The Pastoral Land Commission’s (CPT, in Portuguese) annual report on land conflicts in Brazil’s countryside, published on Wednesday (23), revealed a frightening situation: there is a chemical war going on in the country. The targets are Quilombola communities, peasants, land reform settlers and Indigenous peoples. In 2024 alone, more than 17,000 Brazilian families were victims of this kind of crime. The main culprits are agribusiness people interested in expanding their agricultural frontiers.
In all, there were 276 incidents of this type involving 17,027 families on more than 3.3 million hectares. These figures represent a 763% increase in the number of conflicts and a 582% increase in the number of families affected by chemical warfare compared to 2023. That year, 32 conflicts occurred and 2,498 families were poisoned by pesticides.
“Pesticides are chemical weapons agribusiness uses against the peasant population, Indigenous peoples, Quilombola and traditional communities,” says the Permanent Campaign Against Pesticides and For Life, author of the article in the report. “We can say that these chemical weapons and their technological package add to the arsenal of firearms and other mechanisms that have been used for decades to destroy the ways of life of these populations and enable the expropriation of their territories,” she adds.
Of the 276 conflicts analyzed, 198 mention the terms “aerial spraying”, “plane” or “drone”. One of the cases involves seven rural workers who were victims of work analogous to slavery or overexploitation, where pesticides are among the components that characterize the labour violation. Another 44 cases refer to individualized poisoning, in various contexts, which occurs when there is detailed information about the victims, such as gender, age or social identification.
For researcher and post-doctoral fellow in human geography Larissa Bombardi, this practice is a manifestation of chemical colonialism, which perpetuates violence and inequality in the countryside.
“In classical colonialism, native peoples were violently expelled from their lands to make way for monocultures. This was the process by which Latin American countries emerged as such. So this conflict, this annihilation was how the large estate imposed itself on Brazil and other countries. What is happening today is that, in addition to the physical violence, which persists, there is also chemical violence,” says Bombardi, author of the book Pesticides and Chemical Colonialism.
The researcher criticizes the lack of supervision and the slow progress of Brazilian authorities in banning dangerous pesticides in Brazil. “In the European Union, aerial spraying is banned. It’s past time to ban it [in Brazil].” Bombardi criticizes the lack of control over the use and application of pesticides considered highly toxic. “Obviously, our legislation provides for inspections but what we see is that these inspections don’t really happen, nor are there enough inspectors,” she denounces.
Profile of the victims
The state with the highest number of occurrences is Maranhão, responsible for 82% of the cases recorded. According to the campaign against pesticides, this rise also reflects the increase in inspections and the encouragement of complaints. “Of the 228 conflicts identified in Maranhão state, 68% occurred in the Eastern Maranhão mesoregion, the second largest soy producing region in the state, which has seen a 124% increase in the cultivated area since 2000,” says the text.
But the largest number of families affected is in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, with a total of 7,538, in 17 conflicts of this nature, mainly involving Indigenous communities.
For Bombardi, these situations cannot be dissociated from the predominant agricultural model in Brazil. “We’re talking about an agricultural model that doesn’t serve the interests of the Brazilian population. In fact, we’ve seen the number of jobs in the countryside decrease very significantly over the last ten years, land ownership has become more concentrated, deforestation has increased, and food production for everyday consumption has decreased,” she says.
Children are not safe
According to the article published by the campaign in CPT’s annual report, not even children are safe from the chemical warfare the agribusiness is waging. The text reports cases of pesticide spraying near schools.
“On May 3, 2013, a plane flew over the São José do Pontal school, in the Pontal dos Buritis settlement, in the town of Rio Verde, Goiás. For 20 minutes, the plane poured Syngenta’s Engeo Pleno pesticide over the children who were playing. Of the almost 100 students there, 42 were taken to hospitals in the region, 29 of whom were hospitalized. Many of them had permanent consequences, and the then principal of the school and one of the students poisoned were diagnosed with cancer,” the text says.
“Contamination affects not only territories, water and springs, but also communities, homes and schools, sickening and murdering those who fight agribusiness and its destructive practices,” says another excerpt. The document also highlights impunity for crimes. According to the campaign, a “detailed analysis of 30 emblematic cases involving agrochemicals found that only in 11 cases was there any accountability measure.”
“The pattern of impunity is perpetuated by the justice system itself, which ensures, both through lack of access to justice and through impunity, the conditions for violence to persist in the countryside and the conditions for perpetuating the current agrarian structure,” the article says.
Reports
The article written by the campaign against pesticides mentions reports of chemical substances being dumped on the plantations of small farmers, Quilombola communities and Indigenous peoples. One of these criminal sprayings occurred in Providência Quilombo, located in Salvaterra, in Pará state, where residents reported the illegal dumping of pesticides on a rice plantation in March 2024. Two months later, a farm of a farming family in Tamandaré, Pernambuco state, was invaded by around 30 men who dumped poison on the crop. Finally, the text mentions the Indigenous Guarani Kaiowá, victims of chemical attacks in the region of Caarapó, Mato Grosso do Sul state.
In addition to the risk to health, many small farmers have been prevented from selling their products at organic food fairs because of contamination. In the Mucuri Valley, northeast of Minas Gerais state, families have documented the illegal application of pesticides on the crops of small farmers in the region and even in protected areas. Farmers also denounce the sale of pesticides by unauthorized companies.
The report spoke to a rural worker from the Jampruca region, Minas Gerais state, in the Mucuri Valley, who reported threats for denouncing cases of deliberate pesticide contamination, and for this reason preferred to remain anonymous. She is part of a group of seed collectors who are reforesting previously degraded areas within land reform settlements.
“We have our legal reserve fenced off, waiting to be replanted, to be enriched with native species. Many families have also fenced off the hilltops, the APP areas [Permanent Preservation Areas]. So we’re working hard to reforest this land that we have totally degraded. Today, we already have several birds and several animals that have returned to the region. There was nothing here before, just grass and cattle,” says the farmer.
According to her, pesticide spraying in the region has affected trees considered “matrices” for seed collecting. She recalls that some of them no longer exist. “The concern is that this aerial spraying could reach here because we can’t even get other seeds of these species that we are replanting because the matrices where we collected them no longer exist here in the region,” she explains.
BdF had access to videos of drones carrying out illegal spraying and reports from farmers and collectors in the region. In one of them, a farmer who also prefers not to be identified calls for the affected communities to act.
“The farmers don’t even live in the region: they come, spray poison and leave. We need to get together and go to the City Hall because this is absurd,” the audio says.
“Look at the blackberry trees… Everything is dying,” another farmer says in one of the videos. “The guy used a drone to shoot at 400 meters. It was yesterday, and everything is already like this. Even the bushes are dying. What are we going to do?” the worker continued.
Josean Vieira, known as Jota, is the representative of organic farmers from the northeast of Minas Gerais on the Minas Gerais State Commission for Organic Production (CPOrg, in Portuguese). He has been organizing various reports of illegal activities involving the spraying of chemicals there. He says that the situation had discouraged small farmers from producing organically.
“It’s a loss not only financially, but also for the farmers who give up, get discouraged, and say they’re not going to produce any more,” said Vieira.
According to him, there is an effort to create a reporting procedure to ensure that these crimes don’t go unpunished. “We want to create a procedure for reporting, analyzing and gathering evidence, because if they were able to prove that they had been contaminated, they could even substantiate the complaint and ask for compensation from the person who caused the problem for them,” says Jota.
Although the situation affects dozens of small farmers, Jota guarantees that there is strict control over the food that is currently sold at the region’s organic fairs, which is proven to be free of contaminants.
How did we get here?
The campaign highlights measures by the Brazilian government such as the 1996 Kandir Law (Lcp87), which exempts from tax primary products for export, and Agreement 100/97, which provides for a 60% reduction in the rate of the Tax on the Circulation of Goods and Services (ICMS, in Portuguese) for pesticides responsible for promoting the current agro-export model of food production. “At that historic moment, Brazil sealed its choice as a state that prioritizes trade balance surplus at any cost,” the text highlights.
The use of pesticides as chemical weapons in land conflicts caused the loss of land used for food production, which gave way to export-oriented products, the so-called commodities. “Between 2000 and 2023, the area with soy grew by 225%, corn by 78% and cotton by 111%,” says the document. “By investing in the export of primary products, they [agribusiness] achieve gains in the trade balance, but lose out on the generation of added value, on the one hand. However, they sacrifice their populations and the goods of nature, with the consequences of the massive production of agricultural commodities,” says another section of the report.
The text also mentions the new Pesticide Law (Law 14.785) as an aggravating factor in this whole situation. “Although the new law is not as radical as the 2015 proposal, the main structure of Law 7.802/89 has been broken: the Ministry of Agriculture has now greater power than the health and environmental bodies, and the prohibitive criteria have been replaced by generic conditions, such as ‘unacceptable risk to humans or the environment’.”
The campaign against pesticides also highlights the strong resistance of Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture to adhering to the National Program for the Reduction of Pesticides (Pronara, in Portuguese). It was created in 2012, but has not been updated by the current government “and is awaiting to be launched amid clashes, once again, with the agribusiness sectors that are part of the country’s government”.
Chemical colonialism
According to the text of the campaign against pesticides, seven of the top 10 best-selling pesticides in Brazil are banned in the European Union (EU). While European and North American countries impose restrictions or even ban certain agrochemicals, the companies that produce these chemicals remain based in those same countries, dumping everything the North doesn’t want on the Global South. This contradiction is what some researchers call “chemical colonialism”.
“Global North countries home to transnational agrochemical companies manage to have more protective legislation for their citizens, while at the same time, these companies lobby in peripheral countries to relax legislation and manage to profit for longer from substances banned in their countries. This makes it possible for double standards to exist, which allow highly toxic substances that have already been banned in the Global North to be marketed in the Global South, continuing the flow of capital from colonial plunder through wealth extraction and accumulation,” it reads.
The document cites the example of Paraquat, an herbicide manufactured by Syngenta, which was banned in the EU in 2007 and only had its ban approved in Brazil in 2020. “What’s more, between 2017, when the ban in Brazil was announced, and 2020, when it took effect, sales exploded: in 2018, there was a 12% increase on the previous year, and in 2019 sales grew by 24%. In other words, after the European Union banned Paraquat because it was too dangerous for its citizens, Syngenta managed to profit from this same pesticide in Brazil for another 13 years.”
For Bombardi, this is another perverse aspect of chemical colonialism. She explains that the same laws that prohibit the use of certain substances in northern countries do not mention any kind of ban on their manufacture by the domestic industry, let alone their sale outside national territory. “The global regulation of toxic substances is itself colonialist,” she points out. “The European Union is protected to continue an absolutely unequal and colonialist relationship with Global South countries,” says the researcher. However, she ponders that “They [the Europeans] are not in a bubble. A large part of the food we consume in Europe is imported,” she says.
In the same vein, Bombardi points out that the other side of colonialism is coloniality, which is built on a history of plunder of resources and wealth concentration.
“Coloniality is this characteristic of ours built on large estates, this historical-social, geographical formation of ours, which was built on large estates, on a power that has not been diluted to this day. Who is the majority controlling the Senate in Brazil? It’s precisely the representatives of big landowners. Who has majority control of the Chamber of Deputies? It’s them too. So it’s a perpetuation of this logic, which is a colonial logic,” the researcher points out.
