Report denounces relationship between market and land grabbing in the Cerrado

Monitoring the degree of deforestation in the Cerrado, a biome that has been losing areas for soy cultivation, is something that has already been reported by specialists. Also explaining how agribusiness companies maintain relationships with real estate companies, subsidiaries and the financial market to circumvent laws and increase profit margins, while increasing pressure on traditional communities, is something that gains relevance in this context and is what makes the report released this Wednesday -feira (12), in São Paulo, by the Social Network for Justice and Human Rights, which focuses on the south of Piauí.

The document Transnational agribusiness companies cause violence, land grabbing and destruction in the Cerrado brings to light cases of farms with a history of issuing false title deeds and the performance of networks that put into practice strategies to cover up irregularities surrounding the land.

In the scheme involving the name of the company Bunge, another aspect that the researchers raised is that farmers end up obtaining credit at a high cost, since, when purchasing chemical inputs produced by the company, they get into debt and end up delivering their production to it, in order to to pay off debts.

dispute center

Kajubar, in the municipality of Santa Filomena, is one of the farms that are at the center of disputes and should belong to traditional communities. In 2021, it lost an area of ​​1,800 hectares to deforestation, a situation that ceased in the following two years.

State legislation prohibits any type of exploration, development and environmental licensing as long as territories overlap – in this case, with traditional communities – and there is no definition of who has the right to them. Agência Brasil contacted the Secretary of State for the Environment and Water Resources and received no response.

As explained by the researchers who signed the report, the schemes that impact lands like Kajubar have as agents both agribusiness companies and agricultural real estate and commercialization (trading companies). What you do is buy land at a low price and sell it at a much higher price. At the same time, the companies that have a connection encourage the monoculture of products such as soy.

Also in the city of Santa Filomena, other lands, totaling 124,000 hectares, had their registration blocked by the Agrarian Court of the District of Bom Jesus, a neighboring municipality, due to signs of land grabbing and other illegalities. Two years ago, the business group fighting for its ownership, violating the rights of the local rural communities, managed to unblock it in court, which increased violence and threats against this population.

Logging

Among the farms in this perimeter are Santa Alice and Tupã. The same process happened with the Tagí, Baixão Fechado, Passárgada, Reata, São Manoel, Serra do Ovo, São Paulo, Novas and Fortaleza I, II and III farms. The levels of deforestation to which the report refers are from monitoring by the organization AidEnvironment. In the published document, a point that deserves emphasis is the ease with which an area in the cerrado is deforested, since it can be done with only two tractors and a chain.

“The land grabbing scheme works through the registry of false land titles. It usually starts with the registration of a small lot, which serves to justify the appropriation of larger areas through such false initial titles, involving dozens or even hundreds of thousands of hectares,” write the researchers.

“The areas most coveted by agribusiness are the Cerrado plateaus, with flat and high lands, where soy monoculture is expanding with the possibility of mechanized production. When other companies buy these areas formed through land grabbing, the process of burning and previous deforestation hides the origin of the land”, they add.

In an interview with Brazil Agency, one of the authors of the report, Fábio Pitta, who has been following the scenario for a decade, highlighted that the important thing is to show that financial capital is what dictates the pace of land misappropriation. He also said that what the report illustrates is only a part of what happens in Matopiba (border of the cerrado of the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia).

“People say that the land is ‘heating up’. And, without the buyer, there is no land grabbing, because, otherwise, the land grabber is in his hands and has nothing to do with it”, says Pitta .

bargains

As the researcher points out, the negotiations would not be viable if it were not for the participation of the public authorities. “We see several characteristics of public power that encourage this. First, all the support for agribusiness, for large landholdings, all the discourse and all the agro ideology that we are used to hearing, which makes up an ideology and does not allow this is questioned. This makes the State institutions acting, many times, even independently of each other, which is a big problem in this sense, to end up promoting agro”, he said, citing as an example the lack of articulation between those who have as It is incumbent upon to grant environmental licensing, the body responsible for issuing an anthropological opinion that attests to the presence of a traditional community in the place and who supervises it.”

“At the same time, the slowness of the Judiciary to deal with lands that, at some point, were recognized as illegally illegal and brought a lawsuit against these areas and these land grabbers. advances, because it is illegal, it does not need the legality of the State. The State ends up contributing to forge an image of legality”, adds Pitta.

The other side

In a note sent to the report, Bunge’s advisory states that it “does not comment on commercial relations” and that “it is in compliance with all its strict socio-environmental policies”.

According to the company, cases of human rights violations or other forms of exploitation are not tolerated.

“Bunge’s commitment to be free of deforestation and the conversion of native vegetation into value chains by 2025 is a central part of the company’s business strategy and planning. Bunge does not purchase grains from illegally deforested areas and maintains strict control over socio-environmental criteria in operations. We use state-of-the-art satellite technology to monitor priority areas in South America – more than 16,000 farms, covering more than 20 million hectares. As a result of these efforts, more than 97% of our soy volumes from Brazil are free of deforestation and conversion. This shows that we are very close to reaching our goal of zero deforestation in 2025”, he says in the message.

“Our monitoring is capable of identifying changes in land use and soy planting on each of the farms where we originate and captures any opening of new areas in the monitored regions. Most of our supply in Brazil is direct, to which we have already achieved 100% traceability and monitoring, audited annually by a third party. Last year, we announced that we surpassed our intermediate goal for traceability of the indirect chain and we have already reached 82% of the volumes acquired in key regions, such as the cerrado. is being carried out through the Sustainable Partnership Program, a pioneering initiative that supports grain resellers in the adoption of socio-environmental verification, traceability and monitoring systems, enabling them to improve visibility over their supply chain. The program makes a definitive contribution to raising standards of sustainability and transparency of the indirect soy chain in Brazil, influencing the sector as a whole and promoting important systemic transformations”, he concludes.