The centrality of agriculture to world capital cannot be underestimated. In the decade leading up to 2025, the value of the world’s agricultural exports rose by 34 percent to nearly $2.3 trillion, outstripping metal and mineral commodities and coming second only to fossil fuels. This massive material engine of production is only the tangible side of agribusiness, which increasingly commands enormous circuits of speculative financial capital. The burgeoning green economy has given further consequence to the importance of large-scale farming. With agrifood systems accounting for a third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, agri-capital has an outsized impact on the trajectory of the world’s climate transition.
Unsurprising, then, that in commodity-dependent countries — by the UN’s reckoning, some 80 percent of developing economies — agri-capital enjoys considerable fiscal and political power. Brazil is one such country. Agricultural products account for 43 percent of Brazil’s exports, with soybeans, beef, and coffee heading up a $169 billion commodity juggernaut. This wealth is also intensely concentrated. Just 10 percent of landowners control 73 percent of Brazil’s rural area, with the smallest 50 percent of farms clustered onto just 2 percent of territory. This unequal command of the country’s productive resources undergirds the landowning classes’ enduring command of the state.
Accordingly, Brazilian agribusiness wields the largest and most powerful lobby in a political landscape dominated by entrenched special-interest groups. The Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária (FPA), which touts 342 members across both houses of Brazil’s Congress, is only the spearhead of a nationwide complex that represents the interests of landowners and agricultural corporations irrespective of which party holds office. This is the so-called bancada ruralista — the “ruralist” caucus.
This May, the lobby moved with astounding speed to advance a set of bills that take a chainsaw to Brazil’s environmental and social protections. Here was a concerted assault on the foundations of left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s tenuous environmental victories, a legislative shock-and-awe campaign. Bills were fast-tracked to the floor without review by committees. Laws were struck down only to be resurrected and put to vote hours later. The bills, the timing, the spectators present — all were carefully planned for maximum effect.
What journalists are calling the “Week of Agro” is not a fait accompli. Bills must pass the Senate before becoming law, and there remains the chance of Lula exercising his presidential veto. Regardless of the eventual outcome, the stakes have never been clearer. What is nature for, and who can enjoy its fruits?
The Bills
The sheer scale of the agri-lobby’s legal blitzkrieg can be glimpsed in the laws on offer. These include proposals to slash half a million hectares from the Jamanxim ecological reserve in the Amazon; grant the Ministry of Agriculture control over which animals make the endangered species list; strip protections from 40 percent of forested areas in the state of Pará and from non-forested areas of native vegetation across the country; restrict the government’s ability to monitor criminal risks in rural financing; and, most significantly, to neuter Brazil’s environmental monitoring agency, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), by hampering its ability to combat illegal deforestation using satellite imagery.
Throw in, for good measure, the Supreme Court greenlighting a railway to be carved into indigenous territory and the lobby’s ongoing attempts to use social funds and oil rents to restructure farmers’ debts, and you begin to see the scope of this storm of agricultural reaction.
Yet remarkably little has been created with this flurry of bills. Revenge is its rallying cry: to undo what the sector perceives as infringements on its freedoms of unfettered production and expansion.
Take the decision, which passed Brazil’s lower house of representatives on May 21, to grant the Ministry of Agriculture near-total control over the list of endangered and invasive species — a power usurped from the Ministry of Environment. Here was punishment for the latter ministry’s decision to classify tilapia, a common farmed fish, as an invasive species — a move the ministry was keen to emphasize did not yet restrict its cultivation. The prospect of looming state crackdowns on tilapia threw meat producers into a moral panic. “It’s absurd. It’s vexing,” shrieked the president of the FPA. Under lobby pressure, the Ministry of Environment duly suspended its entire list of protected species in December: all 444 of them. Last month’s bill was brought to Congress to ensure this sort of scare never happens again.
Revenge also fueled what threatens to be the most consequential law passed this May: an assassination of Brazil’s environmental watchdog IBAMA. This agency has been the primary instrument of the third Lula government’s considerable success in combating the deforestation of the Amazon since 2022. Under this invigorated IBAMA, deforestation fell 50 percent over the past three years, with “mega-operations” against criminal loggers generating unprecedented fines and seizures of illegal timber.
These victories rest on two pillars now directly under threat. First is IBAMA’s use of satellite imagery to remotely monitor deforestation without the need for inspectors to physically visit isolated, frequently hostile rural areas. The second is IBAMA’s ability to instate precautionary embargoes on properties being investigated for environmental crimes, blocking their access to markets and credit — a measure considered crucial in combating a fast and furtive criminal sector. Both these powers, insists the agri-lobby, put farmers at unfair risk of punitive action. Horror stories of hapless growers cutting down their persimmon trees only to be pegged as illegal deforesters via satellite have helped the lobby paint itself as the champion of humble farmers harassed by distant, faceless technocrats.
In reality, there are less charitable motives in play. With this law, the agri-lobby aims at nothing less than dynamiting a cornerstone of environmental protection in Brazil. Restricting IBAMA to physical inspections is akin, as one official put it, to monitoring traffic violations with cops hiding in bushes. As for the proposal to warn property owners before IBAMA instates precautionary blocks on their potentially illegal timber or soy reaching the market, there’s a reason criminals are generally not politely notified to expect impending legal attention.
Should it pass, this law stands to block some 70 percent of IBAMA’s monitoring activities. The destruction of the Amazon, already well underway, would be as good as legalized. Brazil teeters, lamented environmental minister João Paulo Capobianco, on the cusp of an “unimaginable regression.” Last week, he warned, may have an “impact on environmental governance in Brazil in proportions we have never seen.”
Farming Crises
Who lies behind this spate of laws? And what is their driving motivation?
Brazil’s agribusiness sector is not a monolith, and the various cleavages in its ranks are key to understanding the grievances that fuel its politics. There are significant gaps between the interests and imperatives open to multinational corporations like Bunge and Amaggi and those of the small and medium farmers that populate Brazil’s agricultural heartlands. Situated obliquely to these groups are the oligarchic clans whose quasi-feudal dominance of Brazil’s north and northeast belies close ties with financialized agri-capital. And beneath all of these are the land-grabbers, wildcat miners, and other extractive criminals who have glommed onto the rural lobby to advance their mutual interest in gutting environmental protections and widening the Amazon’s extractive frontier.
The bancada ruralista’s constituents can thus be situated along several axes based on the size of their land holdings, their degree of integration with world markets, and the legality of their enterprises. What unites this often disparate crowd “from merely a set of sectoral interests into an increasingly assertive movement vying for hegemony on the national stage,” as Fernando Rugitsky puts it, is shared grievance with Lula’s Workers Party’s (PT) model of environmental governance and the Bolsonaro family’s skill in leveraging this grievance to contest power at the highest level.
This “Agri-Bolsonarism” is the mainspring of last month’s legal offensive. Though it is championed by the oligarchs and large landowners who stock the FPA’s ranks in Congress, the movement’s driving force nonetheless lies with small and medium farmers. Their grievances are not wholly unconvincing: wedged uncomfortably between Lulismo‘s twin champions — commodity behemoths and the laboring poor — low-end landowners are struggling to stay afloat. Here was fertile territory for Jair Bolsonaro’s reactionary populism, which folded its celebration of the freestanding entrepreneur into the usual roster of conservative themes: more guns, less regulation, general scorn for the lawless poor. Galvanized by Bolsonaro’s victory, disaffected farmers have proven fully capable of advancing their interests even after his ousting.
The years since Lula’s election have only bolstered the agri-sector’s sense of crisis. Some 8.2 percent of farms defaulted on their debts in late 2025, with insolvency rates mounting quarter by quarter for two years running. Under a perfect storm of US tariffs, rising input costs, and a parade of appalling climatic disasters, many farmers will be lucky to break even in after this year’s harvest. This crisis of profitability is the immanent context of the FPA’s legislative offensive.
Brazil’s agricultural sector has long seen environmental protection as a burden: trees safeguarded at the expense of the farmer. In eviscerating ecological protections, the bancada ruralista seeks to remove any impediments to the scope and intensity of agricultural production. The moral satisfaction of defeating the ecological wing of the Brazilian left is merely an added bonus.
The agri-lobby has also advocated for an outright state bailout for its constituents. The bancada ruralista’s favored response to the debt crisis not only involves dramatically increasing state subsidies available to farmers, but sourcing this debt relief from social funds and oil rents that have surged during the Iran war. It’s a stark reminder of the enduring interplay between the destruction of the earth and the destruction of its poor.
All of this forms a perverse rejoinder to COP30, held just eight months ago in Belém, capital of the Amazon state of Pará, under then-Governor Helder Barbalho. In a surreal bit of political theater, a proud Barbalho stood by as Congress voted to decimate his state’s ecosystems and sanction land-grabbing at scale. Brazil may be taking admirable strides to green its energy grid, but this signal failure to safeguard its forests from bulldozer and chainsaw lends an ashen aftertaste to Brazil’s self-declarations as a “climate leader.”
There does exist a growing contingent of the agribusiness sector seeking to ride the curve of the green transition. Multinationals have been rattled by the EU’s decision to ban Brazilian meat imports, and supply chains marred by labor abuse and ecological destruction increasingly seem a fiscal and PR liability. For these “conscientious” landowners, last month’s assault on environmental protections is simply archaic. Those willing to pay lip service to the climate transition need not forsake hefty profits: carbon tokens, green bonds, and biodiversity credits all offer new ways to extract value from the earth at a fraction of the reputational risk. For now, however, these strategies have been taken up only by a small minority. Large-scale mono-cropping for export — the mode of production imposed by the Portuguese — remains the standard for Brazil’s farmers. Sugar has given way to soy, but little else has changed.
An Ocean of Soybeans
Lula is not without cards to play. The agribusiness sector remains hugely dependent on the state. Without its credits and subsidies, its generous interest rates and state-funded infrastructure — all instantiations of the sort of government activism its right-wing figureheads purport to loathe — the sector cannot survive. Yet Lulismo, in turn, depends on the agribusiness and extractive sectors, requiring their rents and foreign exchange to fuel the PT’s brand of redistributive state developmentalism. With October promising a tight election against Flávio Bolsonaro, Lula is hardly poised to directly confront Congress’s strongest lobby.
Indeed, placation — not resistance — has defined Lula’s relationship with agribusiness across his twelve years in office. Lula has put the state purse at their disposal; farmers in turn have begrudgingly tolerated his social policies. This uneasy marriage — broad-based social uplift fueled by the most regressive of economic sectors — is the insuperable contradiction at the heart of Lulismo.
The Workers Party’s response to last month’s legislative “steamroller” has, thus far, been undeniably feeble. Here and there the environmental caucus managed to soften its wording, toss in a loophole, wag a disapproving finger — looking increasingly as if they had brought a knife to a gunfight. Lula could still exercise his veto should any bills pass the Senate, as he did when the so-called Devastation Law hit the books last July. But this too seems an anemic rejoinder: the presidential veto can itself be overturned should an absolute majority of Congress’s two chambers vote to annul it. A Congress dominated by the bancada ruralista frequently has the last word. It took the FPA less than five months to overturn fifty-six of Lula’s sixty-three vetoes against the aforementioned bill.
If there is a way forward, it lies with those groups on the bleeding edge of the struggle against this agrarian counterrevolution: the indigenous, landless, and quilombola movements who have done so much to bring the pillaging of the earth to global attention. The true power of these popular struggles is rooted in their practical demonstration of modes of living and producing that sustain this planet and its living creatures. As Rugitsky emphasizes, here is a path forward beyond the sterile, combative paradigm of “land-sparing” that defines the PT’s approach to environmental governance. Only if these movements are strengthened by a mass base, only if they can navigate the long march through the institutions of the Brazilian state, will future generations inherit an earth worth inhabiting.
The alternative — an ocean of soybeans, a moonscape trampled by cattle — scarcely bears considering.