In Brazil, Indigenous communities granted farm funds but risk of eviction looms

LARANJEIRA ÑANDERU - Chief Farid Mariano walks proudly amid the trees, vegetables and roots growing in the Laranjeira Ñanderu territory in Brazil's Midwest, retaken by his Guarani and Kaiowá community from a private rancher.

Reoccupied by the Indigenous community in the last two decades, the degraded land has been restored for farming with a lot of hard work.   

Herds of cattle had pounded the ground, making it rock hard, a common problem in Mato Grosso do Sul state, a powerhouse for beef, soybean, corn and sugar-cane.

"It was brutal. We broke a lot of draw hoes here", the chief recalled, standing on the now-arable cropland wedged between a trucking road and a small patch of forest.

Indigenous farming like the Guarani and Kaiowá community’s is a largely unexplored alternative for Brazil to increase food production in degraded pastures and slow the destruction of natural areas like forests and wetlands, destruction that is the country’s main source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Boosting the effort recently has been a shift in a federal programme that makes it possible for the Guarani and Kaiowá and other Indigenous communities to sell food to the government without having secured land titles.

Indigenous people hardly ever access this type of credit. Most subsidies are directed to dominant farm models connected to deforestation, according to an analysis of government data by the Forests & Finance Coalition of NGOs, which aims to improve policies and regulations in the financial sector.

Backlash looms

Under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil is trying to position itself as a global climate leader, using its recent presidency of the G20 group of major economies and the upcoming U.N. COP30 climate summit in 2025 to call for more finance for the environment.

But a backlash looms, as Brazil's Congress is pushing to outlaw dozens of recent Indigenous reoccupations such as Laranjeira Ñanderu, which is producing food with government support while waiting to be fully recognised.

Under the subsidy program for Indigenous farmers, an effort to end the clearing of trees and encourage the regeneration of depleted farmland, each producer may sell up to 30,000 reais ($4,949) a year worth of products to the government, which distributes it to vulnerable communities, prisons, schools, universities and military institutions.

The effort is part of Brazil's Food Acquisition Programme, an initiative launched in 2003 and began focusing on Indigenous people last year.

According to government data, just 5% – 70 million reais out of 1.4 billion reais – spent since July 2023 by the Food Acquisition Programme went to Indigenous farming.

The program allows the Guarani and Kaiowá to provide food for vulnerable communities in the nearby city of Rio Brilhante, where earlier efforts were met with suspicion and hostility.

"Once we tried to sell watermelons, cassava, in the city, and people asked if it was really from our crops or if we had stolen it. We didn't sell anything", said Lileia Pedro de Almeida, a Guarani-Kaiowá leader and human sciences student.

This year, however, Almeida sold the government about 800 reais worth of papaya, bananas and cassava, she told Context.

"For me, it is a great victory to be able to say that the village is nurturing the city", she said, seated in the shade of an "óga pysy" - a huge thatched, triangular-roofed ceremonial house at the center of the territory.

Prohibitive bureaucracy and a lack of expertise from financial institutions in dealing with Indigenous agriculture can make it difficult for them to access conventional credit, said Jeferson Straatmann, senior analyst on socio-biodiversity economics at advocacy Instituto Socioambiental.

"All financing schemes are targeted to agribusinesses, especially cattle ranching", he said, rather than "socially and biologically diverse agriculture".

Promoting traditional Indigenous agriculture

Along with providing income and helping replenish damaged land for farming, the subsidy program helps promote traditional Indigenous agriculture.

Kaiowá farmer Érico Locácio de Lima said he uses a mixture of leaves and earth from the nearby forest patch to fertilize his vegetable bed.

"This is why it's important for us to have native (forest) land … This is Kaiowá culture", he said.

This year, his family sold the government more than 4,000 reais worth of crops, most of it cassava.

The Food Acquisition Programme has created a system that allows the sale of food products regardless of any pending land tenure issues, said Lilian dos Santos Rahal, National Secretary of Food Security.

"We are promoting traditional Indigenous agriculture without expanding the area for cattle, corn, soybeans", she said.

Banks and agribusiness sector push back

But the initiative is in danger, as the nation’s banks and agribusiness sector push back and wield political and economic power that could undermine its benefits to Indigenous communities and to the environment overall.

Brazil is the sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to the EU Emissions Database for Atmospheric Research, 74% of which is linked to farming, data from Brazil's Climate Observatory SEEG system showed.

Most gases are released into the atmosphere by the digestive system of the country's 240 million strong cattle herd or through deforestation to create pastures and grain fields, SEEG data showed.

The country is the world's largest soybean producer and the second-largest beef producer, two industries that often are at odds with Indigenous communities over land.

Most of Brazil's public rural credit since 2008 has gone to soybean farming, granted $47 billion, and beef, granted $45 billion, according to a report by the Forests & Finance Coalition.

Those figures mean the Brazilian banks that channel public funds to farmers are the top financiers of deforestation in the world, as both industries are main drivers of destruction of the country's Amazon and other natural areas, the report said.

That dominance is reflected in Brazil's Congress, where the agribusiness caucus forms a majority that often counters Indigenous rights and authorises further deforestation.

Last year, agribusiness-backed politicians championed and passed a bill limiting Indigenous land claims to those they occupied as of 1988, which could make Laranjeira Ñanderu and more than 60 other territories in Mato Grosso do Sul illegal.

Brazil's Supreme Court is expected to decide if the law is constitutional, but there is no date for such a ruling. 

Meanwhile, pro-farming legislators are trying to change the country’s constitution to bypass potential opposition by the top court.

Most of the Guarani and Kaiowá territories were reoccupied more recently than 1988, often amid deadly clashes with police and farmers.

If the new cutoff date for Indigenous land claims is put into effect, "it will mean death to us", said Almeida.

(Reporting by Andre Cabette Fabio; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst.)