Recent news about genocidal crimes against the Yanomami in the Brazilian Amazon provides a sobering reminder of the precarious condition facing frontier territories that are the locus of predatory incursions with impacts on people and nature. While all eyes are on the Amazon, a new IDS Bulletin unpicks forms of material and discursive aggression against people, nature and their territories in the even more severely threatened Brazilian Cerrado, shedding light on a territory that should not be forgotten in debates about environmental and agrifood justice and sustainability.
While the IDS Bulletin paints a gloomy picture, reflecting historical and recent developments in the Cerrado, there are reasons to be hopeful. The newly elected President of Brazil, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, has declared his commitment to protect all biomes and returned globally-respected rainforest campaigner Marina Silva to her previous role as Minister for the Environment. He has also created a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples led by Sônia Guajajara, an Amazonian indigenous leader. These institutional changes and empowerment of indigenous leaders – as well as potential alliances with new leaders such as Célia Xakriabá, an indigenous woman from the Cerrado elected to Brazil’s National Congress in 2022 – give hope and open up new possibilities for the conservation of this ravaged biome.
This collection of articles, written by mostly young scholar-activists in Brazil and the UK, echoes a broader effort to reclaim the Cerrado as sociobiodiverse and assemble more truthful and fairer representations of this territory that recognise socio-culturally diverse ways of life that are interdependent with biodiversity.
Introducing the Cerrado
The Cerrado is the second largest of the six Brazilian natural biomes or ecoregions. It occupies about a quarter of the country’s surface area, spreading over 2 million km2. It has been described as the world’s most biologically rich savannah. It is a major source of water for the entire country and a huge carbon repository. More than 80 ethnic groups live in the Cerrado, making it also a socioculturally diverse territory.
Though it is less well-known to international audiences who often associate Brazil’s biodiversity with the Amazon alone, the Cerrado is famous among agricultural scientists, agribusinesses, commodity exporters and land speculators as one of the world’s largest agricultural frontiers, and the birthplace of Brazil’s ‘modern’ agriculture.
A problematic ‘origin’ story
The story goes back to the 1970s, a time when Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship and undergoing a process of industrialisation that pushed for farming at scale to feed the growing urban proletariat. Regarded by outsiders as empty and barren land, the Cerrado became the place for unleashing Brazil’s own Green Revolution and pursuing the dream of self-sufficiency and, later, feeding the world.
The ‘miracle of the Cerrado’ narrative praises the conversion of this territory to modern agriculture and emphasises the role of science and technology, which is held to have enabled large-scale farmers to achieve high yields and become competitive in global markets.
But the Cerrado ‘miracle’ has come at a great cost. The environmental impacts of land clearance and intensive farming, alongside social unrest and violence in the Cerrado, have deepened inequality in wealth and land distribution. Martyrdom is a better qualifier to describe what has happened to the Cerrado’s sociobiodiversity over the last half century.
Financialization of nature in the Matopiba frontier
Notwithstanding the growth of movements to deal with this appalling social and environmental legacy, the Cerrado frontier expansion story is not over. As soil degradation and depletion of water basins start impacting yields, the agricultural frontier moves on, in a relentless search for high-yielding conditions. Farming expansion is now focusing on a region popularly known as ‘Matopiba’, which covers the Cerrado portions of four Brazilian states. Matopiba’s territorial demarcation in 2015 sought to brand it (and rebrand the Cerrado) as a ‘modern agribusiness’ region, and an ‘agribusiness gold mine’. The region has since recorded the fastest growth in land area under soybean and rising land concentration.
The IDS Bulletin explores the historical evolution of agricultural frontiers in Brazil, its winners and losers. Recently, agribusinesses in partnership with international capital have created transnational agricultural real estate companies and acquired land in Matopiba, where financial speculation is often disconnected from agrifood production. New financial mechanisms shape the agricultural frontier and exert control over territory, driven by transnational capital. This reflects a global trend of financialization of land and agrifood systems.
Grabbing nature in nature’s name
When Matopiba first became a target for new investments in the early 2010s, its attractiveness to land-grabbers was enhanced by weak environmental protections and enforcement in the region. But as these became more stringent, ways of circumventing them started to flourish.
The IDS Bulletin discusses forms of ‘green grabbing’ using environmental legal instruments. For example, the registration of land with the National System of Rural Environmental Cadastre (known as CAR) has unified agricultural productivity with environmental protection goals and paved the way for investors to appropriate land and ecosystem services.
The self-certification facility of the CAR allows farmers in transition zones like Matopiba to reclassify Amazonian land as Cerrado and thereby deforest a larger percentage of their holdings, since the two biomes have different levels of legal restrictions on deforestation.
Environmental reform and deregulation have also facilitated water grabbing for large-scale irrigation by industrial agriculture and favoured a new phase of soybean expansion in Matopiba. The private agro-exporting sector has secured almost unrestricted access to surface and groundwater in a region struggling with water scarcity.
Appropriation and resistance
The articles in the IDS Bulletin detail the discursive and material appropriation of the Cerrado, including the portrayal of this territory as an agribusiness heaven, the use of fire-setting to advance the frontier and the use of environmental regulation to enclose land and grab nature.
Social movements have denounced and resisted these violent incursions. Their resistance struggles have taken multiple forms, including working with researchers to generate evidence about the scale of the violence and challenge the narrative on the modern Cerrado. Some of the contributors to this IDS Bulletin are deeply involved in these efforts on the ground.
So what next for an engaged research agenda?
As this IDS Bulletin argues, a research agenda that contributes to building justice and sustainability in the Cerrado should:
- continue to challenge, locally and globally, the depiction of the region as a modern agribusiness ‘gold mine’;
- mobilise support for local organisations, networks and initiatives that are connected to communities whose livelihoods have been compromised and whose rights are persistently violated;
- further document the sociobiodiversity of the Cerrado and thereby help to assemble a more inclusive representation of the territory;
- explore how inequities in the Cerrado are connected to inequities elsewhere, as suggested, for example, by accounts that farming practices that deplete its biodiversity and marginalise its people are linked to inequities in food access in other parts of the world.
Research that connects the Cerrado to the broader context of global agrifood systems and sustainability agendas can galvanize a wider set of actors and help build alliances between the victims of injustices in Brazil and in other territories – and thereby become part of efforts to enable a just transition to a more sustainable world.
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