When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, he inherited environmental protection agencies in ruins and deforestation at a 15-year high. His predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, did dismantled regulations and exhausted institutions mandate to enforce environmental laws. Lula aimed to reverse this policy and put Brazil on a path to end deforestation by 2030.
Environmental protection agencies were allowed to resume their work. Between January and November of 2023, the government issued 40 percent more violations against illegal deforestation in the Amazon compared to the same period in 2022, when Bolsonaro was still in office. Lula’s government confiscated and destroyed heavy equipment used by illegal loggers and miners, and placed production bans on illegally cleared land. Lula also reestablished the Amazon Fund, an international pool of money used to support conservation efforts in the rainforest. Just this week, at the G20 summit, outgoing US President Joe Biden pledged $50 million to the fund.
Indeed, almost two years into Lula’s administration, the upward trend was in deforestation vice versa. In 2023, deforestation rates have fallen with 62 percent in the Amazon and 12 percent in Brazil overall (although deforestation has increased in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savanna). So far in 2024, deforestation in the Amazon has fallen by another 32 percent.
Throughout this year, Brazilians have also borne witness to the effects of climate change in a new way. In May, unprecedented floods in the south of the country more than 2 million people were affected, hundreds of thousands were displaced and at least 183 were killed. Other regions are now in their second year of extreme drought, which has led to another intense wildfire season. In September, São Paulo and Brasília were shrouded in smoke from fires in the Amazon and the Cerrado.
And yet, despite the government’s actions, environmental protection and indigenous rights continue to be threatened. Lula rules with the most pro-agribusiness Congress in Brazilian history, severely limiting his ability to protect Brazil’s forests and indigenous peoples in the long term.
“I do believe that the Lula administration really cares about climate change,” said Belen Fernandez Milmanda, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Trinity College and author of Agrarian Elites and Democracy in Latin America. “But on the other hand, part of their ruling coalition is also the agribusiness, and so far I feel like the agribusiness is winning.”
Brazilian politics has always been fragmented, with weak parties. The current Chamber of Deputies, Brazil’s equivalent to the House of Representatives, is made up of politicians from 19 different parties. “It makes it really difficult to govern without some sort of coordination device,” Fernandez Milmanda said. Weak party cohesion makes it easier for interest groups to step into the vacuum and act as this coordination device.
Agribusiness has long been one of the most powerful interest groups in Brazilian politics, but its influence has steadily grown over the past decade as the electorate has shifted to the right and the sector has developed more sophisticated strategies to influence politics. In Congress, agribusiness is represented by the bancada ruralistaor agrarian caucus, a well-organized, multiparty coalition of landowners and agribusiness-connected lawmakers that controls a majority in both houses of Congress. Of the 513 representatives in the Chamber of Deputies, 290 are members of the agrarian caucus. In the senate they make up 50 of 81 legislators.
Today, the agrarian caucus is larger than any single party in the Brazilian legislature. “Members of the agrarian caucus agree. They have high discipline and most Brazilian parties do not,” said Fernandez Milmanda. “That gives them tremendous leverage against any president.”
Much of the coordination around the legislative agenda takes place away from Congress, at the headquarters of Instituto Pensar Agropecuária (IPA), a think tank founded in 2011 and largely funded by major agribusiness corporations, including some in the US and the European Union. Among IPAs main supporters are Brazilian beef giant JBS, German pesticide producer BASF, and US-based corporation Cargill, the world’s largest agribusiness. Core members of the agrarian caucus reportedly meet weekly at the IPA headquarters in Brasilia’s embassy row to discuss the week’s legislative agenda.
“IPA is really important because they are the ones who do all the work, all the technical work,” says Milmanda. “They are drafting the bills that they then give to the legislators, and the legislators will introduce them as their own.”
The agrarian caucus achieved several long-awaited victories in the current congress, which was appointed in January 2023 with Lula. Late last year, they revised Brazil’s main law regulating the use of pesticides. The new legislation, which Human Rights Watch called a “serious threat to the environment and the right to health,” removes barriers to previously prohibited substances and reduces the regulatory oversight of health and environmental agencies. Instead, the Ministry of Agriculture, traditionally led by a member of the agrarian caucus, now has the final say in determining which pesticides are cleared for use. Lula tried to veto parts of the bill, but was overruled by Congress. In the Brazilian system, an absolute majority in each chamber is enough to override a presidential veto.
Another recent victory for the agrarian caucus was a major blow to indigenous rights. Agribusiness has long been fighting in the courts for a legal theory called marco temporarily (“time frame,” in English), which claims that indigenous groups can only claim their traditional lands if they occupied them in 1988, the year the current Brazilian constitution was drawn up. Opponents of the theory argue that it ignores the fact that many indigenous groups were driven from their native lands long before that date. This has dire implications for the hundreds of indigenous territories in Brazil currently awaiting demarcation, and may even affect territories already recognized by law.
The theory made its way through the Brazilian legal system for 16 years, until it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court last year. Congress blatantly disregarded the court’s ruling and passed a bill codifying marco temporal into law. Lula tried to veto the bill, but he was again overruled by the agrarian caucus. The bill is currently being discussed in reconciliation hearings overseen by the Supreme Court, which is tasked with figuring out how the new law will work in light of the court’s 2023 ruling. The legal gray area in which many indigenous groups occupying disputed lands now find themselves has contributed to a wave of attacks by land grabbers and farmers in recent months.
These are just two examples of legislation that is part of what environmentalists have come to call the “destruction package,” a group of at least 20 bills and three constitutional amendments currently being proposed in Congress that target indigenous rights and environmental protections.
“The executive must stop this, because otherwise the trend will be towards very serious setbacks,” said Suely Araújo, public policy coordinator at Observatório do Clima, a coalition of climate-focused civil society organizations.
But the government has limited tools at its disposal to block anti-environmental legislation. In the past, the executive branch had greater control over discretionary spending and could use it to its advantage while negotiating with Congress. In the past decade, a major power shift in Brazilian politics. Through a series of legislative maneuvers, Congress managed to capture a significant portion of the federal budget, weakening the hand of the executive branch.
Among projects that have a high probability of passing, according to analysis by Observatório do Clima, are bills that weaken Brazil’s Forest Code, the key legislation that regulates the use and management of forests. “This will make control much more difficult because illegal forms of deforestation will become legal,” Araújo said.
One such bill reduces the amount of land farmers in the Amazon must preserve on their property from 80 to 50 percent. The move could open up nearly 18 million hectares of forest for agricultural development, according to s recent analysis which the deforestation mapping organization MapBiomas did for the Brazilian magazine Piauí. It is an area roughly the size of the states of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts combined.
In a similar vein, another bill in the package removes protections for native grasslands, including large parts of the Cerrado and the Pantanal (the world’s largest tropical wetland). In theory it would affect 48 million hectares of native vegetation. Another bill, already approved in the Chamber of Deputies, overhauls the environmental licensing process and essentially reduces it to a rubber stamp. “It does away with 40 years of environmental licensing in Brazil,” Araújo said. “You might as well not have licensing legislation.”
Part of the reason many of these bills have a chance to pass is the Lula government’s limited leverage. With little support in Congress and less control over the budget, bargaining with the agriculture caucus becomes an essential tool to pass even non-environmental legislation such as economic reforms. During these negotiations, some environmentalists say concerns about Brazil’s forests are falling by the wayside.
“Perhaps there is a lack of leadership from the president himself, with a stronger stance in response to the demands of the rural,” Araújo said. “There are political agreements and negotiations to be made. The bargaining chip cannot be environmental legislation.”
