Brazil: Agroecology as a Climate Solution Based on Territory

In the year of COP30 in the Amazon, we bring reflections on socio-environmental and climate issues relevant to the territories in the biome, such as the expansion of agricultural commodities, violence in the countryside, and the chemical warfare generated by the intensification of pesticide use. We also discuss false climate solutions based on the financialization of nature. On the other hand, agroecology is the people’s announcement as a practice of territories and as a real climate solution, representing a strategy of resistance against agribusiness.

We present these reflections from our places of action: Pará and Maranhão. Both states are well known for their contradictions. While these states have large areas of tropical forest, they lead in rural conflicts according to the Pastoral Land Commission. They are also part of the Deforestation Arc1, which represents the expansion areas of agribusiness and mining, with the advancement of infrastructure like ports, roads, and railways. At the same time, their governors collaborate with companies on carbon market projects and policies, as supposed sustainable development initiatives.

With soy comes a harmful technological and chemical package

In 2023, according to IBGE data, Pará had over 1 million hectares of soybean crops, three times larger than cassava cultivation. In the same year, Maranhão reached almost 1.2 million hectares of soybeans, vastly exceeding the 50,000 hectares of cassava grown in the state.

There is no soybean planting in forests.

These figures show not only the deforestation vector (soy production) but also indicate that cassava cultivation has lost ground, thereby reducing opportunities for food and nutritional security. Soy cultivation, in opposition to the narrative of green marketing strategies, necessarily demands deforestation, even if pastures in flat areas are converted into soy fields. As Ivete Bastos, a farmer and union leader from Santarém/PA, teaches and denounces, "There is no soybean planting in forests."

With soy comes a harmful technological and chemical package. According to a study by Fetaema, Rama, and the Geography Extension, Research, and Teaching Laboratory (Lepeng/UFMA), 231 locations in 35 municipalities were affected by aerial pesticide spraying by planes and/or drones in 2024. Meanwhile, cereal, legume, and oil-seed production in Maranhão reached 5.99 million tons in 2022, a 4.7 percent increase from 2021, according to IBGE's LSPA (Systematic Production Survey).

The data reveals that the highest intensity of pesticide contamination cases occurs in areas where agribusiness is expanding in Maranhão, especially with soy and eucalyptus. The analysed communities report violent land and socio-environmental conflicts, in which drones and/or planes are used as "weapons of war" to expel communities from their traditionally occupied land.

The process of expanding pesticide use in Brazil, particularly in Pará and Maranhão, has been stimulated by a broad process of environmental deregulation, which includes Law No. 14,785 of 2023, known as the "Poison Package." This legislative measure serves the interests of transnational corporations dominating the global pesticide market.

Brazil is already the world's largest consumer of pesticides, and just ten companies account for 90 percent of the national market.

Agroecology has no reliance on chemicals controlled by large corporations

Soy, like bauxite and iron ore, is a commodity requiring highly damaging logistics infrastructure, such as roads, railways, and ports. These have varied socio-environmental impacts, from the suppression of native vegetation to forced removals, river contamination, and increased greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Agroecology, in contrast, represents a strategy for valuing short commercialization circuits, which reduce costs, improve income, and generate fewer gas emissions. It is based on traditional practices of production diversification with less soil degradation, and no reliance on chemicals controlled by large corporations that cause negative socio-environmental impacts.

Agroecology is the path to liberation, both of the land and the people.

Agroecology is the path to liberation, both of the land and the people. On one hand, the different slavery strategies conducted by the seed, bio-input, and fertilizer companies aims to make them dependent on the production model. These same companies have proposed what we call false solutions to climate change. Meanwhile, agroecology, which does not appropriate the land but is part of it, champions freedom, autonomy and respect of farmers to the land, forests, the cultural protection of traditional seed cultures (the passion, the ancestral), and places to the hearth of the climate debate the right to re-existence.

The concept of freedom of the land liberation through on agroecology includes, in turn, the freedom of the forests in opposition to the forms of privatization, commodification and finannalization of nature that reduce the forest to a credit. The agroecological perspective does not dissociate the production of healthy food from the struggle for food freedom, guaranteed access to water, land, forests and seed., Nor does it dissociate from the valorization of ancestral knowledge, with the land being the ‘mother that sustains us. In a relationship of respect and affection, as farmer Xuxuca, accompanied by the Tijupá Agroecological Association, says: ‘We feel very good working with the land, we only understand those who work on it, we are grateful for every day of work’.

This article was originally published in Spanish by Cátedra Josué de Castro in Nexo Journal on February 10, 2025.