Farmers from traditional peoples and communities denounce the loss of land, pest increase and the contamination of their crops by soybean farms
During a visit to three quilombola territories in Eastern Maranhão state in 2025, Emília Costa encountered the following reality: communities that had historically produced rice were now buying the grain.
As a coordinator of the Quilombola Movement of Maranhão (Moquibom), Costa explains that the scenario they came across was not exactly a surprise. “Monocultures arrived with great force, a true invasion. Soybeans came into their territory and landgrabbed a large portion of what they had”.
The phenomenon has been occurring in different territories within the Matopiba region, an area known as the country’s last agricultural frontier.
An acronym formed by the initials of the States of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia, Matopiba was officially enacted by the Brazilian government just over a decade ago to stimulate agribusiness development in the region.
In that area, as in other agricultural frontiers in Brazil, soybeans are the sector’s flagship crop. Matopiba currently accounts for 19% of the country’s soybean production. The forecast for the current harvest is a record-breaking 172.5 million tons of the grain.
This annual increase in productivity depends on another record, the vast expansion of the national territory taken over by soybean monocultures. This crop currently occupies approximately 48 million hectares of Brazilian territory, with over one third of this area having begun cultivating soybeans in the last ten years.
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Matopiba has been a particularly important region for this growth. Soybeans already occupy almost five million hectares in this area – a number celebrated by the industry.
According to the narrative given by agribusiness, these numbers paint a picture of food production that helps to fight hunger worldwide. As sociologist Milena Evangelista – who studies the discourse and impacts of agribusiness on food insecurity in the Matopiba region – explains, that’s not exactly the case.
“It’s a very strong narrative, this idea of the Matopiba region being a savior of the country’s food sector. This portrayal of agribusiness as a key force for fighting food-related problems, especially hunger. And what we see, in actual fact, is the opposite of that”, she says”.
It is worth noting that two-thirds of Brazilian soybeans are exported and that around 90% of the grains that remain in the country are used for animal feed, not food for human consumption.
The result is an alarming scenario: The Matopiba region has been used more for growing commodities than for producing food. In many cases, such as those described by Costa, this math is in fact a substitution.
Over the past year, Joio has visited the states that make up Matopiba to investigate the social and environmental impacts of agribusiness expansion in the region. The reports are part of the A última fronteira (The last Frontier) series. One very direct effect of monoculture expansion that is rarely discussed is the reduction of hectares farmed with other crops central to the Brazilian diet, such as rice, beans and cassava.
According to agronomist Laelson Ribeiro, a quilombola from the Baião territory in southeastern Tocantins state, the Matopiba decree has encouraged a major concentration and commodification of public lands that had previously been collectively farmed in the region.
“As a result, production declined, because family farming was responsible for producing these crops”, he explains.
The report analyzed the area occupied by these staple crops of the Brazilian diet in Matopiba, based on data from the Municipal Agricultural Production (PAM) survey, also conducted by the IBGE. The data reveal that since the agrarian frontier decree in 2015, the region has lost 142 thousand hectares of rice, 23 thousand of bean crops and 75 thousand of cassava.
It may seem like a disproportionate loss compared to the millions of hectares occupied by soybeans. It is worth pointing out, however, that a large portion of these areas has undergone deforestation of its native vegetation, composed primarily by the Cerrado.
In recent years, the Cerrado region has led the country’s deforestation rankings, and Matopiba, if devastation were an olympic sport, would occupy a place on the podium. 75% of the 652,197 hectares of the biome cleared in 2024 were located in this region.
Maranhão, which has most of its territory within Matopiba, tops the list. 218,298 hectares of vegetation were lost in 2024.
This deforestation also affects local food security, as the harvesting of endemic Cerrado foods remains an important part of the diet of traditional peoples and communities in Matopiba.
For Evangelista, these data receive less attention than they should. She points out that environmentalists consider the Cerrado as a “sacrifice zone” for agribusiness. The term is used to describe areas where the lives and relationships between peoples and territories are disregarded for the profits of economic sectors.
Maranhão itself, once a major Brazilian rice production powerhouse, is the state that has seen the largest reduction in rice-plantation hectares since 2015. Around 113 thousand hectares have been lost in ten years.
Two of the communities visited by quilombola coordinator Emília Costa which no longer produce rice, Cocalinho and Guerreiro, are located in the municipality of Parnarama, in Maranhão state. The municipality has lost 1,783 hectares of rice fields since 2015.
Complete imbalance
In Bahia, communities have experienced similar impacts. The state, with only its western portion within the Matopiba perimeter, has lost almost 7 thousand hectares of rice fields, 57 thousand hectares of beans and 16 thousand hectares of cassava in the last ten years.
Bernardino Alves Barbosa, a Family farmer (“fecheiro”) from the traditional Fundo e Fecho de Pasto de Pedrinhas community in Correntina, western Bahia, has been noticing this change. He is 40 years old and his Family has lived in the region for generations.
“Since the days of my father, grandfather and great-grandfather, my family has lived here in this community. We used to plant corn, cassava, beans. My grandad used to grow rice”, he reveals. In recent times, however, food farming in Correntina has decreased significantly. “Rice is almost down to zero”, he reveals.
According to PAM data, between 2000 and 2024, Correntina lost 1,930 hectares of rice crops. At the same time, it gained 133 thousand hectares of soybean fields.
To Barbosa, the connection between these figures is not just direct substitution. He explains that in the region where he lives the expansion of agribusiness has also caused a noticeable climatic impact.
“When deforestation began, the climate changed. The rains are different now. It used to get cold before, now the nights are as hot as in the daytime”, he reports.
This impact has created another problem that harms food farming: the increase in the number and species of insects and fungi that destroy crops.
“My cassava sprouted and then kind of like a witch came along, like the “cocoa witch’” [a fungus that affects crops], and the leaves got all wrinkled. I’d never heard of this disease before. Then there’s the aphids, which we didn’t use to see in the cassava fields. People start to lose faith and end up not wanting to plant”, says Barbosa.
Complaints about one insect in particular, the whitefly, have come up frequently in interviews conducted by Joio across various regions of Matopiba.
“They’re very tiny, most of the time people don’t even notice them. And then, before you realize it, the crop is practically all lost”, explains the farmer.
According to Laélson Ribeiro, the environmental imbalance caused by monocultures is behind this phenomenon.
“Only within the ecosystems of these territories [of traditional peoples and communities] can you find forest, there are still plants, fresh, healthy air. So animals also seek out these family farming areas”.
The agronomist explains that much of his work as a field technician for the Alternatives for Small-Scale Agriculture in Tocantins (APA-TO) organization has focused on helping to combat these new pests. “Farmers don’t know how to deal with them, because until now they didn’t need to; nature provided that balance”.
While APA-TO strives to work through agro-ecologic practices, avoiding the use of pesticides and genetically modified seeds, companies and rural extension agents end up encouraging the use of chemicals to combat new pests. Ribeiro explains that in Tocantins, whose territory lies entirely within Matopiba borders, farmers are increasingly being pushed towards the agribusiness production model.
“Agribusiness is the state’s policy. So Emater [The Technical Assistence and Rural Extension Company] themselves are encouraging this shift towards agribusiness, distributing genetically modified seeds and devaluing the farming practices of those who live and work in the countryside,” he claims.
As a result of this trend, not only are the hectares growing a greater diversity of food crops decreasing, but so too are the seed varieties of each of these crops. Additionally, genetically modified seeds are hybrids that cannot reproduce, leaving farmers dependent on the annual purchase of new seeds.
“This undermines family farming and leads to a loss of food sovereignty. Farmers end up being forced to sell their land because they have lost their traditional seeds”, the agronomist concludes.
Fields contaminated by pesticides
It is not just animals that escape from soybean-growing areas, but also the drift from sprayed chemicals. Another effect of pesticide use is the contamination of crop fields.
In the Santo Antônio do Costa community in São Luiz Gonzaga, Maranhão, where quilombola Emília Costa lives, several crop fields were contaminated by pesticides from a neighboring farm in just the first few months of this year. “That’s 11 families who won’t have a harvest. They will no longer have rice, corn or beans. They lost everything they planted”, she reveals.
The situation is no different in the Pedrinhas community (BA). Bernardino Alves Barbosa, who has a degree in Agricultural Technology, says that contamination by pesticides carried by water is a major challenge to his agro-ecological production.
“People ask me if I produce organic food. I do grow organically, but the water that irrigates my land comes from springs located on agribusiness farms. So the water that reaches me from the river is already contaminated”, he explains.
As a result, he notices that many plants are dying. Whether it’s the crops or even the riparian vegetation along the rivers. “It is rare today to see green vegetation along the river, you get there and only see dry branches in contact with the water”, he laments.
Food insecurity
In Correntina, farmers are also becoming more dependent on the market to meet their food needs. “Instead of growing their own food, people are buying products that they often don’t even know where they came from, or how they were produced”, explains Barbosa.
In the region, even manioc flour, which used to be stored from one year to the next, is now being purchased. “There is no longer the abundance that there used to be”, the farmer explains.
As a result, new products have started to become part of the diet of communities in Matopiba, as Milena Evangelista points out. “Today they have much more contact with industrialized and ultra-processed food”.
In her master’s thesis, the sociologist produced a case study on the municipality of Campos Lindos, in northeastern Tocantins. Following the expansion of agribusiness through the Matopiba initiative, the municipality became the fourth largest economy in the state.
This wealth, however, has not translated into an improvement in the lives of local families. Quite the opposite; in her research, Evangelista observed the link between the encroachment of the soybean expansion and the rising food insecurity in the municipality. “Agribusiness has disrupted families’ traditional food-based ways of life”, she states.
Data from PAM show that Campos Lindos has lost around 2,400 hectares of rice-growing area in the last decade.
As a result of capital concentration in the municipality, farmers interviewed in Evangelista’s research who were aware of Matopiba said that they believed the acronym was the name of a company.
“It’s interesting because there’s this narrative that Matopiba is a natural asset of the country, that our agriculture is our strength, but in actual fact it’s completely co-opted by transnationals”.
A report published by Greenpeace in 2018 showed that three years after the Matopiba decree, 58% of its municipalities remained poor, with quality-of-life indicators worse than their respective state averages.
“We go on living and producing”
The construction of a heroic agribusiness narrative around Matopiba also stems from rendering invisible the agricultural production of traditional peoples and communities, as well as the biodiversity of the Cerrado region itself.
Evangelista explains that the biome has historically been described as an area where nothing was produced, nothing more than a demographic void. “A vast, wasted territory where there was this imagined perception of abject poverty and agribusiness would sweep in to solve all problems”.
This “deletion” of local populations and their relations with the land works more like a self-fulfilling prophecy – agribusiness has created pockets of biodiversity voids wherever it passes through.
In contrast, social movements led by traditional peoples and communities have spearheaded resistance against food systems driven by fences and monocultures.
“We go on living and producing even in the face of difficulties, cultivating well-being, working and living in harmony with the land”, concludes farmer Ariomara Alves Pessoa, from the riverside community of Brejeira, located in Santa Filomena, Piauí. Bean farming has increased there by 1,717 hectares since 2015.
Ariomara is a member of the Cerrado Collective of Traditional Peoples and Communities. The collective shares photos of harvests showcasing an immense diversity of foods on their social media accounts.
Agronomist Laelson Ribeiro also highlights an achievement: the quilombola communities in Tocantins were included in the federal Arroz da Gente (“Our Rice”) program, launched in June 2025 and coordinated by the National Supply Company (Conab), who have been encouraging rice, cassava and pumpkin farming in the state.
“Quilombola communities hold the know-how to this production, but they had stopped growing these crops. They are now receiving equipment and storage assistance in order to resume production. This has required hard work to recover native seeds”, Ribeiro explains.
In Maranhão, sociologist Marcelo Carneiro, a professor in the Social Sciences Graduate Program at the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA), believes that the sophistication and productivity of family farming – which stands up to agribusiness production methods – are often overlooked. “Contrary to what people say, this type of production is not a backward, outdated model”, he asserts.