An analysis from the perspective of Sustainability

João Carlos Figueiredo

Abstract

The article addresses the three axes of Sustainability: Environmental, Social and Economic, evaluated under the impacts of the devastation caused by the expansion of agricultural frontiers, and its consequences on the climate balance of the southern hemisphere, insofar as it affects the populations of tropical forests and the American savanna, as well as the components of these ecosystems, deeply impacted by the drastic reduction of aquifers (underground) and water sources (surface). It also discusses Brazilian´s option of offering tax subsidies to agribusiness, in detriment of industrial and service sectors, and of socio-environmental projects.

Key words

sustainability, agribusiness, economy, environment

The author

Environmentalist, Indigenist, Information Technology Specialist, academic degree in Humanities from the University of São Paulo, Barão de Mauá University Center and Cruzeiro do Sul Colleges. 35 years of professional experience in Informatics, 10 years of adventure sports experience, 12 years of experience in Indigenism. Currently works at the National Indigenous People’s Foundation, where participated of operations to evacuate indigenous lands invaded by ranchers, land grabbers, prospectors and loggers; also participated of the development of knowledge building projects with vulnerable indigenous populations, due to large undertakings in the Amazon. Dedicated efforts to clarify the environmental impacts of the devastation caused by agribusiness in the Savannah and South American Amazon biomes.

Introduction

The occupation, by agribusiness, of the areas still preserved in the country, combined with the advance of devastation caused by logging companies, by illegal mining, by land grabbers supported by gunmen, by large hydroelectric plants and real estate projects, by the unplanned construction of roads and crossings in the the jungle, by the INCRA settlements in the Amazon and the connivance of a State led by a fanatical right-wing extremist, supported by officers of the Armed Forces who are part of the government, leads us to believe that in little more than ten years there will be no more forests or indigenous people in Brazil.

“Passing the herd” was the expression used by the former Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles.

This photograph was taken in the Marãiwatsédé Indigenous Land, of Xavante ethnicity, in 2013. At the time, there were about 100,000 head of Nelore cows inside of this indigenous territory.

Political Framework

Brazil is experiencing a unique phase in its history, at a time when a broad election transforms the country’s political framework, by elevating an inept and fascist leader to the Presidency of the Republic, causing changes in the composition of the National Congress, Federal Chamber, state Legislative Assemblies. and District Chamber, as it is based on unusual and opportunistic rules, favoring the status quo: political parties and their leaders, who face the Federal Justice for their involvement in illicit operations uncovered by Operation “Lava Jato”, while the population expresses its unprecedented discredit to the democratic institutions and the rule of law. Following world trends to elect far-right governments, Brazil opted for a government linked to retrograde churches, totalitary militarism, strengthening agribusiness (with all its ills) and deconstructing all the social achievements of the last 30 years. The first three months of this macabre administration were characterized by internal conflicts within the ministries, instigated by the new occupant of the Planalto and his rancorous and irresponsible sons.

The renewal of the political cadres of the National Congress, as well as the other positions in dispute at the national and state levels, took place in a strange way in this election, with many chiefs of the “old politics” excluded from power, being, however, replaced by unprepared newcomers, aligned with the extreme right and its radical and nostalgic ideas from the old days of the military dictatorship. The representation of political parties has been profoundly altered, making it difficult to form a support base for this new group that ascended to power.

Faced with this alarming situation, a third aspect has aggravated and compromised the dispute: while the candidate of the radical left, former President Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party, who dominated the political scene for the last 16 years, is in prison and sentenced for corruption and had more than 35% of the voting intentions, his immediate opponent, from the extreme right, is the one who scored the most among the other candidates, being elected with 57 million votes, despite the strong rejection of the progressive sectors. This imbalance of forces between the ideological extremes is associated with corruption, violence and opportunistic changes in electoral legislation.¹

Socio-environmental Framework

Brazil has one of the greatest biodiversity in the planet, having two thirds of the largest equatorial forest in the world, which contains about 12% of all drinking water available on Earth². The Amazon Basin also comprises territories of Guyanas, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, being responsible for the climate system of the South American subcontinent, which complexity is not yet fully revealed by scientific studies. The hydric and biological reserves of the Amazon region, combined with the mineral wealth it possesses, encourage the greed of local landowners, multinational companies and developed countries, eager to exploit them, without any concern for their socio-environmental consequences.

In turn, the Cerrado biome, the Brazilian Savanna, holds a significant volume of underground aquifers that feed a good portion of the hydrographic basins of this subcontinent, with the gigantic Guarani Aquifer as an exponent, which extends it´s territory through the western, southern and southeastern states, reaching the Paraguay and Argentina. The Cerrado vegetation, unlike the Amazon, is very old, and strongly adapted to the climatic cycles and the aridity of its long periods of drought. However, about 50% of its territory has already been occupied and degradeted by agribusiness, in contrast to the 22% of the Amazon Rainforest, already transformed into pastures and monocultures, and heavily dependent on irrigation, obtained from the subsoil, and vulnerable to the enormous volume of pesticides that contaminate aquifers and surface rivers.

According to the agreement signed in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, Brazil has committed to keeping the emission of greenhouse gases 37% below the existing levels in 2005, and the deadline for reaching this target would be at 2025’s, which also implies increasing the share of sustainable bioenergy in the energy matrix to 18% by 2030. However, going against these commitments, Brazil continues to devastate the environment, occupying the Amazon Rainforest and the Cerrado in a disorderly way, exposing more and more areas to occupation by agribusiness , producing a greater amount of gases, as a result of the burning of large areas of native forest, replaced by pastures for cattle and by monoculture plantations of soy, cotton, sugar cane and others.

At the rate which the forest is being devastated, scientists estimate that, in less than ten years, the ecological balance will be disrupted, activating an irreversible process of degradation of the remaining forests. The estimate is that, reaching 25% of deforestation in the Amazon, this entropic process will begin to supplant the resilience of the forest. This is mainly because the devastated areas are not continuous, increasing the exposure of forest edges to the so-called “edge effect”³, which accelerates the loss of biodiversity and water resources.

This phenomenon is abundantly illustrated by scientific research carried out in the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest. The latter, a remnant of coastal occupation since the America’s Discovery in fifty´s century last years, reached such a degree of devastation that today is only 7% of the original forest remains, most of it confined to federal and states Conservation Units. The Atlantic Forest suffered an accelerated process of devastation during the colonization period, aggravated by the intense real estate exploitation in more recent periods, which today also affects the Amazon Forest, as a result of the construction of large hydroelectric plants and extensive highways, including the “Transamazônica”, built in 1972 during the Medici government of sad memory, in the period of 21 years of the military dictatorship.

The combination of these two factors, the political-social uncertainty and the overwhelming advance of agribusiness in a wide territorial extension known as the Arc of Deforestation, which comprises Acre, Rondônia, Mato Grosso, Tocantins and Maranhão, puts at risk not only the survival of the Amazonian biome but of the planet itself, insofar as it alters the climate balance, resulting in a reduction in drinking water stocks in a region of high population density.

The large enterprises developed in the Amazon, such as hydroelectric plants and highways, act as a trigger for real estate expansion and social degradation, driven by the drastic increase in population, transforming, in a few years, villages and small cities into large urban concentrations, bringing, in its midst, prostitution, drug trafficking, “land grabbing”⁴, “pistolagem”⁵ and misery, and making its urban infrastructure precarious. In its wake comes the exploitation of wood, which anticipates the arrival of agribusiness, and prepares the ground for the extinction of the forest in large territorial extensions.

Finally, one of the most harmful factors in this escalation of deforestation refers to the rural settlements promoted by INCRA – Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform, without worrying about the environmental impacts, which bring whole families to live in the dashes, on the banks of major highways, and propagate like roots, penetrating the preserved areas of conservation units and indigenous lands. As soon as they take possession of the land, still with the primary forest inside, they start selling hardwood; they remove and sell the most valuable trees to the lumber companies, then they cut what is left and sell it as firewood for charcoal production ovens and, finally, they burn the stumps that are left on the ground, leaving the land bare and useless even for agriculture.

Without guidance for cultivation, they are left in poverty and end up transferring what is left to the farmers, supported by land grabbers and gunmen.

The last extreme factor in the devastation of the Amazon is mining, started in the 16th century, intensified about seven decades ago, and expanding during the military dictatorship, as well as the great highways and railways destined to the flow of mineral production, and today, of agribusiness. Mining aspires to extensive areas mapped by American satellites and by the DNPM (National Department of Mineral Research, today National Mining Agency) in the 1970s. This process continues to threaten the forest, with projects being processed in the National Congress, through pressure from multinationals. and Brazilian companies, including for the purpose of mineral exploration in indigenous lands and conservation units, as was the recent case of RENCA⁶, in Amapá.

The issue of mining in Brazil is on the agenda of discussions in the National Congress, not out of patriotism, because dishonest businessmen and politicians have no homeland, but because of hidden interests and lobbies of large national and foreign mining companies. Constitutional amendments are waiting for their turn to be voted on, as soon as agribusiness manages to implode indigenous lands and national parks, through bomb agendas of political chiefs, which have been in the pipeline for several years, such as PEC-215, which transfers to Congress the attribution and authority for the demarcation of indigenous lands, which will bury once and for all the aspirations of these populations, whose lands were despoiled by the Portuguese invaders, either by the negligence and cruelty of the authorities, by the incompetence of FUNAI or by the strong pressure exerted by agribusiness, thirsty to finish with the Environment.

There is an argument that circulates among those politicians who sell their votes to make illegal exploitation of preserved areas viable, which is the following: “Europe has already destroyed its forests and destroyed its primitive peoples. The United States has also destroyed the Indians and forests in its territory. However, these countries are among those with the best indices of economic, scientific, technological and social development. So, why not do the same in Brazil, ending poverty and enriching those who share these ideas?”

This argument is false because, if Brazil wipes out the Amazon, the country will suffer the terrible consequences of the greatest climate change in its history, and will become poorer than the desert regions of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The climatic balance of the South American Continent depends on the energy exchanges and intense humidity that occur along the hydrographic basin of the Amazon River, the largest source of drinking water in the world. What sustains these ecosystems are the waters, both surface and underground aquifers, and the processes of energy exchange that occur in the complex Amazonian environment. Without plant protection, they succumb in a few years.

There is a scientific theory based on research, the “Flying Rivers”, which explains this climatic phenomenon. Millions of tons of water evaporate in the Atlantic Ocean, and travel thousands of kilometers through the air (the flying rivers), to fall, in the form of rain, on the forest. From it, they successively detach and precipitate again, through a process called evapotranspiration, which feeds back these air currents of water, on their journey from the mouth to the Andes Mountains, where they transform into glaciers that, in turn, will melt. and form the most complex network of rivers, streams, streams, streams and lagoons, feeding the gigantic Amazon. This is the mystery of Life, which they want to destroy!

A retrospective of the civilizing process

The Great Navigations of the 16th century, according to historians, were motivated by the European interest in finding alternative paths to the East Indies, but also by the search for new continents, which were suspected to exist, as evidenced by the cartographic maps of Antiquity, probably prepared by Viking navigators, Greeks, Chinese and Phoenicians. Even before venturing into the Atlantic and Pacific seas, there was evidence of lands west of the European continent, still known as the “Old Continent”, although Asia and Africa were older, according to archaeological discoveries from the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, objects, paintings and human bones.

Portugal was a small nation, territorially, but with intense trade with the Indies, from where it brought spices (teas, seasonings, herbs), as recorded in the literature of the time, which does not mention what goods it took to exchange for these products. It was pressured by strong competition from Spaniards, English, Italians, Dutch and French. For that country, it was a matter of survival and economic wealth to differentiate itself from its neighbors, expanding its domains beyond Europe. The achievements of Portuguese navigations were immortalized by the epic of Luiz de Camões, in “Os Lusíadas”, narrating the adventures of the Portuguese around the Cape of Storms, today Boa Esperança, in the extreme south of Africa, a place of great dangers and numerous shipwrecks.

The small Portuguese fleet crossed the Atlantic Ocean with the expectation of finding land in the west. This is evident from the reduced size of the vessels and the limited capacity of the expedition to extend over a long period. It was just an exploratory voyage, which would be followed by heavy traffic between the two continents in the years that followed. Portugal’s initial intentions were evident in the initial investigative process, and not of occupation, which later lasted for about 300 years, when they discovered the wealth existing in Pindorama⁷ from overseas.

The first economic activities developed in Brazilian territory since the Discovery were the extraction of brazilwood (“pau-brasil”), the production of sugar cane and the mining of gold, diamonds and precious stones, the cultivation of cocoa, followed by if  cotton planting, coffee farming and rubber (latex) extraction. These extractive and agricultural cycles eventually overlapped, extending for more than a century, until they became economically unviable, either due to the depletion of these resources (in the case of gold, diamond, wood and rubber extraction), or by global competition (in the case of sugarcane, cocoa, cotton and coffee plantations) or even by the emergence of new opportunities (or demands) in the world consumer market.

In this context, it is evident the intensive exploitation of natural resources to the detriment of the environment⁸, which was then irrelevant. There was no planning, even coinciding with other predatory aspects of this economy, such as the traffic and exploitation of slave labor, and the subsequent introduction of immigrants to compensate for the loss of slaves at the end of the 19th century. The intensity of extractive, pastoral and agricultural activities is evident in the disorderly occupation of the west, through the cycles of entrances and flags, when the genocide of indigenous populations was practiced, to steal their territories, in an attempt to enslave them, replacing them. to slave labor brought from the African continent, which had become extremely expensive and fought by society at the time.

In order to operationalize this process of territorial occupation, since the beginning of the 16th century, policies were implemented to encourage land tenure, initially through the Hereditary Captaincies, which were a huge failure, for not being able to fix their grantees in a land that was still wild and devoid of the comfort and resources in European society. Furthermore, the existence of the Treaty of Tordesilhas restricted the Portuguese occupation of the interior of the continent to half of present-day Brazil. The donee of the captaincies had the right to sell or donate parts of their territory, the sesmarias, to other colonizers, as a stimulus to imperial colonization. From there, predatory territorial exploitation emerged, as an activity, adding value to the bare land in the processes of commercialization of discovered areas.

The term “sesmaria”⁹ was used to typify the lands belonging to the Portuguese Crown, in which there was neither the development of economic activities, nor the human occupation of the colonial space. Therefore, given the dimensions of that land found to the west of the Atlantic Ocean, the donation of sesmarias proved to be very interesting for the colonizers, as well as an attraction for the coming of European adventurers, interested in settling in these territories. This system was consolidated in the future Brazilian nation, becoming a usual practice throughout the entire process of territorial occupation of the country.

An important partner of the Portuguese Crown in this civilizing process was the Catholic Church, which since the discovery has been present in this territory, having appropriated huge tracts of land, as it acted as a peacemaker and evangelizer of indigenous peoples. This partnership between the Portuguese Crown and the Church was doubly convenient, which gave the religious a “silvicultural herd to spread their doctrines”, while populating the cities that were formed in the new lands of Portuguese America. This system resulted in the Laudêmio¹⁰, by which the Church received taxes, collected from the intervivo transmission of property rights. This tax collection system survives to this day in some traditional areas of older cities.

It should be noted that Brazil was occupied by the subtraction of indigenous territories and, many times, with the extermination of entire populations and, consequently, causing the disappearance of cultures, ethnicities, languages, customs and traditions of these peoples. To date, most of these peoples from the American continent still do not have their territory demarcated and regularized by the government, many of whom live, like zombies, in cities and, on the side of the roads, as beggars, subject to sexual exploitation, drugs, to violence and humiliation, in what was his land and his world, until the arrival of the Portuguese.

With the arrival of the Portuguese imperial family, fleeing from Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1808, the situation in the colony was unsustainable for the nobles, who came from Europe, lacking the minimum conditions for survival in their involuntary exile. Thus, Dom João VI himself stimulated the installation of small manufacturing industries to meet the basic needs of the nobility, thus taking the first steps towards the industrialization of Brazil. This late process accelerated during almost the entire 19th century and prospered with the return of Dom João VI to Portugal, leaving his son with the responsibility of taking care of the Colony. Therefore, the foundations were laid for the transformation of Colonial Brazil into a free and sovereign Nation, which took place in 1822.

During the long reign of Dom Pedro II, who replaced his father when he also returned to Portugal, despite the revolts in different regions of the country that was being formed, there was a period of great achievements, both in the fields of Arts, Culture and Science as well as Economics. However, the most important step towards the industrialization of the country only took place, effectively, after the Proclamation of the Republic, in 1889. Before, however, in 1888, his daughter, Princess Isabel, taking advantage of her father’s absence (or even by him), took the last step to end slavery in Brazil¹¹, on May 13 of that year.

With the liberation of the slaves, the coffee plantation was without manpower to produce. It was through encouraging the arrival of European and Asian immigrants that Brazil started the industrialization process, still during the reign of Dom Pedro II. Coffee was introduced in Brazil in 1856, settling in the region of Vassouras, state of Rio de Janeiro. In the following years it spread through the Vale do Paraíba, heading north and west of São Paulo to the limits of what is now Mato Grosso do Sul. In this expansion process, the construction of railways began, essential for the flow of agricultural and industrial production of coffee, transforming the country into the world’s largest producer and exporter of this product.

Barão de Mauá and the national industry

The Baron of Mauá, Irineu Evangelista de Souza, (1813-1889), was the first entrepreneur, among the social bourgeoisie in Brazil, to invest heavily in industry. Its productive investments focused on various sectors of the economy, from land and water transport to the establishment of a commercial bank. Gaucho by birth, he moved, still in his teens, to Rio de Janeiro, where he worked in an import company. It was in England that he came into contact with urban and industrial society. Upon returning to Brazil, he acquired a foundry in Niterói, which was transformed into a naval shipyard that produced more than sixty ships.

Irineu Evangelista also created the Companhia de Tugboats da Barra do Rio Grande, obtained transport rights on the Amazon River and invested in tram companies in São Paulo. He was one of the biggest promoters of the implementation of railroads in Brazil. Honored with the title of Barão de Mauá, he built a network of submarine telegraphs, linking Brazil to Europe, invested in the Rio de Janeiro Gas Company and in banking establishments, including Casa Mauá & Cia.

However, its industrialization projects faced the precarious situation of the country’s economy, based heavily on the use of slave labor. Being against slavery, he suffered strong pressure from the coffee landowners, having even been the target of attacks and sabotage in his activities. The intense taxation of industrial activities was the coup de grace for his projects, leading him to bankruptcy in 1878.

As a pioneer in the country’s industrialization process, Barão de Mauá suffered the consequences of a nation dominated by agribusiness, unprepared for the challenges of an industrial, prejudiced and opportunistic mode of production, with its workforce made up of slave labor and, therefore, , without the need to become efficient, since all its revenue was distorted by the absence of the main component of the cost of production, which is the worker’s remuneration.

However, Barão de Mauá left his mark as a visionary and entrepreneur, like few others of his time. Brazil once had a competitive shipyard, and until today the Mauá Shipyard is one of the most successful projects in the country, with an area of ​​180,000 m² and a processing capacity of 36,000 tons of steel per year. It is the largest shipyard in Guanabara Bay, offering shipbuilding services, construction and integration of offshore modules, docks, ship repair and port terminal services. Today, Estaleiro Mauá is considered one of the largest construction, integration and repair centers for the oil and gas industry in the country.

Getúlio Vargas and the march to the West

Getúlio Dornelles Vargas (1882-1954) was born in Rio Grande do Sul and was president of Brazil, after taking power in 1930 and becoming dictator. Taking advantage of his totalitarian powers, he promoted the modernization of the country, creating the Ministry of Labour, Industry and Commerce, and the Ministry of Education and Health, and appointing federal interveners for states and territories. He created the Instituto Brasileiro do Café and the Conselho Nacional do Café, proceeding with the Coffee Valuation Policy. He also valued workers through new labor and union legislation.

In 1932, the crisis on the New York Stock Exchange caught Brazil with huge stocks of grain, losing its international clientele, and leaving many coffee growers in misery. In a few months, fifteen million tons of beans, stored at the Instituto Brasileiro do Café, were burned, ending the development cycle provided by this fantastic product. However, he left as a legacy a complex railway system, composed of the Mogiana Companies, which reached Pedregulho/SP, the Paulista Company, which reached the border between São Paulo and Mato Grosso in the mid-twentieth century, Araraquarense and Sorocabana, which , with other routes, also continued to the Paraná River, on the border with what is now the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

The first railroad in Brazil was inaugurated in 1854, between the Port of Mauá and the city of Fragoso, in Rio de Janeiro, and was conceived by the businessman and banker Irineu Evangelista de Souza, Barão de Mauá, a great supporter of industrialization in the country. Also in this final period of the Empire, the Recife – São Francisco (1858), Central do Brasil (1858) and Santos – Jundiaí (1867) railroads were built.

The major problem of railway construction in Brazil, which caused its early obsolescence in the first half of the 20th century, was the lack of standardization of the distance between its tracks, known as “rail bed gauge”. This prevented such roads from lasting and being integrated, in order to share cargo and passengers along the immense territorial extensions of Brazil. However, during their short existence, they played a leading role, both for the flow of crops and for the industrialization process of our country.

In 1932 Getúlio faced the Constitutionalist Revolution, led by the State of São Paulo, which protested against the totalitarian State and demanded a constituent assembly to draft a new Constitution. In 1934, Getúlio approved his own Constitution, which brought important innovations, such as the secret ballot, which intended to end the well-known “halter vote”, by which the landowners, the colonels of the sertão, controlled the outcome of the elections, ensuring their power and its benefits in obtaining agricultural credit.
In 1935 Vargas faced a new attempt to remove him from power: it was the Intentona Comunista, a long march led by Luiz Carlos Prestes and idealized by the Aliança Libertadora Nacional, a party banned by the Vargas government. In 1937, a group of integralists, who supported Adolf Hitler, forged the Cohen Plan, which conquered a significant portion of the population and the barracks, supporting the Vargas dictatorship.

But it was during the period known as the Estado Novo (1937-1945) that Getúlio Vargas exercised power without opposition, with the support of the military and the sympathy of the working class. It was during this period, when the Second World War was raging in Europe and the Jewish population was fleeing Nazism, that Brazil received a large number of people to work in the fields and in the incipient industry. It was also during this period that Vargas conceived his great “March to the West”.

Its purpose was to occupy the central region of the country, creating new work fronts and consolidating the national territory in the interior, as it was still very concentrated in the coastal strips. In his speech, Vargas stated that the March was “the true sense of Brazilianness”. He requested that institutions such as the National Council of Geography, the National Council of Cartography, the National Council of Statistics and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) provide the necessary data to support its mission to integrate Brazil. The West was an unknown, wild and inhospitable region for most Brazilians.

At that time there were no roads, the rivers were not navigable and there were many indigenous people who were “hostile” to the colonization process, who had moved from the coastal regions to the interior of Brazil. The State resumed its image of the Bandeirante¹², who had traveled the country in search of gold and hunting for Indians and blacks who had escaped from the slave quarters. The latter settled in mountainous regions, constituting the Quilombos, where they lived protected from their tormentors, spoke their native language, practicing their customs.

The March intended to start the conquest to the West, then proceed to the North. One of the works carried out by this march was the installation of telegraph lines, commanded by Marechal Rondon, who managed to get closer to still unknown indigenous groups, created the Xingu Indigenous Park, constituted the Service for the Protection of Indigenous Peoples and Localization of National Workers ( SPILTN), whose purpose was to convert indigenous people into manual workers and integrate them into “civilized” society.

The SPI avoided the extermination of indigenous people, but at a great cost to these populations, who were transferred to other regions, losing their customs, traditions and sacred places, and ended up being used as a justification for the occupation of the territories of Mato Grosso, Rondônia and Acre. To this day, the social and cultural impacts of this process are felt by the indigenous peoples of this vast region. The SPI, created in 1910, fifty years later, gave rise to the current indigenist body, the Fundação Nacional do Índio, created in 1967 and used until today for political interests, moving away from its mission, which is the protection of Indigenous Peoples.

It is estimated that the indigenous population of the territory that became Brazil, at the time of the Discovery, was composed of more than 500 ethnic groups, with more than two hundred languages ​​spoken, totaling more than 5 million human beings. During the civilization process this population was reduced to less than 300 thousand individuals. According to the last IBGE Demographic Census, in 2010, 817,962 indigenous people were counted, distributed in about 600 indigenous lands in different stages of demarcation.

Half of this population still lives in villages, while the rest inhabit cities in all states of the Federation. Today there are 350 ethnicities and 180 languages ​​spoken. The indigenous territory is 117 million hectares, corresponding to 13.7% of the national territory. Brazil is the country with the greatest ethnic diversity on the planet. This ethnic, linguistic and cultural wealth is threatened by agribusiness, which every day encourages new land invasions, encourages illegal leasing of their lands, promotes the illegal purchase of wood and corrupts customs and traditions of these peoples.

For more than a century, since the creation of the Indian Protection Service and passing through Funai, this institution has been manipulated by all governments, under the orders of the oligarchies of landowners and bankers, to try to reverse the process of demarcation of their lands. While agribusiness attacks the material heritage of indigenous peoples, the Catholic and evangelical churches attack their cultural heritage, mischaracterizing their culture and destroying their cosmogony, catechizing human beings who have no way of defending themselves against these heralds of a god that has nothing to do with their traditions, placing a bible in the hands of each indigenous person, corrupting their customs and instilling in them a false knowledge.

Indigenous lands in the Amazon are of equal importance to conservation units, insofar as they preserve the environment and protect springs, fauna and flora, guarantee biodiversity and prevent devastation from spreading beyond areas that are already useless, until even for crops and livestock, so poor have their soils and waters been contaminated by pesticides. If this process of asphyxiating the indigenist institution is not overcome in time, all the work developed in the last hundred years will be irretrievably lost.
However, more than destroying about three hundred indigenous peoples, we will be impoverishing the Brazilian Nation, which will lose millenary cultures, cradle of our own language, origin of our richest cuisine, source of the traditional knowledge that fed, including, unduly, the great laboratories pharmaceuticals with their active principles stolen from the wisdom of the shamans, in syncretism with that of the African orixás, inheritance of the millions of slaves who served Brazil for 300 years.

Juscelino Kubitscheck: 50 years in five

After the tragic death of Getúlio Vargas, who committed suicide in 1954 when he became aware that his closest advisors had betrayed him and were conspiring against him, Café Filho¹³, Carlos Luz¹⁴ and Nereu Ramos¹⁵ succeeded each other, who completed Vargas’ term. They were succeeded by Juscelino Kubitschek, who governed for five years, continuing Vargas’ project of promoting the interiorization of Brazil. For this, he launched his government program, called “50 years in 5”¹⁶, whose purpose was to boost the economy, expanding Getúlio’s goals for the occupation of the West and for the consolidation of the still incipient national industry.

In these five years of intense economic activity, the economic growth factor was based on the construction of Brasília and the consolidation of the Brazilian Automobile Industry. Juscelino had participated in the 1946 Constituent Assembly, had been governor of Belo Horizonte and had traveled through the United States and Canada to learn more about public administration in these countries. From then on, he began to envision his project for the industrialization of Brazil.

To plan his projects, Juscelino created what he called the “National Development Plan”. This plan consisted of a national development project with thirty-one goals, the thirty-first being the construction of Brasília and the transfer of the federal capital. This plan was based on studies carried out by the Joint Brazil-United States Commission between 1951 and 1953, which aimed to identify the crucial points of stagnation of the Brazilian economy, which made the country’s economic growth unfeasible under a capitalist and liberal approach.

The Goals Plan aimed to invest in five sectors of the national economy: energy, transport, basic industry, food and education. The first three sectors received more than 90% of the resources, with education and food receiving around 7% of the investments. The most expressive result of the Goals Plan was the 100% growth of the national base industry, with the use of foreign capital, which generated strong indebtedness and monetary imbalance.

Between 1955 and 1961, more than two billion dollars went into the goals. Juscelino exempted industrial machinery and equipment from import taxes, as well as allowed foreign capital inflows into risky investments, as long as they are associated with national capital (“associated capital”). To expand the domestic market (consumption), the plan offered a generous consumer credit policy.

The country grew 7.9% per year. JK promoted the implantation of the automobile industry with the arrival of automobile factories to Brazil. As the United States was more interested in the European market at the time, European brands came, initially with German capital (Volksvagen), French capital (Simca) and national capital with foreign technology (Vemag). It promoted the naval industry with Japanese, Dutch and national capital, and the steel industry with state resources from BNDES and Japanese capital added to Usiminas. It built large hydroelectric plants, such as Furnas, located in São João da Barra, and Três Marias. The construction of Furnas began in 1957 and was completed in 1963. Furnas formed one of the largest artificial lakes in the world (at the time), which bathes 34 municipalities in Minas Gerais and became known as the “Sea of ​​Minas Gerais”.

The industrialization process of the Southeast region, with the creation of jobs, increases the coming of Northeasterners to this region, mainly São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as well as immigrants from rural areas across the country. Many entrepreneurs, especially those from São Paulo, believed that the lack of development in the Northeast region was one of the biggest obstacles to expanding the domestic market, as it excluded a third of the population. On December 15, 1959, JK created the Northeast Development Superintendence (Sudene) to integrate the region into the national market.

It opened the trans-regional highways that united all regions of Brazil, previously without road connections between them. Petrobras’ oil production increased. With the exception of the hydroelectric power companies, Juscelino practically did not create any state-owned company. Between 1959 and 1960, there was a crisis in the construction work of Brasília. The funds had run out and JK understood that he could not end the government without building Brasilia. When asking for a loan of 300 million dollars to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the body demanded that the country “put its house in order before asking for financial assistance”. JK issued public debt bonds and letters precatory, which are securities traded on the stock exchange to raise short-rnos of the country, by increasing the federal public debt.

The government of Juscelino Kubitschek continues to be the model of efficiency and political competence in Brazil due to the strong impacts on its economic growth. His work was immortalized by the construction of Brasília, where a mausoleum was built in his honor. It contains historical documents about Brasília, the Plan of Goals, the commendations, medals and tributes received by him, as well as the tomb where his mortal remains lie¹⁷. Despite controversies about his choices and priorities, about the indebtedness and the success (or not) of the decision to build Brasilia, Juscelino transformed Brazil as never before had another one been able to do.term capital. JK sold these papers at a discount, that is, at a price below market value, which could be recovered later within a period of five years. With that, he got money to finish the construction of Brasília, but JK was accused of making the next governments unfeasible.

Jânio Quadros and João Goulart

Jânio Quadros¹⁸ was elected president of the Republic with the promise of ending corruption, with João Goulart as vice president. Despite Juscelino’s great achievements, there were many complaints of embezzlement in the major construction works of Brasília. It was said that trucks, loaded with construction materials, received two, three times the value of deliveries with a single invoice. These accusations were never officially confirmed, and what remained in the national memory was the image of a great leader, whose work was eternalized as a Cultural Heritage of Humanity, by UNESCO, both for the architectural project, signed by Oscar Niemeyer, for the urban project of Lúcio Costa, and for the magnificent landscaping work of Burle Marx.

Jânio resigned after a few months in power, alleging the presence of “terrible forces” (or “hidden”), who were conspiring against him. João Goulart was traveling through the Soviet Union, and the Armed Forces were pressuring Congress to prevent him from taking office, fearing the country’s transition to socialism. After negotiations and negotiations, the government regime was changed to parliamentary, allowing Goulart to assume power, and electing, by acclamation, Tancredo Neves as Prime Minister.

This arrangement did not work satisfactorily, and months later it was revoked by Congress, making João Goulart the de facto and de jure President, affronting the Armed Forces and enthusing the radical left, which was restructuring itself, dreaming of the Socialist Revolution. Goulart begins to architect a series of changes, which he called Basic Reforms, giving priority to infrastructure projects, as was usual in the socialist conception of transition from capitalism to communism.

From then on, the strikes and demonstrations of the working class shook the country, demanding celerity in the reforms and creating strong political, economic and social instability, which reached its peak at the great rally at the Central Station of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro. At that moment, the destiny of the country was defined, with great popular concentrations, instigated by the church, in opposition to the socialists. A series of marches took place in the country, called “March of the Family, with God, for Freedom”, giving the argument that the military wanted to assume power.

On April 1, 1964, army contingents marched from Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to overthrow João Goulart who, when he realized that he no longer had military support, abandoned the government and fled to Rio Grande do Sul, then on to Uruguay. Brazil’s fate was sealed and, for 21 years, five generals¹⁹ succeeded one another in power, ending constitutional freedoms and using force, arrested and tortured thousands of innocent people, many of whom were murdered in the basements of the dictatorship, such as the Casa da Morte (Petrópolis), CENIMAR – Navy Information Center, DOI/CODI – Information Operations Detachments / Internal Defense Operations Centers, and DOPS – Department of Political and Social Order.

The Military Coup of 1964

With Goulart’s flight to Uruguay, the military took power and followed 21 years of military dictatorship, hundreds of disappeared, thousands of young people tortured, and a country torn apart by hatred, disenchantment and despair. The military took power in the name of Democracy, as we have already said, but its first acts and those that followed were intended to silence any and all opposition to the military regime. By a curious ruse, all the generals exercised power claiming to have been elected by vote of the National Congress, where there were two parties: that of the Military Government, called ARENA (National Renewal Alliance) and the MDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement), whose purpose was to endorse the acts of the government and disguise the dictatorship implemented in the country.

The military took not only political power, but also control of state-owned companies at the federal and state levels. His action aimed to muzzle the population and stifle opposition in the name of a prosperous and orderly country. The horror of the torture rooms struck the hearts of the youth. Paradoxically, today, the fascist president, elected in October 2018, repeats the same motto and proposes “Order and Progress” as the banner and motto of his “government project”. It is worth remembering that this slogan was created by the federalist movement that overthrew Emperor Pedro II, inspired by the Positivism of Auguste Comte²⁰, a 17th century French philosopher.

To this day, there are supporters of this ancient philosophy and of the intellectual mentor of Nazism, Martin Heidegger²¹, who mobilized the world to its worst experience of war, murdering more than 70 million human beings. However, nothing justifies the acceptance of this Nazi-fascist president who “enchants” his fanatical electorate, just as Hitler mobilized the German Army and youth in the 1930s, the latter with promises of rescuing the dignity lost in the First World War, the former with promises of provide weapons to the population, racial hatred and extreme rigor of police power to face criminals.

Paradoxically, the populations that took to the streets to demonstrate against the corruption of ideological left governments are the stereotype of the electorate that this neo-Nazi managed to conquer.

Going back to the military in 1964, his achievements include the Trans-Amazonian Highway – BR-230, which mortally wounded the largest homogeneous ecosystem in the world; the Itaipu Hydroelectric Power Plant, which flooded one of the most surprising scenarios on the Paraná River, the Balbina Hydroelectric Power Plant, which does not even light up Manaus with the little energy it produces, but which almost destroyed one of the ancient cultures of the Amazon, the Waimiri-Atroari Indians, who were also stabbed by the construction of Highway BR-174, which crossed its territory from south to north, connecting Manaus/AM to Boa Vista/RR, with thousands of deaths and an exuberant fauna strongly affected until the present day.

There were many “achievements” of the military dictatorship, but “justice” must be done to them regarding the continuity of the projects of Getúlio Vargas and Juscelino Kubitschek, with regard to the occupation of the West and the Amazon: environmental devastation. But the military must be debited more emphatically, as they freed up the forest and Cerrado lands for occupation by foreigners²² and by southern gauchos, eager to settle in unproductive large estates, subsidized by generous bank interest and forgiveness of debts eternally overdue and never paid.

We can say that agribusiness began with the Portuguese colonizers, prospered with the gaucho landowners, and flourished with the Workers’ Party. This continuity in recklessness has its price, and we intend to elucidate this project of deconstruction of Nature with the last governments and their unfortunate choices. But the responsibility must be attributed to the military, although their project did not put an end to corruption (it even made it flourish), but concentrated on the power of the generals, who enriched themselves with the profits diverted from the state-owned companies and ensured themselves generous pensions and rich distribution of profits from companies acquired with the blood of their victims. Until today, Brazil has not managed to clean up the History of the Dictatorship, neither with the Truth Commission, nor with the hundreds of books and films produced to rescue the dignity of the victims of our particular holocaust.

One of the victims of this breakdown of power and arrogance was Vladimir Herzog, arrested without any charge against him, tortured and murdered in the DOI/CODI premises of sad memories, and humiliated, even after being killed by his tormentor and torturer, Colonel Brilhante Ulstra , idol and reference of Jair Bolsonaro, a lowly captain, expelled from the Army for indiscipline and attempt to explode a bomb in the barracks where he served, and who today claims the right to lead the Brazilian People and occupy the Presidency of the Republic, to which does not have enough intelligence, competence or culture, not even to be a federal deputy.

He, a mediocre contemporary fascist, xenophobe, misogynist, sexist, racist and disqualified, never, in almost 30 years of Congress, managed to pass a single relevant law, of his own, if not to increase the pay of military officers, including his own ! An opportunist loser!

The military dictatorship had another “masterpiece” of “intelligence and creativity”: by the head of another colonel, José Ezil Veiga da Rocha, former president of the Special Secretariat for Information Technology, created by the military regime, when he conceived the “Lei da Reserva de Mercado para Informática”, an unspeakable excrescence that intended, with a simple stroke of the pen, to enable Brazil to compete with technology giants, such as IBM, Unisys, Hewlet-Packard, Honeywell-Bull, among others, giving priority to the national industry.

For this, five companies were “created”: Cobra, Labo, SID, Sisco and Edisa, powered with public capital and placed as the only option to purchase computers for our companies, from the electronics industry to the banking sector, highly dependent on high information technology. The result was a technological stagnation that distanced us from international competition. Ezil claimed that Informatics would be “our shortcut to development”… he only forgot to say that this shortcut would lead us to backwardness, to the edge of the precipice of inefficiency.

Every dictatorship is a setback, a delay in life for a nation, a wasted time, during which society is massacred by those who swore to defend the country from its enemies. However, enemies cannot exist within the Nation. Even the worst crooks have to be treated with dignity, for torture and cruelty against subjugated people is just cowardice and incompetence to run a nation. Brazil paid a huge price for the terrible years of military dictatorship. Until today, the country has not recovered from the scars left by the military on the Brazilian people.

The New Republic and the Constituent Assembly of 1988

The trauma caused by 21 years of military dictatorship fueled the excessive zeal of politicians by creating safeguards against a possible relapse of the barracks in the desire to run the country in its strange and obtuse way. A Constituent Assembly was elected with the same politicians (or their direct descendants) who still inhabit the halls of the National Congress, representatives of the same oligarchies that emerged during the Colonial Period, fed in the Empire, grew up in the Old Republic and became ” donas do Brasil” to this day. For this reason, due to the vices of the past, the final text was changed at the last minute, removing the figure of Parliamentarianism from its pages and restoring Presidentialism, without, however, correcting the distortions arising from this setback.

A prolix architecture of laws built a tangle of protections that, in a few years, proved to be ineffective against the authors themselves, who were capable of committing the crime against the homeland like a serial killer. For more than thirty years, parliamentarians patched up this text, the offspring of the dictatorship with Dracula, trying to make viable the governments that succeeded each other without the ability to efficiently manage Brazil. Right from the start, the inflation, contained by the military under the guns, soared, and reached the two, three, four digits, imploding the Sarney government, and then the savior of the homeland, the maharajah hunter, Fernando Collor de Mello and their companions.

FHC, the “enlightened despot” of the Brazilian Revolution, came and, in the princely majesty of the Academy of Social Sciences, dealt a fatal blow to inflation, reducing it to reasonable levels. Enthusiastic with his success, he decides to privatize everything, handing over, hand in hand, to Vale do Rio Doce, which exploded in fantastic profits, in private hands, and, years later, caused the worst environmental disaster in Brazil, ending, precisely, with the VALE DO RIO DOCE, and today the poison of the author of the second environmental crime is bitter, causing the death of almost 300 people in Brumadinho, due to negligence, ambition, inhumanity and impunity! FHC left the government with the merit of containing inflation and creating a law that forbids spending more than you earn… a primary lesson for any civilized people.

Fernando Henrique and economic stability

Fernando Henrique Cardoso was that sociologist who taught at the University of São Paulo, developed Marxist theories on Latin American dictatorships, was a professor at the Sorbonne as a political exile, returned to Brazil and won over the military with his emblematic phrase: “Forget everything that I wrote and said as an academic, for now I will govern”! Interestingly, that’s exactly what he did, proving to be one of Machiavelli’s most brilliant disciples…

It must be admitted, however, that he put the house in order, reduced four-digit inflation to a measly 1.8% a year in 1998 and handed it over to the PT at 12.53% p.a. in 2003, he created the Fiscal Responsibility Law, according to which the government could not spend more than it collects. He carried out the fateful privatizations of the Telebras System and Vale do Rio Doce, raising no less than 78.6 billion reais from the public coffers. It is true that today this is less than the annual budget deficit and what PT and its partners in power collected from Petrobras, Odebrecht and other contractors, but at the time it was a very significant amount. So much so that the business world (the same that later supported “Coiso”) gave it a standing ovation.

It is worth mentioning that “VALE” (the company) was sold for the trifle of 3.3 billion reais, the new currency created by FHC (perhaps for his dream of being emperor), which was equivalent to the dollar at the time, which represented , at most, the steel company’s one-year billing, when its mineral reserves alone were calculated at more than R$ 100 billion at the time. In fact, at least it had the merit of demonstrating how incompetent the public sector is, since Vale’s annual PROFIT alone is today of 17.6 billion reais. He could buy the company five times a year without taking a penny out of the cash register. Its market value is estimated today at 300 billion reais!

Of course, it must be considered that past acts cannot be evaluated with present facts, but the disparity is such that any citizen would be ashamed if he had made a similar deal. There is no way to reverse past mistakes. The more remote, the more unlikely the reversal will be, and in this case the company is one of the four largest in the country, and propagates the false image of socio-environmental sustainability.

Economic stability was gained at the expense of these mistakes. The worst is perhaps the fact that three and a half presidential terms of the Workers’ Party were enough to annihilate all this work. Today, the budget deficit is 139 billion reais per year. In just over two years, if it were a surplus, Vale could be bought back as part of the national patrimony… another conjecture in the face of the past…

But FHC also made agreements with agribusiness, although he did not compromise the national industry during his government. There were significant improvements, both in the Economy and in Education, Health and Environment. It was during his government that the National System of Conservation Units (SNUC) was instituted, which is now administered by ICMBio – Instituto Chico Mendes da Biodiversidade, created by Lula under Marina Silva at the Ministry of the Environment. Some of his proposals were taken up by Lula in his government, such as the demand for a seat by Brazil on the UN Security Council. Social issues were also addressed by FHC and Ruth Cardoso, and taken over by Lula, such as the Bolsa Família program, the result of the merger of several social programs: PNAA – National Program for Access to Food, Bolsa Escola, Bolsa Alimentação, Auxílio Gás, among others.

Lula, Dilma and the Workers’ Party

Expansion of Agribusiness and Social and Environmental Programs

The hybrid form of government created by the Constituent Assembly, which mischaracterized Parliamentarianism, as we have already said, generated situations in which the “creativity” of the corrupt turned into advantages and threats. The most harmful is, of course, the need for any government to work with Congress without having a majority in the House and Senate. Therefore, every bill or act of the federal government requires the formation of the “majority”, and this entails endless negotiations, always aimed at reaching the power of the Executive: exchanges of “favors” for “positions” at the various levels of the Administration. Public, from ministries, secretariats, directorates, coordinations, supervisions, all translated into DAS – Superior Management and Advisory, commissioned positions, often essentially technical, but distributed to any citizen, with or without a clean record, with or without competence to occupy them.

This “management model” is the main cause of all the problems faced since the enactment of the Federal Constitution of 1998, and it has worsened as the ruler himself becomes hostage to petty political parties. They called themselves “lower clergy” in the early post-dictatorship periods. Then they evolved into Centrão, creating a false ideological connotation for a criminal phenomenon called by the codenames “bribery”, “blackmail”, “kickback”, “voting sales”, “business counter” and other unique names. All governments paid to have their projects approved, be they of relevant significance to the Nation, or simple bargaining chips between the three powers, in order to accommodate a “godson” in a DAS position.

Agribusiness entered this “business” smartly, first by electing rural candidates, from the former UDR – Rural Democratic Union, to the current CNA – National Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock. He went on to appoint the Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (MAPA), even to appoint directors of Embrapa – Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, which should only be a research institution, non-profit and without ideological nuances. He even appointed the President of Funai and its directors, when its hidden objectives are known to be known: to prevent the demarcation of indigenous lands and encourage illegal activities in these territories.

In 2012, during the International Conference on Climate Change (“United Nations Conference on Environment and Development”), RIO+20, Brazil promised drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions while Congress voted on changes in legislation environmental protection – the Forest Code – disqualifying it to please agribusiness, exempting farmers who committed environmental crimes in the Amazon and the Brazilian Cerrado from fines already levied, and dangerously reducing permanent preservation areas (APP) and legal reserves ( RL) of rural properties in the Legal Amazon. These changes, endorsed by President Dilma Rousseff, of the Workers’ Party, had an immediate impact on the resurgence of Amazonian devastation, since the availability of land for deforestation, legalized by the ruralists, was expanded.

It should be noted that, although discrete, this increase in forest devastation was concentrated in the states of Pará and Mato Grosso, the two most responsible for the environmental degradation of the Amazon in recent decades. There were different reasons in each of these states. While Mato Grosso is the largest grain producer and owner of the largest cattle herd in the country, therefore, directly related to agribusiness, Pará had a strong impact as a result of the construction of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Power Plant, in addition to being one of the most affected regions. by the Trans-Amazonian highway and by the INCRA settlements. Today he is a champion in land grabbing and murder of environmental and indigenist activists.

In Rondônia, the third most impacted state by agribusiness, soy production has increased every year, advancing over the remnants of protected areas and indigenous lands. The CAR – Rural Environmental Registry, gives a clear idea about these occupations, which occur in a disorderly way, threatening indigenous populations and de-characterizing what is left of the Amazon biome. On the BR-364, on the stretch between Vilhena and Porto Velho alone, over a distance of 780 kilometers, more than a thousand trucks transport soy to the port terminals on the Madeira River daily. These three states, together with the areas in the process of degradation, represent more than 75% of the total deforested in the Amazon since the beginning of the new millennium.

In 500 years, Brazil has already destroyed 93% of the Atlantic Forest and most of the Araucaria forests in Paraná and Santa Catarina. In about 50 years, especially after the construction of Brasília and roads like the Transbrasiliana, it destroyed more than half of the Cerrado. In the 21st century, it is taking great strides to destroy the Cerrado and the Amazon. Calculations indicate that the country has already eliminated 22% of the forest and the destruction continues to accelerate with deforestation, large projects for the construction of hydroelectric plants, the expansion of livestock and soy, the growth of cities and the spread of logging, mining and mining.

“Unfortunately, the government has no plan to save the Amazon. On the contrary, what exists are precarious plans to reduce deforestation, in parallel with the increase in large development projects. The Amazon suffers from two types of threats: 1) one created internally, as a result of the developmentalist ideology; 2) and another, mostly from outside, as a result of global warming and climate change.” (text extracted from a manifesto of the Brazilian Association of the Public Ministry for the Environment).

The 2006 and 2017 Agricultural Censuses

After 11 years since the last survey in 2006, the IBGE carried out the 2017 Agricultural Census, which was released in July 2018. However, the previous Census remains extremely relevant for showing how Rural Brazil is organized among small medium and large producers, who are the landowners, their respective levels of education, the types of products cultivated (temporary and permanent crops, horticultural crops, raising beef and dairy animals), as well as other essential issues such as the true meaning of Agribusiness, which we intend to analyze in the course of this article.

Of the 5,175,636 rural properties existing in Brazil (and considered in the 2006 survey, totaling 333,680,037 hectares), 3,946,411 of the properties (76.25%) are owned, totaling 310,515,259 hectares (93.06%). Considering the size of rural properties, 1,840,807 have less than 5 (five) hectares, corresponding to 35.57% of all rural properties. Family farming (up to 500 hectares) corresponds to 4,818,881 rural properties (146,296,551 hectares), representing 87.32% of all rural production units in Brazil. These properties supply more than 80% of all products on the table of Brazilians, such as fruit and vegetables, beans, rice and manioc, among others.
Excluding family farming, there are 101,736 large producers (over 500 hectares), representing agribusiness, with 1.97% of Brazilian rural establishments, occupying 187,383,486 hectares, 56.16% of all arable area in the country. in 2006. A large part of Brazil’s agricultural production is destined for export, such as sugarcane, coffee, soy, beef, tobacco, corn, cotton, pork, poultry (chicken ) and agroforestry products (wood).

According to data provided by the official website of the Brazilian Forest Service, an agency of the MMA – Ministry of the Environment²³, until May 2018, 5.1 million rural properties were registered, totaling an area of ​​448,319,254 hectares entered in the database. of the system, confirming that agribusiness corresponds to 52.73% of the national territory. Comparing to FUNAI and ICMBIO data, we have, respectively, 116,900,565.36 hectares of indigenous lands and 75,016,301.91 hectares of federal conservation units. Part of the rural properties should be preserved, depending on their geographical location: Permanent Preservation Areas (APP) and Legal Reserves (RL), intended to protect the different Brazilian biomes.

The data presented contradict the information presented by the Embrapa researcher, Evaristo de Miranda²⁴: for some years, this researcher has been saying that more than half of the national territory is preserved, thanks to agribusiness. This statement is absolutely false. It is important to highlight that Embrapa’s studies do not consider that small green and discontinuous areas do not characterize preserved areas, as they do not sustain biodiversity and do not reproduce the complete cycles of nitrogen and carbon, essential for life. Analyzing satellite images, adding small patches of vegetation to preserved areas, is a dishonest way of circumventing and distorting the truth of the facts.

For an area to be considered of environmental preservation, it is necessary to analyze its biodiversity in loco, as well as the factors that ensure its resilience and perpetuity. We consider that less than 20% of rural large estates comply with the new legislation on legal reserves and permanent preservation areas, mainly in the Amazon, where, even according to the new Brazilian Forest Code, 80% of the areas of properties located in the Legal Amazon should be preserved as primary forest, which is not the case.

For Brazilian ecosystems it is necessary to treat biodiversity as consisting of continuous areas, comprising springs, streams, rivers, primary vegetation, fauna and natural processes that prove complete cycles of Nitrogen, Oxygen and Carbon, compatible with the balance of Nature. The distortion of the Brazilian Forest Code, promoted by the National Congress, and endorsed by President Dilma Rousseff, in July 2012, in the middle of the World Conference on Biodiversity, led to the acceleration of the loss of biodiversity in all Brazilian biomes, but especially in the Cerrado and Amazon biomes, more heavily devastated from then on. The numbers show this. It is important to highlight that the approval of the changes in the Brazilian Forest Code aimed to expand agribusiness and forgive the debts of large landowners for environmental crimes committed over the last 50 years, causing irreversible losses to biodiversity, including within indigenous lands and units. of conservation.

Contrary to what the defenders of these changes in legislation claimed, environmental crimes continued anyway, and this can be proven even by the Rural Environmental Registry, which unequivocally shows the presence of rural properties within conservation units and indigenous lands.

To analyze the impacts of agribusiness on the preservation of the Environment, we tabulated information from the Rural Environmental Registry (http://www.car.gov.br/#/). See, at the end of this article, the consolidated spreadsheet containing CAR data, referring to March 2018, totaled by federation unit and compared with information from Indigenous Lands (official website of FUNAI) and from Federal Conservation Units (official website of ICMBio). It should be noted that the first four Brazilian states with the largest area affected by agribusiness represent 52.36% of the entire territory of Brazil, with three of them located within the Legal Amazon (Amazonas, Pará and Mato Grosso), and the first two ( Amazonas and Pará) are located in the Amazon Forest (See the table with data from the Brazilian Forest Service at the end of this article, cited above).

Comparing the data from FUNAI and ICMBIO, we have, respectively, 116,900,565.36 hectares of indigenous lands and 75,016,301.91 hectares of federal conservation units. We consider that less than 20% of rural large estates comply with the legislation on legal reserves and permanent preservation areas, mainly in the Amazon, where, even according to the new Brazilian Forest Code, 80% of the areas of properties located in the Legal Amazon should be kept preserved as primary forest. This statement is true and verifiable through satellite images.

For Brazilian ecosystems it is necessary to treat biodiversity as continuous areas, comprising springs, streams, rivers, primary vegetation, fauna and natural processes that prove complete cycles of Nitrogen and Carbon, compatible with the balance of Nature. The distortion of the Brazilian Forest Code, promoted by the National Congress, and endorsed by President Dilma Rousseff, in July 2012, in the middle of the World Conference on Biodiversity, led to the acceleration of the loss of biodiversity in all Brazilian biomes, but especially in the Cerrado and Amazon biomes, more heavily devastated from then on.

The numbers show this. It is important to highlight that the approval of the changes in the Brazilian Forest Code aimed to expand agribusiness and forgive the debts of large landowners for environmental crimes committed over the last 50 years, causing irreversible losses to biodiversity, including within indigenous lands and units. of conservation. Contrary to what the defenders of these changes in legislation claimed, environmental crimes continued anyway, and this can be proven even by the Rural Environmental Registry, which unequivocally shows the presence of rural properties within conservation units and indigenous lands.

Follows Infographic produced by the Brazilian Forest Service²⁵.

To analyze the impacts of agribusiness on the preservation of the Environment, we tabulated information from the Rural Environmental Registry (http://www.car.gov.br/#/). See, at the end of this article, the consolidated spreadsheet with data from the CAR – Rural Environmental Registry, referring to March 2018, totaled by federation unit and compared with information from Indigenous Lands (FUNAI official website) and from the Units of Federal Conservation (ICMBio’s official website).

Note that indigenous lands correspond to 13.75% of the national territory, but not all of them are reasonably preserved. In the last four decades, the devastation caused by agribusiness (which illegally leases areas within indigenous lands), by illegal logging (one of the main agents of degradation in the Amazon), by mining and mining, by the irresponsible proliferation of of INCRA, by the federal government, in the vicinity of indigenous lands and conservation units, and by large enterprises in the Amazon, mainly highways and hydroelectric plants, in addition to other subsidiary factors, such as the real estate boom that follows the trail of enterprises and highways, all of these factors caused (and continue to cause) the reduction of preserved areas, mainly in the states of Roraima, Rondônia, Acre, Mato Grosso, Tocantins, Pará and Maranhão (the Arch of Deforestation). Today, some ethnic groups, such as the Xavante peoples, are no longer able to live like their ancestors as a result of climate change, strongly accentuated by the influence of agribusiness, and the fires that occur annually in their territories and, in part, correspond to their culture and way of life, can no longer be controlled without severe impacts on native vegetation. The resilience of these territories begins to fail, accentuating the loss of biodiversity.

The illegal occupation of areas inside indigenous lands has caused not only environmental degradation, but also the reduction of indigenous populations without contact with our civilization²⁶. The most critical cases are the isolated indigenous populations of the Amazon, on its western border (Vale do Javari, Boca do Acre and Alto Solimões), peoples severely threatened with extinction due to the constant harassment of loggers and prospectors within their territories, across borders. international and from our own country.

It should be noted that the first four Brazilian states with the largest area affected by agribusiness represent 52.36% of the entire territory of Brazil, with three of them located within the Legal Amazon (Amazonas, Pará and Mato Grosso), and the first two ( Amazonas and Pará) in the Amazon Forest (See the table with data from the Brazilian Forest Service at the end of this article, cited above).

When these figures are broken down into different groups of economic activity, it can be seen that the production of temporary crops represents 31.68% of agricultural production, while livestock represents 51.91% (70.18% of this only with livestock cattle), and permanent crops represent only 12.35% of the country’s agricultural production, which proves that the proposals for agroforestry units have not yet been incorporated by rural producers. It is worth noting that Embrapa calls “forests” the monocultures planted with eucalyptus, pine and other trees that do not belong to the national flora. Such “forests” do not fulfill the purpose of sustaining biodiversity, but only the production of wood, and that is why they are called “green desert”.

The predominance of male rural landowners is absolute in Brazil: 87.38% of ruralists are men. In the past, the countryside was populated by farming families. Another alarming fact is the level of education of rural landowners: 65% of rural landowners have incomplete primary education or are illiterate. Only 4.85% of rural landowners have a technical level or higher. This demonstrates that agribusiness did not bring prosperity to the countryside, but only wealth to large landowners. Small rural properties (farms and farms) continue to experience the same difficulties as at the beginning of the 20th century, which proves that agribusiness is the great concentrator of wealth among all existing means of production in Brazil.

About 25% of rural properties (in hectares) are located in Minas Gerais and São Paulo, and two thirds of rural properties (67%) are concentrated in seven states: MG, SP, RS, GO, BA, PR, MS . These numbers validate the evidence that agribusiness is the new profile of Brazilian agriculture, with the largest rural properties located in Amazonas, Pará and Mato Grosso, none of the three listed in the list above. There are about 255,000 rural producers without their own planting, cultivation or breeding area, that is, rural workers working as agricultural labor on someone else’s property.

Most (88.62%) of rural landowners live in the countryside or in the municipality they own. Among those who live far from their rural property, there are 3.39% of the owners, which corresponds to 13.50% of the entire Brazilian rural area, that is, large rural owners live far from the countryside.

About a third (31.57%) of rural properties represent less than one percent (0.79%) of the total area of ​​rural properties in Brazil. However, 0.37% of rural properties (above 2,500 hectares) correspond to about a third (31.41%) of the total area of ​​rural properties. Here, again, is evidence of the concentration of wealth produced by agribusiness, to the detriment of family farming.

The Production of temporary crops represent 31.68% of agricultural activities, while livestock corresponds to more than half (51.91%) of rural production. The raising of cattle alone represents 79.18% of the national livestock, occupying about 190 million hectares of the national territory (one ox per hectare). Animal husbandry alone accounts for almost 225 million hectares os agribusiness, with poultry farming accounting for 7.91% of this sector, with about 13.056 million tons in 2017²⁷.

It is worth noting that all primary export products are called commodities, that is, ores, soy, corn, rice, meat, sugar cane, oil, cotton, coffee, all of which are not processed by the industry. Commodities have a specific sector on the stock exchanges, as their prices vary according to the international market. This is further evidence that agribusiness has the objective of exporting its products, and not the domestic market, belying the advertisements that claim that agribusiness products supply Brazilians’ tables. Who feeds Brazil is family farming.

Impacts of Agribusiness on the Economy, Society and the Environment

Economy

Since the country chose to overvalue agribusiness as the predominant activity in the formation of the Gross Domestic Product, Industry has been relegated to the background, gradually losing its importance in the Brazilian economy. Favoring the countryside was reflected in the granting of subsidized credit, also affecting the balance of public accounts, and impacting the results of other sectors of the economy. Given its importance in the Brazilian GDP, Congress began to be commanded, in matters of interest to agribusiness, by a bench of deputies and senators, whose nickname “Ruralist” was not restricted to defending the interests of Agribusiness, but also to combating any actions whose occupants believed to go against such interests.

This included areas protected by indigenous populations, which were heavily fought and their fundamental rights violated, in favor of new concessions to those in power. The Environment also began to be relegated to the background whenever ruralists thought it harmed their interests. Proof of this occurred in July 2012, when the Brazilian Forest Code, one of the most advanced in the world, was de-characterized to allow large estates to advance against the Amazon and Cerrado, reducing permanent preservation areas, legal reserves and other concepts. fundamental to environmental conservation.

Subsidized loans granted to farmers, with interest far below any loan that other entrepreneurs could claim, were still not honored by borrowers and, to further favor such interests, the Federal Government and Congress created the REFIS – Special Regularization Program. tax²⁸, theoretically, aimed at small and medium-sized companies, but which even favored large rural producers, to the detriment of the population.

Society

Programs aimed at improving the quality of life of the Brazilian rural population, such as Bolsa Família, Rural Credit for small family farmers, Rural Electrification, as well as other benefits created by the FHC government and improved by the PT governments, were gradually discarded to favor to agribusiness. Brazil started to live according to the Rural GDP.
While the country deepened in the political-institutional crisis, agribusiness prospered, for large producers. This process, which fed back into itself, deepened the already very serious gaps between social classes, concentrating on the wealthy classes, to the detriment of the less favored population. Brazilian society was induced to believe that agribusiness was the country’s salvation in the face of the world crisis. For the ruralists, everything was allowed, aggravating social conflicts and scrapping other sectors of the national economy.

Rede Globo, recipient of institutional favors from the CNA²⁹, created and ran its own advertising campaign, inducing people to believe that ‘AGRO IS POP, AGRO IS TECH, AGRO IS EVERYTHING’! For months, this multimillion-dollar campaign, apparently without sponsors, has been broadcast on television, including in agribusiness all family production, which never had such subsidies that only the powerful, “friends of Rede Globo”, could have. Today, society, poor, uneducated, subordinate and humiliated, fully believes that, without agribusiness, Brazil would enter the worst recession in its history. And they don’t even realize that we’ve been in a recession since 2014.

Environment

The agribusiness production cycle has made this sector of the economy extremely demanding, demanding more and more territories to be dedicated to rural production. This unequivocal fact favored deforestation, and wood exploitation became a preliminary and indispensable element for the expansion of agribusiness. In this way, it could be said that “agribusiness” does not devastate the environment; it’s the lumber companies that do it!
These are the links in the same production chain: first, noble wood is extracted for illegal export; then the remaining forest is cut down and the wood is set on fire; finally, comes soy, cattle, cotton, corn, sugar cane… and this is how the forest is destroyed and new agribusiness fronts are implemented, which complete the work, exchanging the remaining forests for grain monoculture and extensive cattle raising.

A country’s economy comprises a diversity of production modes, which must be balanced with the availability of natural resources, to ensure the continuity of the Nation for our descendants. Take the example of oil-producing countries, and compare yourself with our situation. Oil, as an energy source, has its days numbered, as it is a finite, non-renewable resource. How will Middle Eastern countries survive when their reserves are exhausted, or when petroleum derivatives are replaced by alternative sources, with a lower impact on carbon production?

Brazil is privileged to have the largest continuous forest in the equatorial region. A forest rich in biodiversity, being the world’s largest reserve of drinking water, which is continuously recycled, thanks to the renewal process fed by the evaporation of the Atlantic Ocean, the evapotranspiration of the forest and the melting of the Andes, in addition to the aerial migration of immense amounts of sand from the Sahara desert, which replace the equivalent of soil washed away by the waters of the gigantic Amazon River, the largest in the world! We have another privilege: that of having one of the largest savannas in the world, the Cerrado, with a very rich and diversified vegetation, adapted to the rigorous climatic conditions, and which also contains one of the largest reserves of underground sources of the Guarani aquifer and other smaller ones, which they also supply the main Brazilian hydrographic basins, such as the Amazon, the Pantanal and the Paraguai River, the São Francisco River and the Paraná River, in addition to numerous rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean.

However, while the world prepares for the inevitable famine, which will result from global warming, Brazil wastes and squanders its natural reserves, selling ore to the world, selling grain to the world, selling meat to the world, and devastating our biggest natural riches. We are, so to speak, eliminating our almost infinite possibilities to prosper in favor of a minority of agribusiness aristocrats, composed of a social minority that dominated not only the country’s agricultural production, but also politics and the rest of society, hostage to its power of domination and its economic power.

The drastic reduction of the immense Amazon Forest will have irreversible impacts on the climate of South America, savannahizing a territory of more than six million square kilometers, which goes beyond our territorial limits, desertifying the Cerrado and the Pampas, and reducing our water reserves drinking water, making it impossible for our 200 million inhabitants to survive! Water will certainly be humanity’s greatest treasure, much more important than oil and minerals were in past times. The world population has tripled in less than a century, and is fast approaching ten billion human beings. Some will say that science will find the solution to water and food shortages. Others dream of spaceships that will migrate terrestrial elites to other planets in the Universe. But we will not escape the fate we are preparing for our children…

The amazing thing is that there are other alternatives! We don’t need to be the “breadbasket of the world”, nor supply the population with two hundred and twenty million head of cattle! We don’t need to deplete our mineral, water and biodiversity reserves to have a strong, powerful and happy nation… If Arabs and Jews can survive in deserts, desalinating sea water, why, with so much natural wealth, can we not the most powerful nation on this planet? Why devastate so much wealth?

It seems that the Brazilian people, uneducated and weak, do not realize that a minority is enslaving the population and enriching itself with the misery of more than forty million human beings… we. But ignorance is the origin of totalitarian systems. And Aristocracy is one of the forms of domination and power, a tyranny without perceptible violence, as it hides in the very forms of democracy. These powerful ones manipulate intellectuals, unscrupulous politicians and opportunistic researchers of science and technology for their own benefit, and deny the Nation and the destiny of our people… that we are victims, while they squander their wealth, even dominating the media! We are blind to the obvious!

There is, yes, an alternative… there are, in fact, many alternatives that necessarily imply the resumption of the destiny of the Nation by the people. Isn’t that how it is written in the Constitution of the Republic of Brazil? “All power emanates from the People, and in their name it will be exercised”! But it’s not true. All power is in the hands of minorities: Agribusiness, Rede Globo, the big Empreiteiras, the multinational mining companies, the Lumber companies, the rotten Politics, the Evangelicals… model of car, cell phone, tennis, computer, camera, watch… even if none of them is essential to conquer the greatest wealth of life: being happy! We look at our children and we want to put them in the richest school, take them to Disneyland, give them designer clothes, attend high-end clubs, teach them English, even if they don’t speak their own language. English is a “must” for the whole world! We want to take a vacation traveling abroad, even though we know very little about our own country! We want to buy Japanese electronics, even though our industry may evolve and compete with them, as China and Korea did! This is the so-called “mutt complex”! Yes, we are mutts, but they are the best dogs in the world, much friendlier than Hotweilers, Dobermans and PitBulls! We are ashamed of our mestizo race, with more than 300 very rich ethnicities, with their cultures, their folklores, their beliefs, their languages… and yet we accept that landowners and politicians discriminate against blacks, mulattos, mestizos, indigenous people…

After all, why are we so ignorant and slaves to these pseudo-aristocratic, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-religious minorities? Why do we voluntarily submit to the exploitation and humiliation of these agribusiness feudal lords, stupidly accepting the statement by REDE GLOBO, that “AGRO IS POP, AGRO IS TECH, AGRO IS EVERYTHING”? Is there a more stupid, indecent and false statement? We cannot continue to be deceived by the Bolsonaros of life, by the Renans, Sarneys, Temers, Jucás, while our people go hungry, and we swallow dry, devouring FRIBOI meat (or are they free-boys?).

There is still time to save rivers, forests and their inhabitants, indigenous peoples, quilombolas, our mestizos and the Brazilian nation. But, for that, “you need to have strength, you need to have race, you need to always have greed”, as Ivan Lins used to say! We need the self-affirmation of our nationality and our character! We need to learn to choose the Right, the Just, the Ethical, the Worthy, the Path of Good and Equality. As long as we admit that the powerful are better, that corrupt politicians are inevitable, that the option for agribusiness and the stigma of “the breadbasket of the world” is the destiny of the Nation, there will be no possibility of changing our destiny, and our descendants will be condemned to live in misery, subjugated by the scum of this country! We do not need to produce 10 billion chickens for the world, nor keep an ox for every hectare of our land, while millions of human beings do not have a decent home, nor access to education for their children, not even basic sanitation, let alone healthy food on your table! Why feed the world if we don’t even feed our children?

There are alternatives far beyond agribusiness. Ernst Grötsch demonstrated this when he arrived in Brazil and bought 600 hectares of scorched earth and transformed it into a productive forest rich in biodiversity, in less than ten years! Permaculture demonstrated this, building mud houses and composting their own feces to transform family farming into something simple and cheap! Indigenous peoples demonstrated this by living for over ten thousand years without interference from invading whites, before being massacred by the colonists! The black slaves of Africa demonstrated this by surviving their tormentors, despite all the cruelty to which they were subjected, preserving their race, their culture, their language, their songs, their fantastic religions and their millenary traditions…

2017 Agricultural Census³⁰

The 2017 Agro Census has so far identified 5,072,152 agricultural establishments in Brazil, covering a total area of ​​350,253,329 hectares. In relation to the 2006 Agricultural Census, this area grew by 5% (16.5 million hectares, equivalent to the area of ​​the state of Acre) despite a 2% reduction (103,484 units) in the number of establishments. However, when producers without an area are excluded, there is an increase of 74,864 establishments. It should also be noted that methodological differences contributed to the drop in the total number of producers without an area from 255,019 in 2006 to 76,671 in 2017.

Among establishments with 1,000 hectares or more, there was an increase both in number (3,287 more) and in area (16.3 million more hectares). Its share in the total area went from 45% to 47.5% from 2006 to 2017. As for establishments between 100 and 1000 ha, their share in the total area dropped from 33.8% to 32% (814,574 ha less) and had a decrease of 4,152 units.

As for the legal status of the land, the proportion of establishments on own land increased from 76.2% to 82%, but the share of these establishments in the total area decreased from 90.5% to 85.4%. The proportion of establishments with leased land fell from 6.5% in 2006 to 6.3% in 2017, although the participation of the modality in the total area has grown from 4.5% to 8.6%.

In 2017, there were 15,036,978 people employed in agricultural establishments. In 11 years, this represents a drop of 1.5 million people, including producers, their relatives, temporary and permanent workers. The average number of people employed per establishment also dropped from 3.2 people in 2006 to 3 people in 2017. In the opposite direction, the number of tractors grew 49.7% in the period and reached 1.22 million units. In 2017, around 734 thousand establishments used tractors.

It is also worth noting that 1,681,001 producers used pesticides in 2017, an increase of 20.4% compared to 2006. The use of irrigation also expanded, with an increase of 52% both in establishments (502,425) and in area (6,903,048 hectares). In addition, Internet access in agricultural establishments grew by 1,790.1%, from 75,000 in 2006 to 1,425,323 producers who declared having access in 2017.

About 15.5% of producers said they had never attended school and 79.1% did not go beyond elementary school. The participation of women and elderly people aged 65 and over in the management of establishments increased, reaching, respectively, 18.6% and 21.41%. In 2006, women represented 12.7% of producers and the elderly, 17.52%. In addition, for the first time, the Agro Census investigated the color or race of the producers: 52% of them were black or brown and 45% were white, a distribution similar to the population of the country, according to the PNAD Contínua 2017.

As can be seen in these numbers, in the last 11 years nothing has changed in the profile of the rural man, whose predominance reflects the absence of public policies aimed at the small farmer who supplies the Brazilian table, while agribusiness produces for export. The small farmer, the one who employs the whole family in the work in the field, remains semi-illiterate and with restricted access to sources of resources, while the monoculture and cattle large estates obtain subsidized credit, long terms for amortization and, when they do not honor their commitments, receive the benefit of debt refinancing programs with forgiveness of fines and new credits.

Something is very wrong with this model of development, which penalizes rural people and encourages large estates. While small farmers are a contingent of 4,500,000 families, agribusiness enriches around 100,000 entrepreneurs, heavily supplied with resources for the mechanization of their enterprises, increasingly reducing the labor employed in favor of exorbitant profits and privileged access to export channels for their products.

If the rural man makes farming his way of life, the agribusiness entrepreneur manages his latifundia aiming only at his profit and enrichment. As if this strategic inconsistency on the part of governments were not enough, agribusiness is most responsible for the environmental devastation in the Legal Amazon and the Brazilian Cerrado. Their farms are made up of monocultures, while the traditional farmer has diversified crops and creations, which do not affect so deeply the balance of the ecosystems in which he has been inserted since time immemorial.

What agribusinesses call agroforests are nothing more than extensive cattle breeding “intercropped” with eucalyptus plantations and other exotic species, which quickly deplete arable soils, contributing to environmental degradation. In early 20th century plantations there were large native forest areas, which protected springs, paths and water courses. But in today’s large estates there is no place for Nature, as every centimeter of soil has to justify its productive function, even at the expense of the accelerated impoverishment of the soil, which is “recovered” through intense loads of pesticides.

While the farmer used to rotate crops and raise animals, as do indigenous peoples, agribusiness simply abandons the areas devastated by him, and buys new properties with native vegetation to be, in turn, degraded. The farmer had love for his piece of land, but the landowner sees only a piece of land that will enrich his enterprise. This catastrophic vision cannot succeed, as the planet’s resources are limited. If this predatory process continues, the Earth will soon be just a lifeless desert…

Wasteland in the Amazon: logging and clay ovens to make charcoal: portrait of Brazil

Areas occupied by agribusiness and their percentage in relation to the national territory

CAR data – Rural Environmental Registry (March 2018)
Federation unity	CAR Area (hectares)	% Brazil	% accumulated
Mato Grosso	73.750.957,44	18,15%	18,15%
Pará	56.575.309,51	13,92%	32,07%
Amazonas	45.480.152,01	11,19%	43,26%
Minas Gerais	36.951.398,09	9,09%	52,36%
Goiás	23.527.194,84	5,79%	58,15%
São Paulo	22.745.139,73	5,60%	63,74%
Maranhão	20.028.321,14	4,93%	68,67%
Rio Grande do Sul	17.230.690,36	4,24%	72,91%
Paraná	14.743.786,47	3,63%	76,54%
Acre	14.036.200,42	3,45%	79,99%
Rondônia	13.789.132,00	3,39%	83,39%
Tocantins	13.390.452,83	3,30%	86,68%
Bahia	12.282.265,17	3,02%	89,71%
Piauí	8.565.143,33	2,11%	91,81%
Santa Catarina	6.572.347,16	1,62%	93,43%
Ceará	3.946.039,74	0,97%	94,40%
Pernambuco	3.872.177,75	0,95%	95,35%
Roraima	3.717.985,68	0,91%	96,27%
Amapá	3.608.080,45	0,89%	97,16%
Rio de Janeiro	3.111.284,13	0,77%	97,92%
Rio Grande do Norte	2.310.692,76	0,57%	98,49%
Paraíba	1.969.874,15	0,48%	98,98%
M:ato Grosso do Sul	1.617.151,69	0,40%	99,37%
Sergipe	1.019.115,93	0,25%	99,63%
Alagoas	914.811,18	0,23%	99,85%
Distrito Federal	607.425,72	0,15%	100,00%
TOTAL Brazil	406.363.129,69	47,79%	850.280.588
CAR data May/2018 (*)	448.319.254	52,73%
Indigenous Lands	116.900.565,36	13,75%
Conservation units	75.016.301,91	8,82%
(*) http://www.florestal.gov.br/numeros-do-car – 5.1 million rural properties

1The Clean Record Law, in force since 2010, determines the ineligibility, for a period of eight years, of politicians impeached and/or convicted in criminal proceedings at second instance (collegiate)

2Drinking water represents less than 4% of all water on the earth’s surface, distributed between glaciers, underground aquifers and surface waters. More than 95% of the planet’s water is salty and found in the oceans.

3Edge effect is a change in the structure, composition and/or relative abundance of species in the marginal part of a forest fragment. Such an effect would be more intense in small and isolated fragments.

4Land grabbing is the process of falsifying documents to illegally take possession of vacant or third-party land. The term cricket was used because such documents were kept in drawers, together with which crickets (insects) were placed. Cricket droppings give documents an aging appearance.

5Gunmen bandits: they are professional assassins, financed by agribusiness and logging companies to drive squatters, indigenous people and settlers away from their lands.

6RENCA – “Reserva Nacional de Cobre e Associados” is an extensive mineral reserve located in the northeast of the Amazon, between the states of Pará and Amapá, with an area larger than Denmark. It is a Reserve, that is, it should be protected from exploitation, mainly by foreigners. But the National Congress almost managed to release it for exploration by Canadian companies, famous for being in all places where there are mineral reserves, from whatever country they are. The Amazon is rich in several ores that are highly coveted by the electronics industries, such as tantalite and niobium, which are abundant in the nearby region.

7Pindorama: The term comes from the Tupi pindó-rama or pindó-retama, “land/place/region of palm trees”. It is a designation for the mythical place of the Tupi-Guarani peoples, which would be a land free from evils. Archaeologists believe that the myth was formed at the time of the ancient migrations, when the Tupi-Guarani moved to the Brazilian coast, currently in the eastern region of South America. Several Tupi-Guarani groups inhabited the region until the “invasion of Pindorama”, better known as the “discovery of Brazil” (Source: Wikipedia)

8Environment: this expression is relatively recent, as is the current concern to preserve it. Its meaning is diffuse, as it supports different interpretations and scopes. We can say, however, that the “environment” comprises the whole set of natural factors affected by human presence, because, in its absence, such a microcosm simply does not differ. Therefore, “environment” comprises the set of natural resources (physical, chemical and biological) in the surroundings of a geographic area that is intended to be studied.

9Land “dates”, as well as “land floors” or “sesmarias floors”, were synonyms for small lots, usually granted by municipal councils as “urban sesmarias”.

10Laudêmio is a tax on the market value or the transaction value of the property to be paid when there is an onerous transaction with definitive deed of occupation rights, or land tenure, such as land owned by the Navy, the Catholic Church or the imperial family, not being, therefore, in legal terms, a tax, or tribute.

11Golden Law (Lei Áurea): Princess Isabel signed the law that ended slavery on May 13, 1888. “Aurea“, which means “golden”, refers to the glorious character of the law that put an end to this inhuman form of exploitation. from work.

12The “Entradas e Bandeiras” were territorial exploration expeditions that took place in Colonial Brazil between the 17th and 18th centuries. The “Entries” were official expeditions (organized by the government) that left the coast towards the interior of Brazil. The “Bandeiras” were expeditions organized and financed by individuals, mainly from São Paulo. They departed from São Paulo and São Vicente mainly, heading for the central-west and south regions of Brazil.

13João Fernandes Campos Café Filho was a Brazilian lawyer and politician, being president of Brazil between August 24, 1954 and November 8, 1955.

14Carlos Coimbra da Luz was a Brazilian lawyer, professor, journalist and politician, President of the Republic from November 8 to 11, 1955.

15Nereu de Oliveira Ramos was a Brazilian lawyer and politician. He was vice president of Brazil, elected by the National Congress, from 1946 to 1951. On November 11, 1955, when then president Carlos Luz was deposed, Nereu Ramos assumed the presidency of the Republic since, in the absence of the vice president, the role fell to the vice president of the Senate. When the definitive removal of Café Filho, of whom Carlos Luz was vice-president, was declared, the Chamber of Deputies voted in favor of Nereu Ramos as president until Juscelino Kubitschek took office.

16Goal Plan: “Fifty years of progress in five years of achievements”.

17First lady Sarah Kubitschek, who died at age 87, was buried on February 5, 1996, at 5 pm, at Campo da Esperança cemetery, in Brasília. She left two daughters, Márcia and Maristela.

18Jânio da Silva Quadros nasceu em Campo Grande, capital do Mato Grosso do Sul, no dia 25 de janeiro de 1917. Foi advogado, professor e político brasileiro. Foi o vigésimo segundo presidente do Brasil, entre 31 de janeiro de 1961 e 25 de agosto de 1961, data em que renunciou. Faleceu em São Paulo, em 16 de fevereiro de 1992, com 75 anos.

19Castelo Branco, Costa e Silva, Garrastazu Médici, Ernesto Geisel and João Batista Figueiredo, not counting the Military Junta of 1969. It was composed of the three military ministers: General Aurélio de Lira Tavares, Minister of the Army; Admiral Augusto Rademaker, Minister of the Navy; and Brigadier Márcio Melo, Minister of Aeronautics.

20Sir Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte was a French philosopher, founder of Sociology and Positivism, who worked intensively in the creation of a positive philosophy. (Source: Wikipedia)

21Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 Meßkirch – May 26, 1976) was a German philosopher, writer, university professor and rector. He is seen as the link between Kierkegaard’s existentialism and Husserl’s phenomenology. His main concern was to elaborate an analysis of existence, that is, to clarify the true meaning of being. Heidegger joined the Nazi party (NSDAP) on May 1, 1933 (the year Adolf Hitler came to power), and was later appointed rector of the University of Freiburg, delivering the speech The Self-Affirmation of the German University. However, shortly afterwards he resigned from the position of rector, being pressured by other professors at the university, who were trying to boycott the Nazi Party to which Heidegger lent his credibility. (Source: Wikipedia)

22Projeto Jari (Jari Florestal e Agropecuária) is the name of a factory built on the banks of the Jari River, for the production of cellulose and other products, which began in 1967. The project was conceived by the North American billionaire Daniel Keith Ludwig and his partner Joaquim Nunes Almeida. He ordered the construction of a pulp mill in Japan, in the city of Kobe, using Finnish technology from the city of Tampere, with two floating platforms, one for pulp production and the other for energy production. The power unit produced 55 megawatts and was powered by petroleum-based BPF oil with an option to consume wood chips.

23http://www.florestal.gov.br/numeros-do-car – Cadastro Ambiental Rural

24“Almost 65% of the territory of MT is conserved”, says a study by Embrapa – https://www.embrapa.br/busca-de-noticias/-/noticia/25604479/quase-65-do-territorio-de-mt -and-conserved-says-embrapa-study – “Study by Embrapa Monitoring by Satellite shows that 64.77% of the territory of Mato Grosso is constituted by protected areas (conservation units and indigenous lands) and preserved. The remaining area is occupied by natural pastures (3.03%), planted pastures (21.52%), agriculture (10.39%) and urban areas (0.30%)”. The mapping was presented by the researcher and general head of the Unit, Evaristo de Miranda, during the Aprosoja – Sustainability event, organized by the Soy and Corn Producers Association of the State of Mato Grosso.

25It should be noted that the registered area is greater than the registerable area, evidencing the presence of rural properties within indigenous lands, conservation units, legal reserves and permanent preservation areas, in addition to the occupation of vacant Union lands. The irrational occupation of Brazilian territory is being evidenced by property records in the Rural Environmental Registry. This is even more evident when looking at the figures for the North region: of the 93.7 million hectares that can be registered, 137.6 million hectares are already registered, which would only be justified by the overlapping of properties in the Rural Environmental Registry system.

26Isolated Indians are populations that have no contact with the surrounding society and, thanks to this, they preserve their traditional way of life, living only from hunting, fishing and gathering nuts, roots, fruits, herbs and tubers. There are dozens of small groups throughout the Legal Amazon, under serious risk of extinction.

27Fonte: Agência Brasil http://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/economia/noticia/2017-12/producao-de-carne-de-frango-e-de-porco-aumenta-em-2017-diz-abpa

28In January 2018, President Temer sanctioned Law No. 13,606, creating a REFIS to pay in installments estimated debts of R$17 billion with Funrural, and the adhesion period was extended by Provisional Measure No. 828, until May 30, 2018. Source: Valor Econômico newspaper (https://www.valor.com.br/brasil/5533863/auditores-da-receita-vao-justica-federal-contra-refis-do-agronegocio). According to the Association of Tax Auditors, the program involves an estimated revenue waiver of R$15.22 billion between 2018 and 2020.

29Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil, class entity composed of large landowners in the country. The CNA System is composed of three entities: the Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil (CNA), which represents small, medium and large Brazilian rural producers, the National Rural Apprenticeship Service (SENAR) which acts as an instrument for Rural Professional Training and Social Promotion and quality of life for rural men and women, and the CNA Institute, which develops studies and research in the social area and agribusiness. Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil (CNA) is responsible for bringing together political and rural associations and leaders across the country. President: João Martins da Silva Junior – Graduated in Business Administration, João Martins da Silva Junior has a professional trajectory linked to livestock activity for over 50 years. This story began in the generation before him, when João Martins, his father, a rancher, slaughtered oxen to supply Salvador in the 1930s. In the 1965s, he established himself as a rancher and milk producer at Fazenda Grande Vista. , in Feira de Santana, in the interior of Bahia, owned by Agropecuária João Martins S/A, of which he was director. Source: institutional website of the entity – (https://www.cnabrasil.org.br/sobre-cna/apresentacao)

30IBGE: Censo Agropecuário 2017: https://censos.ibge.gov.br/agro/2017/