Farming for Whom? Agribusiness, Colonial Legacies, and the Case for Agroecology in Brazil

In 2022, Brazil was the second main food exporter in the world while at the same time, it remains on the hunger map. Looking deeper into it, most of the agricultural land in Brazil is in the hands of a minority of large-scale farmers who produce for exportation, and 77% of the population is fed by family farming. The root of this paradox is the export-led extractivist food production system of large-scale farmers in Brazil, which has its roots in an unequal regime of land ownership dating back from the carving of land during the colonization of Latin America.

The current model has negative environmental and social consequences on the population, and it is also opposed by the largest social movement in Latin America: the Landless Workers’s Movement (MST). They advocate for land reform, which would redistribute large estates to landless families, enabling them to practice agroecological farming. MST challenges the latifundio logic of land exploitation for exportation and profit, as it prioritizes feeding the country’s population with non-destructive family farming.

With this article, we shed light on the export-led model of latifundios as a colonial legacy that perpetuates the status of Brazil as a commodity frontier and recontextualize the decolonial nature of the MST movement and its sweeping program of land reform. By incorporating a socio-metabolic framework, with a mix of Critical Discourse Analysis and Socioeconomic Data Analysis, we ensure that this research both looks into the discourse being used in the country and into the official socioeconomic data.

Our main finding is that addressing the structural land distribution inequalities rooted in Brazil’s colonial past is not only key to overcoming the paradox of being a top food exporter while facing widespread hunger but also crucial for building a more equitable and resilient food system.