Agribusiness Legitimation and Production of Ignorance on the Water Crisis in West Bahia, Brazil

This paper examines the strategies that the Brazilian agribusiness, which is often associated with unsustainable practices, uses to legitimize itself and create an image of being socio-environmentally friendly. It is particularly focused on the sector's activities in West Bahia, an agricultural frontier where, over the past five decades, there has been significant conversion of native savanna vegetation into large-scale monoculture farms. Since 2010, the region has experienced a new wave of expansion through irrigation, which increasingly uses groundwater. Alongside these processes, there has been a reduction in the flow of the region's rivers, resulting in a water crisis felt especially by traditional rural communities, resulting in environmental injustice. In this paper, we focus on the magazine produced by the Association of Farmers and Irrigators of Bahia (AIBA), AIBA Rural, the main agribusiness association in the state. Based on a thematic analysis of all the issues of AIBA Rural published between 2015 and 2023, ranging from the first to the twenty-sixth edition, we argue that the sector uses five discursive strategies to legitimize its activities from a socio-environmental viewpoint: the agribusiness is legal (acts in accordance with the law); scientific; highly technological; productive; and socio-environmentally responsible. In addition, we argue that the texts published in AIBA Rural magazine make selective use of scientific literature on the region's water crisis, resulting in greater legitimacy for the sector, but based on the production of ignorance about the phenomenon.