Lives
broken
by

SOYA

that
feeds
our
pigs

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Soya bean fields stretch beyond the horizon. Thousands of hectares of bare land under the relentless sun of the dry season. " They've deforested the trees that used to shade the land and that's drying up our rivers," complains Guilherme Ferreira de Souza. He has has lived his 64 years in the small community of Aldeia in the northwest of Bahia (Brazil). He is a geraizeiro, as the traditional inhabitants of this tropical savannah are known, descendants of runaway slaves, gold prospectors and peasants who moved into the interior of Brazil in the 19th century. For these communities, the arrival of large soya bean farms has meant not only the loss of the vegetation on which they depend for their livelihoods, but also the direct threat of expropriation, in some cases violent expropriation.

Geraizeiros live in the valleys, the lowest part of the savannah, which still conserves its unique vegetation. It is a redoubt of wildlife which is increasingly being cornered. Above, on the high plateau, everything is cultivated. "Thirty years ago we had a wedding and the bride's father couldn't reach us: we had to build him a bridge made of wood to cross the river. Now cars can easily ford the river", Ferreira explains. The Cerrado is, in fact, Brazil's most important groundwater reservoir, home to eight of the country's twelve largest river basins. But farmers claim there is no problem.

"The impact of agriculture on water is very small," says Odacil Ranzi, president of the Association of Farmers and Irrigators of Bahia (AIBA), who welcomes us to his office in Luis Eduardo de Magalhãens, a town in western Bahia built in the wake of agricultural expansion and the only one in the area where Bolsonaro won in the 2018 elections. "The rivers have the same water all year round despite the fact that it doesn't rain at all for six months here. The groundwater is very abundant, we farmers could use much more water than we do," he says confidently. His vision could not be more different from that of the poor communities in the area, who talk about rivers that are drying up and swamps that are disappearing. The farmers' representative, on the other hand, states without blushing: "In 40 years I have not seen any climate change in this region.

However, several environmental reports note the impact of agribusiness on the ecosystems of the Cerrado, and confirm that river flows have been reduced. From the car window, it is clear that the region today is very different from the one encountered by the big farmers who, like Ranzi, arrived in the 1970s and 1980s from the south of the country and opened up the region to agribusiness. The expanses of fields ready for cultivation stretch as far as the eye can see. Columns of black smoke here and there warn of several nearby fires. Fire is one of the most commonly used means of clearing the land for new crops. However, in late September, at the end of six months of dry season and with temperatures exceeding 35 degrees Celsius, accidental fires also proliferate.

" Soya has wiped out all of nature. The water is running out, everything is deforested", laments Florentino Ferreira da Sousa, Guilherme's cousin. He welcomes us into his house, nestled in a remote corner of the valley, and explains that there are two jaguars roaming the area: they have already killed three calves. These are some of the dangers that communities living in the heart of the savannah have had to face all their lives, subsisting on small pastures and planting cassava, beans and other foodstuffs. Now, however, they face threats far worse than the jaguars.

Florentino Ferreira and his cousin Guilherme led their community's struggle against Fazenda Estrondo, the property that now occupies the land where they have always lived. "My mother is 98 years old today and she was born here", says the latter, as proof of their right to live there, despite the fact that they do not have title deeds. "Some neighbours have left, intimidated by the Fazenda, but it is very difficult for us to live in the city", says Florentino: "Here the land gives us everything". But living conditions are also changing for these communities. "The swamps are drying up and the rivers are shrinking because of deforestation and agribusiness's deep wells", he remarks: "If nature shrinks further, our life will be very hard".

Fazenda Estrondo was established in this area of Bahia in the 1980s. A businessman from Rio de Janeiro, Ronald Guimarães Levinsohn, presented false title deeds for these public lands in order to present them as collateral for a debt. Estrondo is an exceptional case due to its size: the 'fazenda' occupies 315,000 hectares, more than three times the size of the city of Barcelona. But it is a system that is repeated throughout the region. "The land grabbing of the 70s and 80s was only documentary, hidden in the records. The real deforestation did not start until 2003, and it is from 2014, in fact, that legal reserves began to be declared in the areas where valley communities live, leading to a situation of conflict and violence," explains Mauricio Correia, the lawyer from the Association of Rural Workers' Lawyers (AATR) who is handling the case.

It was then, around 2014, that the Fazenda set up guard posts with armed men. "They forbade us to leave the valley, they asked for our documents for any movement," Guilherme explains. "The gunmen took our horses, they did things just to humiliate us. They killed the uncle of a relative of mine just to frighten us, so that everyone would know who was in charge," adds Florentino. Suddenly, they could no longer go to the plateau to harvest pequi fruits, as they had always done, or the golden grass with which they make traditional handicrafts.

"We used to go to the plateau to look for mangaba and tucumães, but now there is nothing left", recalls Guilherme. From the mangaba fruit shell, they made milk and also a kind of rubber. From tucumães (a kind of palm tree) they made rope, he explains. Official data show that the municipality of Formosa do Rio Preto, where this fazenda is located, has suffered the most deforestation in the entire Cerrado between 2001 and 2019, according to a Greenpeace report, which also denounces that the Fazenda Estrondo used slave labour for some time and in 2016 it was fined for illegal deforestation.

With the help of AATR and the NGO 10Envolvimento, the communities took legal action and the courts have finally recognised their right of possession over 43,000 hectares of the Fazenda. The Bahia government admitted just this year that the acquisition of the entire Fazenda Estrondo property is fraudulent, and has initiated a process that could end up with the expropriation of the entire property, Correia explains. But in 2019, the same government granted a new licence to Delfin Rio S.A., Estrondo's main holding company, to deforest a further 25,000 hectares of land, the equivalent of 35,700 football fields.

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The bullet marks are still visible on the fence between us and the watchtower. At the top of the tower, a security guard records us with his mobile phone and hides his face when we photograph him. "From this point on, they won't let us pass, even though we had always taken our cattle to graze in that area", explains Edinaldo, who lives in the Cachoeira community, just 1,300 metres from the watchtower. The holes in the fence show that while today they have only taken out their mobile phones, the ban is often enforced at gunpoint. A few kilometres further on, in another community within the same Fazenda Estrondo, Fernando carries proof of this in his own flesh: the two scars left by a bullet that pierced his leg.

"I went with my neighbour André to look for a cow that had escaped and entered the Fazenda's fields. We went to retrieve it and when we were returning home we were stopped and ordered to get off our horses. They told us that we had to accompany them to their hut, but we didn't trust them and tried to leave. Then they started shooting. That's when I felt the pain in my leg and saw that it was covered in blood," says the 24-year-old. The guards, from a private security company hired by Fazenda Estrondo, went away and left him there. His neighbour and other companions decided to return and took him to a hospital in the city of Palmas, in the neighbouring state of Tocantins.

Fernando was shot in August 2019. Two years earlier, the courts had ruled in favour of these traditional communities and recognised their right of possession (direito de posse) over 43,000 hectares of Fazenda Estrondo. The ruling, however, was not final and did not put an end to the regime of "terror" that had been established by the private security guards.

"Those armed men were always going around making threats, saying that we had no right to be here. The men would take the cattle out to graze in the morning and you would spend the day worrying whether they would come back or not," explains Isaltina Guedes da Silva, a nurse who lives in the Gatos community, also located in a valley within the Fazenda Estrondo.

In June 2021, the Supreme Court confirmed the ruling in favour of the communities, giving no leave to appeal. But the communities themselves had already taken matters into their own hands a few months earlier, tired of waiting for real changes. The charred ruins of several surveillance huts bear witness to this. As we walk past one of them, a neighbour who accompanies us, an older, affable-looking man, has no problem admitting that it was he who burnt it down one day when it was empty. "Our struggle continues because we have been here before, we know that the ruling is one thing and reality is another. We are not calm, but attentive", says Guedes, and adds that he only dreams of one thing: "To be able to leave our children and grandchildren a better, peaceful future on this land".

The charred remains of logs, a few pots and a blackened chair were all that was left of the shepherds' hut. Altamirando, who had slept many times in that shelter, needed a few minutes of solitude to digest the sight. Only a week before, hooded men with guns had set fire to the hut. They had also burnt down other houses scattered nearby and even some of the vegetation during their escape. The blackened trunks of some of the moriche palms we had seen along the road were proof of this. The aim of the attack? To frighten the inhabitants of the community of São Marcelo and to put pressure on them not to return to the land where they had always grazed their cattle. It is now owned by Fazenda Santa Maria, a company owned by Canabrava, which grows soya.

"We have no title deeds, but we have the right to possession because we have always lived and grazed cattle here. Our taxes prove it," says Altamirando da Silva. He explains that until the attack he thought it would be possible to reach a legal agreement with the owner of the Fazenda. It has now become clear that it is not. "They were gunslingers hired by the landowner. They came in four cars. When we saw the smoke at nine o'clock in the morning, one of our neighbours went immediately and met them on the road. They opened fire to scare him. Two of the cars turned back and the others continued this way and drove through the community. They covered their faces, but we know who they are," says Da Silva. Several neighbours present for this newspaper's visit in mid-September corroborate his version.

The attack on the huts in the São Marcelo community was the most recent in the area, only six days ago. " Twenty days earlier we had found a cow that had been shot dead," adds another neighbour. But the stories of threats and terror, stories of private security guards hired by the landowners who do not hesitate to use guns, were repeated in every community this newspaper visited in the northwest of Bahia and in the south of the neighbouring state of Piauí.

"It was an act of vandalism, and you can see the extent of the environmental crime, which will take years to recover," remarks Pabla Ferreira Lemos, standing in front of the burnt moriche palms. The moriche is the typical palm tree of the Cerrado, and communities living here use every part of it. Its leaves are used for the roofs of houses, its fruits are eaten - plain, juiced or in cakes - and they even extract an oil that is said to have medicinal properties.

Pabla Ferreira and her brother Aurélio have continued their father's struggle, one of the posseiros who led the São Marcelo community's fight against the fazenda, and who died in 2020 from covid-19. After these events, however, it was the fazenda that filed a lawsuit against the villagers, claiming "they have removed cattle from their land in an orderly and peaceful manner", explains Ferreira. The fire that this newspaper witnessed was therefore their "peaceful and orderly" way of expelling the communities that graze cattle in the area.

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"The fazendeiro sent me a message: he had already hired the gunman to kill me, he was just waiting until he got a third fine". Juarez Celestino de Sousa had twice reported the neighbouring farm because its pesticides pollute the land where he lives, in the Riacho dos Cavalos community in the south of the Brazilian state of Piauí. The environmental authorities fined the farm, but nothing has changed. "They spray their toxic agro-chemicals from planes and they end up on our land, or they get washed down here during the rainy season," says De Sousa. He adds that their crops, which they plant for food, no longer grow as they did before, but many "sprout and die".

Many "[agrochemicals] considered highly toxic by the European Union" are used in Brazil and, in fact, "Jair Bolsonaro's government has authorised many more than any previous government," explains Grain researcher Larissa Parker. Those used by farmers in this area of southern Piauí not only damage traditional villagers' crops, but also pollute the waters of their rivers, marshes and ponds. Fishing plays a major role in the livelihoods of these communities, known as ribeirinhos (riverbank dwellers). "In the Uruçuí Preto river there used to be a lot of fishing, but now there is no more: all the fish have been wiped out," laments De Sousa.

João Henrique Pereira Mendes Jr. shows us the leaves of his orange trees, full of black spots. He says that the nearby presence of soya crops, treated with powerful pesticides, has brought the whitefly plague to his land. "All this did not exist before the arrival of agribusiness, we are seeing diseases in the plants that we have never had before, it has been happening for the last ten years and it is because of all this poison", Pereira assures us.

As in the communities in Bahia, these traditional villages in southern Piauí suffer from what is known as green land grabbing: powerful neighbouring farmers want to register the land where they live as their legal reserve and try to evict them. "With bribes they get legal title deeds and put security guards on the land to pressure us into leaving. Some of our neighbours sold them the land and left for the city," explains De Sousa, who is also spokesperson for the Collective of Traditional Peoples and Communities of the Piaui Cerrado, a group of nine communities in the Santa Filomena area that have come together to increase their strength. With the help of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), they have finally obtained title deeds to their lands.

They will be of little use, however, if the soil is poisoned. "We have noticed that there are more and more cases of diabetes, blood pressure problems and headaches," explains Celestino. A few kilometres away, in a nearby community, Geraldo João Pessoa, 54, assures us that he has a constant headache. "We always drank water from the river, but three years ago we built a well to reduce the possibility of dying from poisoning," Pessoa explains. Pessoa's fears, however, are not officially confirmed. CSIC pesticide expert Silvia Lacorte explains that the headache is a possible effect of some herbicides and pesticides, as is the transfer of pests such as whitefly and the effects on crops that communities report. She also explains that in areas with such high temperatures, higher quantities of pesticides are used than in Europe, and that GM soya already incorporates pesticides in the seed " to avoid it being eaten by animals", which tends to contaminate the soil.

His wife, Maria dos Rios Álvares, shows us her hands and feet. They are full of dark rashes, which make her skin feel very rough when you shake hands with her. They believe this is due to the constant contact with the water: in these communities it is the women who wash clothes and do the dishes in the river. But Lacorte points out that dermatitis caused by pesticides is more likely to occur when the toxic substance has been handled directly, rather than through contact with contaminated water. The couple have visited a dermatologist, but admit they have no official diagnosis linking the disease to pesticide contamination, but Pessoa is certain it is the cause. "We haven't found doctors who want to certify it, so as not to be singled out by the powerful agribusiness," says De Sousa. This sector has become even more powerful since the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro. De Sousa is clear: "Now the most dangerous poison for us is Bolsonaro, he is the worst pest".

"In November last year I came down here with a sack of clothes and the water was so dirty that we couldn't do any washing. It was red and ugly and smelt very strong. I think it was either dead yacarés or dead fish. I' d guess yacaré because it was a very strong smell", explains Jeane Tavares dos Santos, who lives in the Brejo do Miguel community in the south of Piauí. Yacaré are caimans typical of these marshy regions of South America.

Tavares sits on the wooden plank which, placed on a base made of logs, she used as a "washing bench". Ribeirinho communities like this one live off the marshes and rivers, where they bathe and wash, but which also provide water for them and their livestock to drink. They also fish. But the water is contaminated by the pesticides that agricultural estates use to grow soya.

They call themselves ribeirinhos and brejeiros (swamp dwellers). This area of tropical savannah in the Cerrado is – or was – full of swamps, which generated unique ecosystems which are very important for carbon capture.

" I have a 20-year-old daughter and an 18-year-old daughter, I raised them here and when they were little we carried water from the river to the house and they came to bathe here, but today we can no longer use this water", she explains, pointing to the small stream where she has installed the wooden plank, very close to her house. Nor can they go to the reservoir where they used to go to collect moriche fruit, because the agricultural landowner who has settled on their land has cut off the access. His name is Anderson and he does not have private security guards like other fazendeiros. He himself has taken it upon himself to talk to the neighbours of the community to make it clear that the land is his. The neighbours denounce that his pesticides pollute the water and that they have led to a plague of white flies in their own crops.

It is the end of the dry season, in September, and Jeane Tavares' bench stands in the mud. In addition to being brown in colour, the water is so low that it is not possible to clean clothes on this makeshift table. When her daughters were young, it was not a stream but a large river. "It's getting drier every year because deforestation is getting closer and closer to the marshes, and I'm sure that by August next year it will be dry," she says.

"The main problem is the deforestation of the areas near rivers' sources," explains Cácio Luiz Boechat, a researcher at the Bom Jesus de Piauí University, who led a research group that visited the region in December 2020 to take samples from the Uruçuí Preto river. "We did not find a significant enough number of molecules from pesticides to endanger human health," he explains, although he admits that samples need to be taken again during the months of January to March, when most of the crop fields are irrigated with pesticides. He also believes that research should be extended to community soil and crops, but the university does not have sufficient funding for this, he says.

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Jovencino Pereira da Silva wants to know when his community, Chupé, will receive the title deed to the land they occupy. He can't seem to believe that this day will come and asks the representative of the Pastoral Land Commission accompanying us several times - he says they expect it in January. Xupé is one of nine communities that have fought together against the Piauí state government and have managed to obtain recognition of their property. "With this title I will feel a little more secure", he says, and tells us a story that is repeated everywhere we have visited in Matopiba: that of agricultural landowners who arrive with often fraudulent land titles and who terrorise the local populations with their gunmen, private security guards hired to carry out the land grabbing.

" There is no Cerrado left, the soya crops are destroying everything", says Pereira. It's a complaint we've heard before, but with a new element: "Here there are grileiros who fight with other grileiros, because their business is not to farm the land, but to obtain the land and then sell it", he says, and tells us about a company present in this area called Radar. It is Brazilian, but it has obtained investments from the American college teachers' pension fund, the TIAA-CREF.

Rising land prices in Matopiba have made the region an area of interest to companies such as Radar and other speculators, who "acquire land at very low prices, often through local grileiros", explains University of São Paulo professor Fábio Teixeira Pitta. Grileiros are people who claim land using false title deeds.

Pitta has been studying the phenomenon of land speculation for years, and he explains that the subsidies and facilities Brazilian authorities give to agribusiness mean that the price of land, especially land already deforested and ready for cultivation, has skyrocketed, especially in this region. "In Brazil, land is a financial asset", he explains. Pitta also assists affected communities through his work with the NGO Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Social Network for Justice and Human Rights). And the capital gains from the sale of land in this region of the Cerrado, the new soya frontier, are among the highest in the country.

"There is more money to be made here nowadays by speculating on land than by selling soya," says Altamirando Ribeiro of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), an NGO that helps communities. As the world's population and demand for food increases, land prices always go up, never down, and prices are even higher when the land has been deforested.

We were welcomed into a sort of courtyard with a circular reed roof, like a giant hat that protects us from the merciless sun of the Cerrado, and creates an intimate space, conducive to conversation. It is a simple but cosy construction that we have seen in other houses in the riverside communities of southern Piauí. But Maria Zulmira Lima de Sousa's is not a ribeirinha community. In fact, they belong to the indigenous Gamela people. However, none of them speak Gamela, and their way of life is identical to that of the traditional communities around them. They also subsist by growing cassava, beans and rice, herding cattle, hunting and fishing, which is becoming increasingly scarce. But certain features of Zulmira's face and the pride with which she speaks of her Gamela blood tell you they are different.

An anthropological study by the University of Bom Jesus officially determined that they were Gamela Indians, a people native to what is now the state of Maranhão, in the north of Piauí. With this recognition, they have been able to have their land demarcated as indigenous territory. "They wanted to expel us from our territory and that is why we started the process of indigenous recognition. That is why this recognition as indigenous has been very important for us. We don't have the document in our hands yet, but we will have it", she explains, after also reporting threats and pressure from the private security guards of some local landowners.

The Gamela people are one of nine communities in southern Piauí that have gained official recognition of their ownership of the land on which they live. Not the right of possession, but outright ownership. "They have granted some titles to small landowners like this in order to justify and legitimise the large-scale transfer of public lands," explains Grain researcher Larissa Parker.

This state of Piauí, and the southern communities we visited, are part of a World Bank pilot scheme to regularise Brazil's land market. This involves changing state laws that allow public land to be transferred into private hands over larger areas than before, despite the fact that the Brazilian constitution specifies that public land is to be used for agrarian reform and for indigenous or Afro-descendant peoples, and that if it is sold to private owners it must be for their subsistence. The World Bank-sponsored legal reforms do away with this and allow the sale of public land to large landowners "at 90% subsidised prices", and this "encourages land speculation", warns Parker.

Zulmira takes us to see one of the remaining lakes near her community. She says that at least three have already disappeared, and that the remaining ones, like these we see here, are contaminated by pesticides. There are certainly no fish to be seen. "I'm 45 years old and I've seen a lot of changes. When I was 14 I used to walk a lot in the highlands, where there are now crops, and it was all thick vegetation. Now deforestation has wiped it all out," she explains. On the way to the lake, in fact, we cross what seems to have been a riverbed. Now it is full of sand, washed down from the high plateau by the rain. The trees that held it back are gone.