 shouldn’t be allowed to be claimed. According to this idea, even people who had just been violently expelled from their lands at the time are not eligible to recover their territories.

In the 20th of July 2017, Michel Temer, who was president at the time, signed sentence 001/2017, which turned the temporal limit into law. Less than two weeks later, he was saved in the chamber of deputies from an inquiry that investigated him for passive corruption. The support he received from the FPA had a strong role in the decision. During his whole presidency, only one indigenous territory was demarcated, and that demarcation was cancelled at the end of his term based on the enforcement of the temporal limit.

Another victory was won by the FPA when the Bolsonaro government transferred the power to demarcate quilombola and indigenous lands to the ministry of agriculture. Bolsonaro also claimed that he intends to revise the demarcation of some territories criticizing a hypothetical “demarcation industry” that makes “suspect decisions”.

Such ideas are aligned with that of FPA members such as ex-FPA president Alceu Moreira, who a little earlier had criticized supposed illegalities in the demarcation process during a public audience with the Commission for the Environment and Sustainable Development in the chamber of deputies.

With demarcations suspended and the possibility of having demarcations revised and possibly undone as the agribusiness ramps up its onslaught against indigenous lands, the perspective of the end of violence against indigenous populations is unlikely at the moment.

It should be noted as well that the protection of indigenous lands is intrinsically linked with environmental issues. Indigenous lands are the territories with the lowest rates of deforestation, which means that there is also a huge environmental cost to taking away indigenous sovereignty over their own lands.

Still, indigenous peoples are not the only ones affected by the FPA, which attacks environmental regulations, constantly approves harmful pesticides and promotes precarious working conditions for rural workers, going so far as to hamper the fight against slave labor.

Agribusiness and rural working conditions

This takes us to another consequence of Brazilian agribusiness: its effects on the working conditions of agricultural workers. One of the ways it changes such conditions is by reducing the amount of available jobs as the mechanized model it relies on needs little human labor to cultivate large tracts of land. According to a FAO report, family farming employs 77% of rural workers while possessing only 1/4rth of the available land.

The profit produced by family farming also tends to be distributed in a way that is less unequal, since such farmers tend to adopt business models that are less centralized, while profits from agribusiness tend to concentrate in the hands of a few wealthy landowners. And as we have already seen, family farming produces more value per hectare than large industrial farms.

While there are a series of issues that need to be addressed in order to improve the working conditions of family farming in Brazil, these conditions tend to be much better than those offered by agribusiness farms. Among issues faced by workers employed in those properties are exposure to pesticides and other chemical products, excessive exposure to sun and heat, long work journeys, low salaries and lack of working contracts, which exposes these workers to exploitation.

Another issue faced by rural workers is slave labor, which persists despite efforts to end it. The FPA has been relentless in its efforts to further degrade rural working conditions and to halt the fight against slave labor.

One instance of this is the legislative project 6422, redacted by Nilson Leitão. Ex-president of the FPA. Some of the changes proposed by this project were work journeys of up to 18 consecutive days, the possibility of selling all holidays to employers, 12 hours workdays and the possibility of employing workers without providing worker’s rights that are guaranteed by the law. The project also proposes that up to 20% of salaries can be discounted in order to pay for housing and 25% for meals.

The project also aimed to define rural workers as those that perform a service in a “rural property or rustic building” in exchange for “a salary or payment of any kind”, which opens up a space for those that use slave labor to defend themselves against legal actions.

The project was shelved, but it wasn’t FPA’s only attempt to facilitate the exploitation of rural workers. Their members have been trying to change the definition of slave labor for a long time. In October 2017 they were able to do so through the then President Michel Temer, who added four new requisites for labor conditions to count as slave labor. These included the need for labor to be enforced through threats, for the restriction of transport and the use of armed security to keep indebted laborers at a given site and the retention of personal documents of laborers.

The change was harshly criticized by many sectors of society for making it much harder to fight against modern slavery, and it was cancelled two months later in December. A new definition was implemented removing the necessity of direct coercion for labor conditions to be considered as slave labor. Despite the defeat, members of the FPA are still working for alternatives, encouraged by the Bolsonaro government

FPA’s offensives against environmental legislation

One of FPA’s main interests through the years has been to dismantle environmental laws. Its members have, for instance, presented many legislative projects with the purpose of changing legal requirements for the execution of projects which utilize natural resources and/or can provoke environmental degradation. Some of these projects have attempted to free certain activities such as extensive agriculture and the building of roads from the obligation to provide an environmental license, and others have aimed to facilitate the concession of such licenses. One such project intended to remove the need to listen to local communities.

In January 2018, shortly after Bolsonaro came to power, FPA members presented such alterations as a priority in a meeting with Ricardo Salles, the current minister of the environment. They also debated a project proposed by deputy and FPA member Mauro Pereira, which aims at transferring decisions concerning environmental licencing from states to municipalities. Many entities have criticized this project on the grounds that it might create a scenario where different municipalities compete to attract outside investment by reducing environmental regulation, which would facilitate the exploitation of natural resources.

The reunion also included discussions around projects with the objective of changing laws that protect environmental reserves so these areas can be exploited, as well as projects that would ease legal punishment against property owners responsible for illegal deforestation in their properties.

One of the main topics of the reunion was the demand from FPA members for a mobilization with the objective to approve the legislative project 6229/2002, also known as the “legislative project of the poison”. Its objective is to facilitate the approval of new pesticides.

This project comes at a time when pesticides have been approved at an alarming rate. In 2018 alone, 290 substances were approved. When Brazil is facing serious social and environmental consequences from the excessive use of pesticides, this is a worrying prospect.

Rural Exodus

Another consequence of the expansion of the dominant model of agribusiness that has major social implications is the strengthening of the rural exodus. A global trend, the rural exodus consists of the migration of people from rural areas to urban centers. Its roots are to be found in changes that occurred in both environments, and it proceeded to provoke further changes.

With the expansion of agribusiness, land became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, making it harder for rural workers to own land. Many were also forced to sell their lands to big landowners under the threat of violence.

The lack of available land forces many agricultural workers to subject themselves to precarious working conditions offered by agribusiness, which makes the prospect of moving to the city more attractive. The increasing mechanization of agriculture also reduced the number of available jobs for agricultural workers, which forced many to look for work elsewhere.

Many also moved to the city due to the lack of infrastructure, services, and education. There are also those that move to the city in the wake of droughts and floods which are often aggravated by agribusiness practices.

But the lack of opportunities in rural areas wasn’t the only factor that brought people to the cities. As the cities grew and the process of urbanization advanced, more opportunities and attractions emerged, which encouraged people to move to urban areas chasing the prospect of a better life.

In Brazil, the rural exodus has been happening for a long time, but this process gained force in the thirties as the country industrialized, cities grew larger and land concentration increased in rural areas. The pace of the rural exodus increased further in when new agribusiness practices were introduced, and later decreased and stabilized. The demographic impacts of this process were tremendous.

Brazil’s population increased 267% between 1950 and 2010. During the same period, urban population increased 766% while the rural population fell by 10%. With a reduced population, most land concentrated in the hands of a few and lack of employment opportunities, many rural cities experienced increasingly precarious conditions. This is especially true for cities that were left with an ageing population as younger folks moved elsewhere. Many forms of local knowledge were not passed ahead and disappeared. Cultural practices also vanished and were lost forever.

This process also caused many changes in urban centers. Especially in large cities that experienced a large influx of new inhabitants. One of these changes was the increase in the number of people working under precarious conditions in the cities due to the mismatch between the amount of new people looking for work and the emerging employment opportunities. People who came from rural areas were also often under-educated, which made it harder for them to compete for jobs.

Those who migrated to the cities also had difficulties finding housing. This contributed to the fast growth of urban slums known as favelas, which are often in areas that are subject to floods and landslides. Many favelas also suffer from poor housing condition and lack of basic infrastructure such as drinkable water and sanitation.

The number of homeless people also increased, propelled in part by gentrification and real estate speculation. These changes in urban centers have also led to an increase in urban violence, which is one of the main problems faced by Brazilian society. Thus, we can see how the rural exodus has deeply affected both rural and urban areas.

Conclusion

Despite all the praise agribusiness receives in Brazil, its social and environmental consequences are an open wound that keeps bleeding. There is no way to justify maintaining these practices when they are far from the most efficient mean of producing agricultural commodities unless we are talking in terms of production per person, since mechanization allows it to cultivate large areas with few laborers.

Still, family farming produces more food and monetary value per area while causing less environmental damages and employing more laborers that are usually under better working conditions. Agricultural techniques that are being developed by agroecology and permaculture are also providing us with the means to be more productive and sustainable while avoiding the negative externalities associated with agribusiness, and the implementation of such techniques has been yielding very promising results.

The potential of such methods goes beyond avoiding negative externalities. They are also capable of regenerating soils and increasing biodiversity, transforming degraded areas into healthy biomes that produce food. Recovering degraded soils also contributes to reducing global warming by capturing carbon while fighting desertification and erosion and increasing the quantity of rain and contributing to the water cycle.

The interest in such practices and in organic agriculture have been increasing around the world, propelled by many movements. In the last few years, organic agriculture in Brazil has been growing at an amazing pace, increasing by 20% a year.

The largest obstacles are political. With agribusiness being strongly represented the state, it is hard to approve public policies which challenge the hegemonic agricultural model. Despite these challenges, we have all the tools available to implement an agricultural model that is not only ecological and more beneficial to society but also more productive, which can generate a virtuous cycle. If we can challenge political interests behind agribusiness, we can make it happen.

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Luísa Souza

Travesti libertária (anarquista) jornalista e pesquisadora. Interessada em filosofia e em questões sociais e ambientais.