Text originally published on the Mídia Ninja website, on 2/22/2023
We have the agro and the ogre. The agro is much larger than the ogre, it produces much more, both for the domestic market and for export. But it is the ogre that needs more amnesty, tax benefits, labor, health and environmental impunity. And he is also the one who “corners” most of the votes that guarantee an overpriced representation of the sector in Congress and in agricultural policy.
The ogre supported Bolsonaro’s misgovernment and also the attempted coup d’état after his defeat at the polls. But now he complains that Lula has weakened the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (Mapa) and is paying more attention to socio-environmental policies than to agribusiness demands (or the ogre?). He complains about the recreation of the Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA), where the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra) will be located, and which will focus on family farming. The combination of all this in Mapa, in the last government, was unable to prevent the brutal setback in food security conditions, relegating 30 million people to hunger.
The ogre also complains about the return of the Brazilian Forest Service (SBF) and the management of the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) to the Ministry of the Environment (MMA). They are basic instruments of the forestry police, which have been subordinated, in recent years, to the interests of non-forest occupation of the territory. Its allocation to the Ministry of Agriculture did not prevent the explosion in deforestation rates, nor did it affect reforestation goals.
The ogre’s hidden jealousy in relation to the socio-environmental agenda stems from the fact that it is no longer subordinated to the ogre, which also dominated the Ministry of the Environment, Ibama, the SBF and the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai), in addition to the Incra, but which, now, will once again guide their actions towards appropriate policies, and not subordinate ones.
Export
Agriculture is among the main beneficiaries of overcoming the international isolation to which Brazil has been subjected in recent years. The resumption of socio-environmental policies will help unlock the trade agreement between the European Union and Mercosur and pave the way for a similar one with China. It should also facilitate the access of Brazilian companies, including agro, to global investment funds, which adopt environmental conditions.
The ogre will face greater difficulties in deforesting and grabbing public lands on the agricultural frontier, as well as in leasing Indigenous Lands and ending conservation units. But these difficulties will make it easier for the agro to expand and diversify its exports, at the same time that it intensifies production and qualifies the management of the productive chains.
Resources generated by increased exports of agricultural commodities do not automatically revert to more food on the people’s table. So much so that food prices have reached an abusive level, while millions of people beg in the streets of big cities in search of leftovers. While the Agriculture portfolio focuses on exports, the MDA must guarantee the supply of the internal market, at affordable prices.
agros and agros
Another component is the productive chains of socio-biodiversity, the economy of the forest. It is a dimension of agro that rejects monoculture in order to live with the standing forest. It is related to agroforestry, but goes further in the diversity of products and services, with a limited scale. There are several small production chains, which require appropriate logistics and promotion strategies to enter the markets. Payment for socio-environmental services can make a difference on this front.
The economy of the forest needs more efficient communication systems, internet in the depths of the bush. It needs clean energy to produce, transport and improve the quality of life and access to information for communities. They are very interested in being able to provide good quality food for schools and other institutions.
Ogre that swallows agro
The ogre is skeptical and climate denier, but the agro needs to protect and adapt. It needs to incorporate, in an organic way, the essential function of forests for climate regulation and rainfall, articulate productive strategies with conservation at scale, which requires a look that goes beyond the properties and sees the territory as a whole, necessarily diverse .
The ogre always hisses. It appropriates the productivity of agriculture to legitimize the expansion of predatory occupation of the territory, aiming at its immediate gains, to the detriment of all other forms of occupation and harming the climatic conditions on which agriculture also depends. It’s the snake eating itself by the tail.
This week, the National Congress must vote on the Provisional Measure that shaped the ministerial structure of the Lula government. The ogre promises to mobilize the “agro” bench to try to prevent the reorganization of the MDA and the linking of the SFB to the MMA. In other words: he continues to want to prevent Lula from governing, going against the objective interests of the agro.