How Brazil’s Agribusiness Became “Pop”

Ten years on, Globo’s “Agro Is Pop” campaign has become a symbol of how the sector built its public image — promoting a narrative that left out land grabbing, land concentration, deforestation, and rural violence

In 2017, the audience at the Global Agribusiness Forum Talks in São Paulo witnessed a rare scene: a senior Globo executive — the most influential television network in Brazil and a historic force in shaping the national imagination — took the stage to explain the strategy behind an unprecedented campaign in the company’s history.

The campaign was called Agro, a indústria-riqueza do Brasil — roughly, the industry that underpins Brazil’s wealth — but became known by its slogan, “Agro é pop” (“Agro is pop”). Launched in 2016, it presented agribusiness as a source of technology, food, jobs, wealth, and national pride. Its short films aired throughout Globo’s programming and ended with a phrase that would become ubiquitous: “Agro é tech, agro é pop, agro é tudo” (“Agro is tech, agro is pop, agro is everything”).

At that point, the campaign hadn’t even been running for a year. Roberto Lasalvia Schmidt, then TV Globo’s marketing director, opened his presentation with a promise to the audience of industry representatives: “You’re going to be hypnotized, you’ll leave here saying agro is tech, agro is pop.”

The phrase summed up one of the most ambitious and visible communications campaigns by Brazilian agribusiness in the past decade. Ten years later, it’s difficult to measure the campaign’s impact on the sector’s image in isolation. It was part of a broader offensive that included advertising, lobbying, soap operas, opinion polls, and rural marketing initiatives. But “Agro, a indústria-riqueza do Brasil” was the most media-visible of these initiatives: the one that reached the most people, had the most polished aesthetic, and became one of the longest-running.

Globo’s entry into this battle over public image came at a decisive moment in Brazilian politics. The campaign debuted in June 2016, just weeks after the Chamber of Deputies authorized the opening of impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff. The country was in the midst of a wave of conservative mobilization, marked by the use of the national flag’s colors and the strengthening of political groups aligned with the market and agribusiness.

The agribusiness caucus (bancada ruralista), one of the most powerful blocs in Brazil’s Congress, played a central role in this process. The group brings together lawmakers who act in defense of agribusiness interests, large landowners, and sectors tied to agricultural commodity production. Half of the votes in favor of impeachment came from lawmakers linked to this political camp.

At the same time, rural violence was rising. In 2016, the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) recorded around 1,100 rural conflicts, 30% more than the previous year. There were 61 killings, compared with 47 in 2015. None of this would appear in the campaign’s films.

In its early years, the network released new films at a frequent pace. According to Schmidt, by 2017 the campaign had already reached 179 million consumers across 650 airings. As far as O Joio could verify, the last new installment was released in 2022, though the spots continue to air. Globo did not respond to interview requests or grant access to the full set of the campaign’s films.

How “Business” Disappeared from the Word

To understand the strength of this campaign, it’s important to understand the political meaning of the word “agro” in Brazil. The term is a shortened form of “agronegócio,” equivalent to “agribusiness.” But the abbreviation is not neutral. By dropping “negócio” (business) from the word, the sector adopted a simpler, friendlier, and more flexible brand identity. “Agro” came to designate not only large farms, meatpacking plants, banks, trading companies, machinery manufacturers, and input suppliers, but also food, family, work, modernity, and national identity.

What was new about the campaign wasn’t just its subject, but its format. Agro, a indústria-riqueza do Brasil was not a conventional advertising campaign purchased by a company or industry association. It was Globo’s own initiative, aired throughout its programming, with an educational tone, sophisticated aesthetics, designed to resemble journalistic content.

The films ran about 50 seconds and were structured as brief explanations of production chains. A voiceover led viewers through quick associations: grain becomes feed, feed nourishes animals, animals produce milk, meat, and wool; wool and cotton become clothing; clothing drives fashion, which generates profit, jobs, and investment. At the end came the mantra: “Agro é tech, agro é pop, agro é tudo.”

For Cleyton Gerhardt, a researcher and professor at the Institute of International Relations and Defense at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), this format is one of the campaign’s defining features. “This initiative has a very distinctive feature, which is its educational approach. So, first, you have a voiceover — there’s no character speaking, no well-known figure. It’s almost like a teacher saying, ‘look, agro is this, agro is that.'”

The professorial tone was combined with a strategy of emotional connection. Commenting on one of the campaign’s films, Schmidt explained that the intent was to “create that emotional connection” and produce “a super positive association with the consumer, with the Brazilian person, reminding people that someone produces the food they put on their tables.”

For Schmidt, this content had an “eminently journalistic” approach. According to him, the team responsible for that was Globo Rural, the program historically associated with rural coverage at the network. The statement helps explain one of the campaign’s central features: it dressed up a commercial effort to promote an economic sector in informational and educational clothing.

The campaign became an advertising vehicle of its own. Globo never disclosed how much it earned from the initiative, but the films were accompanied by sponsoring brands. Among them were Bradesco, Nissan, Seara, Ford Ranger, and Maturata.

One of the clearest examples of this operation was the film “Agricultura familiar é agro” (“Family Farming Is Agro”), released in 2017. The ad presented millions of small farms as part of the same symbolic universe as agribusiness. The distinction between small producers, large landowners, land reform settlers, integrator companies, meatpacking plants, trading companies, and banks disappeared in the name of a shared identity.

In practice, this formulation also served the sector’s institutional agenda. The agribusiness caucus regularly mobilizes the idea that it speaks on behalf of all producers, including small ones, to defend agendas that serve large landowners’ interests. Environmental restrictions, enforcement, land demarcation, and pesticide regulations can thus be presented as threats to rural areas as a whole — rather than to specific economic groups.

What the campaign showed was harmony. What it left out were the conflicts. “No ad is going to talk about the degree of land concentration, no ad is going to talk about the conflicts,” says João Vitor Sooma, a doctoral candidate at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ) and popular educator at FASE. “On the contrary, it’s going to try to show harmony among peoples, traditional communities, and agribusiness, it’s going to try to say that family farming is agro.”

This erasure became even more evident when the campaign turned to the past. In one of the earliest films, dedicated to sugarcane, the piece claimed sugarcane had been “a Brazilian success for almost 500 years.” The line turned a history marked by slavery, land concentration, and violence into a point of pride. The wealth was on display; the historical conditions that produced it were not.

For Sooma, the campaign tries to separate modern agro from the colonial-era large estate, but this separation runs up against what he calls “colonial fractures”: “land concentration, a history of socio-environmental crimes, land grabbing, the intense connection between the sector and the Brazilian state.”

For the campaign’s defenders, however, the problem wasn’t an excess of symbolic power held by agro, but the sector’s historic difficulty communicating with the urban population.

Ricardo Nicodemos, president of the Brazilian Association of Rural and Agribusiness Marketing (ABMRA), says there was a gap between rural and urban Brazil that needed to be addressed. “People eat, get dressed, use biofuel or other products made from agribusiness raw materials, but they never really had any idea where it comes from or how it’s made,” he says.

This gap, according to Nicodemos, fed stereotypes. In surveys conducted by the association, the image of the rural producer was often trapped between two extremes: on one side, the caricature of the poor, backward, folksy countryman; on the other, the wealthy large landowner, owner of pickup trucks and multimillion-dollar tractors.

Along the same lines, José Luiz Tejon, vice president of Agribusiness at the Brazilian Association of Sales and Marketing Executives, sees the campaign as an educational effort. “It’s encyclopedic content, I’d say, very educational,” he states.

For Tejon, the campaign helped present agro as a force of national prosperity and linked the sector to the idea of tropical sustainability. “Brazilian nature, combined with this model of sustainable tropical agriculture, is a perfect match,” he says.

This defense, however, rests on a central premise: that the campaign merely revealed a positive reality that already existed. It’s precisely this premise that critics contest.

The defense of the campaign as educational content raises an uncomfortable question, however: what happens when the network helping to build a positive image of a sector needs to report on its problems?

The question came up at the Global Agribusiness Forum Talks itself, in 2017. After Schmidt’s presentation, the director of the Brazilian Zebu Breeders Association (ABCZ), an organization tied to cattle ranching, brought up Operation Weak Flesh, launched days earlier by the Federal Police to investigate fraud committed by meatpacking plants. The case had shaken the image of Brazilian meat both at home and abroad.

“We had something happen last week, going back to the meat issue, that really upset us,” said Prata Filho. He then put a question to the Globo executive about the case’s news coverage: “Does the press weigh the positive or negative consequences of a news story like that?”

The question exposed a central tension in the campaign. Normally, a news organization avoids aligning itself with the image of an economic sector precisely because it may need to investigate that sector. If a production chain is the target of an accusation, fraud, or crisis, the press needs the freedom to report on the case without first calculating the reputational impact on its commercial partners.

​Schmidt began his answer by distancing himself from the newsroom. “Tough question, because I’m not a journalist, I’m from the marketing side,” he said. But he then added that there was an assessment of the sources used in news reports: “There’s definitely an evaluation of sources, first of all, to know whether the sources are trustworthy or not.”

In the Weak Flesh case, the source was the Federal Police. The answer, improvised as it was, left a bigger question hanging: by creating a campaign promoting agro, with the language of journalism and the stamp of its journalistic tradition in rural coverage, didn’t Globo also assume part of the reputational risk associated with that sector?

This point is even more sensitive because Globo is not just a private media company. As a broadcasting concessionaire, it operates a public service subject to constitutional principles. Raquel Baster, of Intervozes, a Brazilian organization that works for the democratization of communication, notes that radio and television broadcasters must fulfill educational, artistic, cultural, and informational purposes, in addition to respecting other points of view and the public interest.

National Identity

Ten years later, agro is neither just an economic sector nor an advertising brand. The prefix escaped Globo’s films and began circulating as a marker of identity, belonging, and success: agroboy, agrogirl, agronejo (a blend of “agro” and sertanejo, or country music), mãe do agro (“agro mom”), professor do agro (“agro teacher”), barbeiro do agro (“agro barber”).

“Our own language began undergoing a process of colonization by agro,” says Gerhardt. “Anything is possible if you add agro to it.”

This presence is especially strong in the so-called agro capitals, cities like Sinop and Sorriso, in the state of Mato Grosso, and Luís Eduardo Magalhães, in Bahia. These are municipalities marked by the economic and political strength of agribusiness, where criticism of the sector finds little public space. In these territories, agro appears less as a specific economic activity and more as a way of organizing social life, the urban landscape, consumption habits, and symbols of prestige.

Gerhardt draws attention to these markers of distinction: the pickup truck, the work boot, sertanejo music, the monumental aesthetic of houses and commercial buildings, the omnipresence of the blue button-down shirt. These are markers that help define who belongs to the world of agro — and who is merely trying to get close to it.

But the same operation that turned agro into a broad identity also produced a reverse effect. By presenting itself as everything, the sector came to concentrate criticisms that previously could have been directed separately at soy, cattle ranching, cotton, sugarcane, or oranges. If “agro is everything,” it also becomes harder to say that the problems are isolated cases.

“The negative perception of agribusiness stems from historical reality,” assesses João Vitor Sooma. For him, criticism of the sector doesn’t stem from ignorance, but from concrete experience with deforestation, land conflicts, land grabbing, socio-environmental crimes, and rural violence.

This is where the showcase built by the campaign meets its limits. The message of prosperity, technology, and national pride remains strong. But it now coexists with another one, increasingly present in surveys, news coverage, and social movements: agro é tóxico, agro é roubo, agro é ogro — “agro is toxic, agro is theft, agro is an ogre.” By turning agro into an all-encompassing brand, the campaign also helped make the target of contestation more visible.

In his 2017 talk, Schmidt closed his presentation with a call to the sector itself: “Take advantage of the fact that we set up the ball, and go spike it.” Ten years later, the image still holds up. Globo set up the ball, agro spiked it, and the country lived through a decade marked by the economic, political, and cultural centrality of agribusiness.