South America’s “wildfire season” is upon us. As of early September, about three quarters of the total area on fire in Latin America was in Brazil, where smoke from the burning biomes extended to 60 percent of the country’s territory. Fire connected to deforestation and agribusiness activity has become so ubiquitous that one quarter of the country was on fire at least once in the past 40 years.
This situation indicates that although the problem was notable under the government of Jair Bolsonaro, who supported the expansion of the agribusiness and extractive industries in their violence against Indigenous, campesino, and traditional communities, the fire crisis in Brazil is a permanent problem that cannot be fought only reactively. Brazil’s current government holds the opportunity to gather popular support for a more radical agroecological agenda and agrarian reform to not only fight the fires and smoke but prevent them altogether.
Criticism of the environmental policy of the Workers’ Party (PT) coalition government is met with resistance by part of the left. In Brazil today, arguments about a false energy transition are often paired with claims that Brazil cannot develop and grow without oil. Indeed, oil and fossil gas extraction is growing alongside wind, solar, and green hydrogen investments. While part of the government argues that more oil production, including off the Amazonian coast, is necessary to finance the so-called energy transition, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Marina Silva and Indigenous Peoples Minister Sonia Guajajara, among others, have insisted that a bolder agenda is necessary. Such an agenda would include land settlement and reparations for Indigenous, quilombola, and other traditional communities.
All in all, the current government’s take on the environment is contradictory and insufficient to add substance to Brazil’s statements to the international community that it will lead the region and emergent economies in fighting climate change. One key matter is the general state of demobilization—there is little to no indication that Lula would be willing to call people to the streets to support government proposals currently held hostage by the legislative right.
But rather than simply accepting the explanation that Lula’s hands are tied by the strong far-right presence in Congress, Brazilian environmentalists have argued that the executive power must do better with what it does have within reach. This work has included a complicated battle by federal environmental employees for better pay and working conditions and demands to increase investments in strategic areas such as agroecology, civil defense in rural areas, and agrarian reform processes.
In this scenario, even the government’s intensified efforts to respond to the spread of the fires are limited. To tackle the class issue that allows for environmental destruction, a mix of government policy and grassroots politics is necessary. It is thus urgent to push the government to divest from agribusiness and create a structure of reparations that can make room for alternative, popular power and politics to flourish.
A State of Environmental Contradictions
In 2019, when the skies of big Brazilian cities like São Paulo darkened as gigantic, criminal fires burned in the Amazon on the “Day of Fire,” debate about the violence of agribusiness and the need for forest protection prompted street mobilizations and a strong reaction from the leftist opposition. It was the first year of Bolsonaro’s openly ecocidal government, and his movement’s unwavering alliance with large landowners had empowered them to burn, steal, kidnap, torture, and kill.
The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is clearly different in this respect. Lula was elected with a more progressive environmental agenda, determined to bring Brazil back to the world stage as a climate leader and to reduce deforestation, principally in the Amazon. Marina Silva, minister of the environment and climate change, has helped to bring back nature to key policy debates, including when it means going against the president’s preference for deepening Brazil’s investments in and dependence on fossil fuels.
The government’s policy is thus characterized by a mix of advances and contradictions, providing large landowners with comfortable room to operate with violence against nature and traditional communities. These forces also count on the support of a right-wing Congress that either dismantles environmental law or hides setbacks and green capitalist measures within new bills.
Lula has rightly called attention to the fact that although so many commitments and resolutions are made in climate negotiations, the United Nations lacks the authority to enforce promises and impose effective climate policy. However, the same can be said about Brazil, where climate politics is driven sectorially, in a fragmented fashion. Lula’s campaign promise to create an interministerial climate authority was left aside for more than a year and a half. Only in September, as the extent of the fires made the air of major cities unbreathable, did the government finally strike the plans for the new authority.
The Brazilian agribusiness class has learned to take advantage of how the government reacts to crisis rather than prevents it. While Brazil’s agro—as the agribusiness industry is popularly known—is not as unencumbered as it was in previous years, it is still free enough to destroy environmental legislation through its allies in Congress and to expand its activities with financing and tax policies promoted by the Lula government. Agribusiness is also currently free to set the country ablaze because Brazil’s institutions are not strong enough to find and punish those responsible, and because government policies still treat large landowners as key players in GDP growth.
These conditions are related to the fact that Brazil remains locked in a model of prioritizing commodity exports that enrich a few without making major contributions to tax revenue and job creation. In fact, the commodity system’s real contributions have been devastating monoculture crop systems, dangerous chemicals, modern enslaved labor, attacks against Indigenous peoples and their demands, and a never-ending stalling of the agrarian reform dreams that could put an end to centuries of dispossession and environmental destruction.
We could feed ourselves without agribusiness. But even with fair prices and agroecological methods, small producers cannot yet do it alone. Brazil is not ready, and one of the main reasons is that, rather than reducing the share of agribusiness in the Brazilian economy, the state acts to encourage and increase it. The difference today in federal investment in agribusiness compared to investment in family farming is exorbitant. The 2024/2025 Family Farming Safra Plan, which provides financial support for small farmers, allocated R$76 billion in rural credits. President Lula said that the plan “may not be everything we need, but it’s the best we can do.” Meanwhile, the 2024/2025 Safra Plan, which caters to agribusiness, received R$400.59 billion. Even if the government acknowledges the importance of increasing the productivity of family farming in terms of food production, its policies also clearly maintain a highly unequal productive structure on the land.
The results are many. Facing tough competition, small producers see no alternatives but to adhere to monocultural production, and even family farmers are being forced to produce commodities, as Paulo Petersen, from the National Articulation of Agroecology (ANA) points out. The harshness of life in the countryside is accentuated by the threat of violence. And sometimes family production is lost or wasted because it cannot be transported to the end consumer, a problem worsened by extreme droughts or floods and price fluctuations influenced by large producers.
Family farmers still put food on the Brazilian table—but with great difficulty. Without a policy that also confronts the logic of agribusiness production, family farming will never be able to replace agribusiness in size and influence, finally eliminating our economic dependence on agribusiness and taking away its power to burn our biomes.
It Takes More than Putting Out Fires
Divestment from agribusiness does not require cooperation from right-wing legislators, but it will certainly draw anger from the agribusiness class. This is a risk worth taking, since Brazil is currently subsidizing agribusiness profits and paying the bill for the loss and damage around it.
The consequence of 2019’s “Day of Fire” is clear: more than half of the burned forest has become pasture, in a country that already has more cattle than people. Currently, agribusiness is being compensated for the environmental crimes it commits, encouraging large landowners to keep setting fires as a method for land-grabbing and business expansion. Agribusiness is also a financial market, and its logic of profit, speculation, and rent-seeking sees production conditions in the short term. As agribusiness extracts as much territory and profit as possible, insurance companies and speculators are preparing to profit from the risks of a worsening climate.
When all else fails, large landowners will bet on the state to finance and rescue agribusiness, as happened recently in Rio Grande do Sul in response to massive floods. If changes were made earlier preventing agribusiness from concentrating 70 percent of national rice production in Rio Grande do Sul, impacting the biome and the regional water system, perhaps the flooding disaster in May would not have led to a supply crisis for one of the most important cereals in the Brazilian diet. Instead, the Brazilian state bailed out agribusiness once again to save the economy and ensure basic food security. The government took these measures without any prospect of charging agribusiness for the damage it causes directly and indirectly by violating nature.
In a recent interview, Lula was once again emphatic about how generous his and President Dilma Rousseff’s governments have been with agribusiness. He repeated that he issued decrees and measures to save agribusiness and that his Safra Plan is the biggest and best that agribusiness has ever had. But unfortunately, he said, agribusiness has an ideological problem: “a prejudice” against him and his Workers’ Party. Even when progressive governments shell out big investments in the sector, Brazilian agribusiness continues to oppose these administrations because its interests lie in the concentration of property and profits and unbridled speculation. This is not a prejudice, but a sign that as long as there is left-wing resistance to the dominance of agribusiness within the federal government, that government will be declared the enemy of agribusiness.
This dynamic is why a politics of reparations is key. Brazil must dare to reverse the processes of land and income concentration. This policy change, which would require a great deal of organization and popular will, would lead to a massive class confrontation with agribusiness. It would also involve connecting demands around food sovereignty, climate change mitigation, and land rights to the debate about the ecological transition, which currently the government reduces to a matter of investment and infrastructure packages without confronting the structural intersections between capital and ecological collapse.
The win-win logic driving Lula’s governance is incompatible with the term “transition” because transitioning requires that previous models cease to exist. A just approach to ecological transition must address reparations and reducing dependencies at the same time. If today agribusiness is among the leading forces behind Brazil’s GDP, transition frameworks must build political power to promote jobs and food, while at the same time reducing the class power of agribusiness in favor of the rural working class.
Seen in this light, the so-called “ecological” programs within the agribusiness-friendly Safra Plan serve to greenwash the image of agribusiness. Without policy changes, the majority of the sector will continue to engage in predatory socioenvironmental action. Instead, the agribusiness allocations in the Safra Plan should be reduced, more restrictive, and open only to landowners with clean environmental crime records. At the same time, land must be redistributed through an agrarian reform. In fact, current legal frameworks could offer mechanisms for the state to seize sites of environmental crimes and redirect that land for agrarian reform—something Minister Marina Silva has stated is under consideration. Holding agribusiness accountable for fires and deforestation is not only about prosecuting bad actors for their behavior, but also about giving the land a just, socio-ecological destiny.
In addition, agribusinesses owe the state tens of billions of dollars in debt. These monies, together with fines for environmental crimes, can be collected and used for adaptation projects and social insurance for the population affected by climate disasters. With a real and just transition, the transfer of economic power will promote ecological sovereignty that, as a result, will help to repair the centuries of colonization, slavery, and exploitation of the peoples who live in the countryside and forests or in precarious conditions on the outskirts of Brazilian cities.
Of course, for a transfer of economic power to popular territories to translate into class power, proactive public policies and a committed government will not be enough. It is also necessary to promote a “popular and radical environmentalism,” as proposed by Neto Onirê Sankara and Erahsto Felício. Any popular policy of confronting the power of agribusiness depends on this approach. It also depends on combating environmental racism, a category key to exposing how fires in Brazil only draw mass attention once their impacts reach São Paulo and other metropolises.
It is urgent to reorient the transition discourse in Brazil to prevent it from being hijacked by both green capitalism and the old political forces that suck up direct resources and waste others by causing catastrophic losses and damage. The government’s insistence on the failed tactic of conciliation with a political and economic class that attacks all forms of popular sovereignty keeps Brazil suffocated: figuratively by stifling the construction of alternatives, and literally, by fire and floods. The fires present Lula’s government and allied social movements with the responsibility to take away the power of agribusiness and break with the vicious cycle of land inequality, dispossession, and environmental destruction that negates any effort to turn Brazil into a climate leader.
Sabrina Fernandes is a Brazilian sociologist and political economist. She is currently the Head of Research of the Alameda Institute and a member of NACLA’s Editorial Committee. She is an ecosocialist activist and part of the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South.
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Publish date : 2024-10-08 05:33:00
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