What Is “Agronegocinho” — Brazil’s Agribusiness Lite? 

When the idea that agribusiness feeds the country takes over the countryside, it erases the diverse realities of rural life, threatens the country’s food sovereignty, and hinders nature’s resilience. 

A farmer who uses all 20 hectares of his land to grow corn and applies pesticides regularly. A land reform settler leases out their plot for soybean production, even though the practice is prohibited. A family that gives up growing food for its own consumption in order to expand its herd and sell cattle to a large meatpacking company. Three situations, one phenomenon: agronegocinho (a Brazilian term roughly translated as “agribusiness lite”). 

This happens when smallholders are absorbed by the logic of agribusiness, producing commodities instead of food. Beyond the fields, their imagination has also been captured, leading them to treat the land from a purely productivist standpoint and relate to their territory in strictly economic terms. Thus, the small farmers mentioned at the beginning of this article might even see themselves as part of agribusiness. But they are not. 

“Many farmers see themselves as agribusiness because they own land and have a similar way of producing.  But when they look at their profit margins… after subtracting labor costs and input costs, they are left with very little. They will never be able to compete with agribusiness. This mindset is very difficult to overcome,” says Vânia Marques Pinto, president of the National Confederation of Rural Workers and Family Farmers (Contag). 

Within the agronegocinho mindset, adherence to the Green Revolution technological package (genetically modified seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and agricultural machinery) is considered the only valid production model. Meanwhile, the production systems and knowledge of peasants, Indigenous peoples, and traditional communities are dismissed as “backward.” 

The term agronegocinho is used by peasant movements as a critique, but it does not exist as an academic concept. The term “agribusiness” itself is relatively recent, brought to Brazil by the National Agriculture and Livestock Confederation (CNA) in the 1960s, based on a U.S. concept. It was translated from the English term agribusiness, especially from the 1980s, as a way to distinguish food production (agriculture) from commodity production aimed at global markets (agribusiness). This conceptualization drew a clear line: on one side stood the peasant; on the other, capitalism. However, this division has long been blurred by the overarching narrative that “agro is everything.”

“Agribusiness production relies on scale and requires land. Every small farmer’s plot is an agricultural frontier waiting to be absorbed by agribusiness,” summarizes Diego Moreira, a member of the National Coordination of the production sector of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST). In his view, there is no possible comparison between agribusiness giants and small-scale farming. 

“This expansion creates a miserable form of agriculture. An agriculture that is entirely manual, penalized, and unable to reach its potential. It turns traditional, peasant farming into an unproductive practice, and this becomes an agribusiness narrative used in the ideological battle,” he adds, referring to the notion that without the technological package, the model is obsolete. 

Impoverishing rural areas is one way of emptying them. Researcher Letícia Chimini, a professor at the Federal University of Latin American Integration (Unila), sees the same process: “This agricultural frontier threatens every piece of land that is not another large estate. They never overlap with one another; they overlap onto these smaller, more vulnerable groups that have less state support to sustain themselves.”

Winning over minds and fields 

Understanding the term requires looking at the very construction of the idea of “agribusiness” in Brazil. It was the Green Revolution of the 1960s that introduced a productivist and industrial logic into rural areas, promoting a vision of “modernization” based on industrial agricultural inputs and farm machinery. The technological package increased productivity per hectare while reducing labor demand. As a result, a large number of unemployed rural workers migrated to the cities. Poorer farmers, unable to adopt the new technologies, lost their land to debt or sold it off. 

Within this context, one of the main tools for controlling agronegocinho emerged: the integrated agricultural production system. Under this model, farmers receive seeds, seedlings, and technical assistance, and in return, their production becomes specialized and exclusively tied to the contracting company. Generally, these are long-term contracts that generate debt—the most classic example being the tobacco supply chain, though part of the production of milk, poultry, pork, soy, and corn is also structured this way. 

The logic goes: if agribusiness giants cannot empty the countryside, they can co-opt its workforce. “They used to say that the only way for the peasantry to survive was by integrating into agribusiness. That is why the term agronegocinho was coined,” recalls Anderson Amaro, a member of the national leadership of the Small Farmers’ Movement (MPA) and coordinator of Via Campesina’s rural organizations secretariat.

Peasant, a forgotten word 

The mentality to transform land into a logical, optimized, and industrial system has been sweeping away rural diversity for nearly a century. “The state plays a role in this process. It is a history of denied rights. And when support policies finally arrive, they tend to favor agribusiness while pushing smallholders into debt,” points out Chimini, referring to the National Program for Strengthening Family Farming (Pronaf). Over the course of 30 years, 47% of Pronaf’s funding resources have gone to soybean cultivation and cattle ranching.

Pronaf was the first public policy to introduce the concept of “family farming” in 1995.  Before that, this demographic was referred to as small farmers, subsistence farmers, or low-income producers. 

By unifying everyone under a single term, it becomes easier to design a policy guideline. However, the concept homogenized the diversity of the countryside by placing  land reform settlers, smallholders, extractivist communities, riverine populations, Quilombola communities, traditional communities, and Indigenous peoples under the exact same rule. Nearly 20 years after Pronaf’s creation, the term “family farming” entered Brazil’s legal framework through the Family Farming Law and continues to trivialize other government actions.

Loss of diversity, loss of sovereignty 

Identities that did not fit within large landholdings and the formal economy have been brutally erased over the centuries. “Who are the peasants in Brazil? They are the settlers, the landless, squatters, caiçaras (traditional coastal communities), geraizeiros (traditional farmers of the Cerrado), pastoral communities, riverine populations, extractivists, rubber tappers, Brazil nut gatherers, fishermen, and traditional cattle herders of the Araguaia region. Due to the struggles peasants faced throughout history, they were unable to assert themselves as such,” summarized Ariovaldo Umbelino de Oliveira.  In recent Brazilian history, the military dictatorship’s persecution of the Peasant Leagues stands out as the most notable example.

The productivist model of land exploitation that permeates the agronegocinho mindset is as old as the Portuguese invasion of Brazil. Since colonial times, the country has exported raw materials produced on vast estates using enslaved (or poorly paid) labor, and state subsidies. The model updates itself as rights are gained, but it never retreats.

In a territorial formation like Brazil’s, rooted in colonization, small property ownership was unprecedented until the 19th century. The Land Law of 1850 was deliberately designed to prevent formerly enslaved Black people from gaining access to land. The situation began to change with the arrival of the first European immigrants. They were settled in small agricultural production hubs in the Southern region, tasked with supplying the domestic market and securing land occupation. 

“The agreement with the Portuguese colony and the landowners of the time was that they could not produce anything that competed with charque (beef jerky). So, they could not raise cattle. So, they produced what the large estates did not: rice, tobacco, vegetables, whatever served to feed the surrounding population,” Chimini explains.

From the beginning, Brazilian food production has operated according to rules written by people who neither eat nor live in that territory. Hence the peasant movements’ discomfort with agronegocinho. 

With a smaller variety of food being produced, food sovereignty is weakened, as is the resilience of the ecosystem, which increases both the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. The result is greater agricultural losses and creates a vicious cycle that contributes to rising food prices. 

At a time when fighting hunger has once again become a government priority, Brazil continues to invest in an agricultural project that pressures food production. Under President Lula’s administration, the dominant message remains that “agro is everything,” as if the large-scale model did not interfere with the small one. As if commodity production did not affect food production. As if these two forms of agriculture could overlap without any detriment.

“A country’s sovereignty relies on deciding what matters to it, but also on defining where the public budget goes: what are we going to foster?” Chimini asks. In her view, strengthening food production requires confronting land concentration and unequal access to resources. “To share the bread, we first need to share the land,” she concludes.