- Brazil produces more soybeans than any other nation, and the city of Sorriso, Mato Grosso, leads this production, which drove the municipal per capita GDP from 27,000 reais to 132,000 reais ($15,800 to more than $25,000) in the last 10 years.
- The highway running through town helps illustrate the contrast between gated communities of luxury homes along one side and precarious homes where agricultural workers and family farmers live amid vulnerable social situations on the other.
- Family farmers struggle to keep producing amid land disputes and clouds of pesticides that destroy their crops, ruin honey production and raise cancer rates — which are twice as high in Sorriso than the state average.
- Lives are also lost to organized crime in Sorriso, the municipality with the sixth-highest murder rate in the nation, and also to agribusiness itself, with dozens dead after becoming engulfed in soybean silos.
Seen from the air, the BR-163 highway cutting through the city that proudly calls itself the National Agribusiness Capital reflects an abrupt socioeconomic divide — as if it were a border dividing two opposing realities like the wall that separates Israel from Palestine.
The robust economy on the west side of the highway is evidenced by block after block of luxury-brand retail shops, streets filled with pickup trucks costing hundreds of thousands of reais and ever-increasing numbers of luxury homes and gated communities.
Meanwhile, on the east side, cars made decades ago circulate on roads first paved fewer than five years ago in a landscape composed of simple, unfinished brick houses. Billboards for buses that carry anonymous workers to and from the northern state of Maranhão also dot the landscape. Many here have even given up their lives to the production chain of Cerrado gold, also known as soybean.
The generation of wealth and propagation of inequality in Brazil’s central-west are two faces of the one single development project put into practice in the 1970s. Based on the logic that Amazonia and the Cerrado needed to be occupied by colonialists from southern Brazil, the project went into overdrive with the globalization of food commodities, consolidating Brazil as the world’s breadbasket. It also consolidated Brazil’s inability to feed its own population.
“The colonization project was a federal program [during the military dictatorship] that allowed companies to purchase large swaths of land and organize themselves commercially and strategically to resell them,” explains Vitale Joanoni Neto, research professor at Mato Grosso Federal University.
In short, the strategy was to create large parcels of rural land connected to urban land. It was a way for the colonizing company to make its product more attractive with the promise of planned cities for future Cerrado farm owners. And it was the truth: In Sorriso, one of the cities built by the colonizing company, neighborhoods popped up offering a very good lifestyle. The problems ended up belonging to the people who didn’t fit into the framework of this development plan. Agricultural workers arrived later with neither land nor houses and were therefore segregated from the opportunities for progress.
Brazil, global soybean capital
Brazil dominates the global rankings for soybean production today, with a 2022-23 harvest amounting to 319.9 million tons. Sorriso was the municipality that most contributed to this bounty, with 2.1 million tons. Of the total soybean exported from Brazil, 75% goes to China, where it is largely fed to pigs, the animal protein most consumed by the Chinese.
The $167 billion pumped into the Brazilian trade balance from the sale of so much soybean is vital to the economy. It leverages GDP growth and stabilizes the Brazilian real on the global dollar-based economy.
From a local perspective, money from agribusiness forced a revolution on the municipalities of north-central Mato Grosso state. For example, the per capita GDP in Sorriso jumped from 27,583.96 reais in 2010 ($15,800 at the time) to 98,309.14 reais ($24,457) in 2020, and in 2021, the per capita GDP hit 131,899.11 reais ($25,413). Over the same period, the city’s population nearly doubled, from 66,521 inhabitants to 110,635 in the last census, taken in 2022.
In a part of Brazil where wealth is derived from the fruit of the land, what are those with no land supposed to do? It’s a question that a large contingent of the people living in Sorriso ask themselves. According to data from the federal government’s Cadastro Único social service platform, some 30% of the local population lives in situations of social vulnerability. According to The Atlas of Rural Brazil, the region boasts the greatest concentration of land in all of Brazil. And those who have to fight for land experience firsthand the other side of the social apartheid imposed by agribusiness.
The Alvorecer Settlement: ‘They want to corral us’
For more than two decades now, Milton and Eva Batista have been itinerant crop workers, moving among the municipalities of north-central Mato Grosso. The home they recently built inside the Alvorecer Settlement is their fifth — all their previous homes were demolished by trucks and tractors in land repossession operations.
“This is the first wooden house that I’ve built. I did it by myself — just me and God,” says Milton, father of six, three of whom have been raised inside land occupation settlements. Before he built this home, he and his family had been living under a tarp for years.
Both Milton and Eva are 65 years old and have lived in the Alvorecer Settlement since December 2022, when they were invited by community leader Gerson Sousa Santana to move back out to the rural part of the municipality. Before this, they had been, in their words, “suffering” in their life on the outskirts of urban Sorriso. “We went to that city with nothing but the clothes on our backs,” says Milton Batista. At that point, they were leaving behind three years of work invested in a settlement that had been razed and turned into soybean fields.
Aside from finding the land on which they were able to make their home inside the Alvorecer Settlement, here they also found stories similar to their own. The first land, occupied in 2014, was completely reverted in less than seven months. After being removed from the land, the people organized themselves into an association and definitively occupied 180 hectares (445 acres) belonging to sugar producer União where 113 families lived at the time.
Then, one of the most influential soybean families in the city claimed ownership of the territory, and the pressure placed in court worked in their favor. In 2019, an injunction reduced the size of the settlement by more than 90%. “They told us they wanted to trap us in a pigsty,” recalls association president Gerson Sousa Santana.
The people who lived there tell of being violently evicted from the settlement. To begin with, the operation was not carried out legally: Santana says that neither he nor the association’s lawyer received judicial notice of the removal. Tractors and helicopters simply arrived unannounced and gave the people living in the settlement only a few minutes to gather their sparse belongings and regroup on a 16.9-hectare (42-acre) plot of land delineated by the judges. The land that they live and farm on today produces only enough soybean and corn to feed one family.
The violence was repeated in the fields. Where a wall had stood, the landowners dug a 2-meter- (6.6-foot-) deep trench between the two territories — an impassable ravine into which the animals the 80 families living there depended on for their food fell and died. The association has requested the following in court: 5 hectares (12.3 acres) for each family, including a native reserve. “We are asking for decent housing and land to grow our food, that’s all,” summarizes Santana.
The Jonas Pinheiro Settlement: ‘Agro wants it back’
Alvorecer is neighbor to the Jonas Pinheiros Settlement, upon which its inhabitants in fact depend for water and electric power. An older settlement, Jonas Pinheiro is much farther along in its land regularization process, but is still dealing with legal issues.
The Jonas Pinheiros Settlement was ratified by INCRA (the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform) in 1999, the same year that the first families moved onto the 7,300 hectares (18,039 acres) composing the site. Marcio Manoel da Silva and Maria Boaventura de Sousa Silva (known as Sula) arrived in 2002 and since then have been living off the food they grow. “The only thing we know is growing food,” affirms Marcio da Silva. Just like the other 400 families living in the settlement, the Silvas live with the risk of being removed from the land.
In 2021, the court annulled an expropriation case for the entire area. A lawsuit filed by the family that owned the farm claimed they should recover the land because of errors committed by INCRA during the regularization process. The threat of eviction resulted in many different reactions from the people living there. Some gave up living off the land altogether and some even became sick. “There were people who fainted and ended up in the hospital,” relates Sula, who is president of the Cooperative of Small Rural Producers of Vale do Celeste.
“When we came here, no one cared about this land. Everyone thought it was basically unproductive,” da Silva recalls. “Now that we’ve shown that food can be grown here, that the land does have some value, agribusiness wants to take it back.” The crops from Jonas Pinheiro proved to be especially fruitful during the COVID-19 pandemic: The family farmers received, for a limited time, a relief kit of machinery and tractors from the city. They were able to produce record crops of fruits and vegetables that were later distributed among people in Sorriso.
The announcement of the federal Plano Safra subsidy program in 2023 raised expectations among family farmers to be able to raise funds for purchasing new equipment and machinery, which would leverage sustainable, strong production as they grew in the pandemic. But to their shock, the settlement’s application was rejected because of an environmental embargo due to the fact that the area destined for a collective environmental reserve for all of Jonas Pinheiro had been invaded and occupied.
The swath of land destined to be an environmental reserve has been occupied since the start of the settlement project. It began with some of the settlers seeking out more hectares to plant their crops. After two decades, hardly any native vegetation remains and the profile of its occupants has changed: The area is almost completely covered with soybean fields and pastures full of white cattle.
For Marcio Manoel da Silva and Maria Boaventura de Sousa, this is just one more stranglehold that agribusiness has on family farmers. It is a cycle in which farmers devoid of resources produce less and less, finally giving up their way of living. Many rent their land inside the settlement so that fraudulent middlemen inside the associations work to persuade more and more family farmers to cede to the interests of the large landowners and plant more soybean.
Pesticides: Human disease and animal extermination
The invasion of soybean farming into the Jonas Pinheiro Settlement Project has brought new problems. There are many accounts of low-flying planes dropping pesticides on plantations occupying rented land. Farmers in the Alvorecer Settlement describe similar scenarios. “In soybean planting season, they pass over with planes to spread the poison. But they don’t just open up over their crops, they drop the poison on our land too. It rains poison and it destroys our fruit,” Santana says. “My mother got sick because of the pesticides and I had to move her to a rented place in the city.”
Santana cites the most recent scientific studies as proof. The article “Environment, health and pesticides, challenges and perspectives on defending the health of humans, the environment and the workforce,” published in 2023 by researchers at Mato Grosso Federal University, details the relationship between pesticide use and cancer rates in the state between 2001 and 2016.
Over the 15-year period, the average rate of cancer cases in Mato Grosso grew by 19.45%. But what most calls attention is that the increase of cases reported was higher in the municipalities located in north-central Mato Grosso, including Sorriso, where the use of pesticides is the highest. Over 2 million liters (528,000 gallons) were spread in 2019 alone. While the state average for cancer is 166.97 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, in the agribusiness capital, there were 304.35 cases per 100,000.
The study concluded that there is “a strong correlation” between the use of pesticides and cancer cases, adding that there is a “positive correlation between cases of acute intoxication, death due to intoxication, childhood cancer, fetal deformities, miscarriages and suicides.”
The indiscriminate use of pesticides has an even more devastating effect on the animal kingdom’s most important pollinators. Family farmer Zauri José Biavatti, known as Bispo, has been working his land located between the Jonas Pinheiro Settlement Project and one of the largest soybean farms along BR-163 for 19 years. He has observed that the number of airplanes passing overhead to drop pesticides on crops is increasing as the years go by. With this increase, so is the death rate of his bees.
“Bees always die, but it’s normal to just lose two hives a year, three at the most. Since 2020, I have been losing many more than that, and this year, in 2023, I lost 15 of my 19 hives,” Biavatti says. His is not an isolated case.
More than 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) away, family farmer Oridio Queiroz tells how his bees were exterminated on his own property. “You can’t extract all the honey at one time, so I had collected from just three boxes. At that point, everything was fine,” he says. “Two days later, a friend called saying he needed to see my bees. When I got there, I was devastated. The bees were gone — all of them dead.” Queiroz lost some 250 kilograms (550 pounds) of honey, valued in financial terms at about 12,000 reais ($2,240), plus more than 10 years he had invested in keeping the hives.
Many investigations carried out at separate locations in the municipality of Sorriso found that bees were dying because of the excessive use of pesticides. The most evident case was the conviction of a cotton farm owner who was fined 225,000 reais ($42,000) for having exterminated more than 100 million bees in the region between Sorriso, Sinop and Ipiranga do Norte. The investigations carried out by the Mato Grosso Farming and Cattle Raising Defense Institute (INDEA) found the presence of the active ingredient fipronil.
Family farmers tell our reporters about the use of illegal pesticides purchased in Paraguay and unapproved for use by ANVISA, Brazil’s national health agency.
An expanding luxury market
There are neighborhoods in Sorriso’s downtown where one could imagine being in an affluent part of the United States. On streets dominated by pickups and SUVs, the economic clout is evident. More than 10% of the local vehicle fleet in Sorriso is composed of pickup trucks, especially large ones like Rams, which cost a minimum of 240,000 reais ($44,750). More than 12,000 license plates for vehicles in this category were issued in Sorriso in 2023.
The local real estate market is also booming here. The average market price per square meter here has increased by 80% since 2020, reaching an estimated 2,772.35 reais ($517) today. In comparison, in São Paulo, Brazil’s wealthiest city, the average price per square meter was 7,153 reais ($1,300) at the end of 2023, according to the purchase and sales report by QuintoAndar, an online brokerage. The prices of mansions sold inside Sorriso’s luxury gated communities rose by up to 140% over the last four years.
The inflation affecting the rich — who pay as much as 1,000 reais ($185) for a single piece of clothing at the top-end shops on Avenida João Brescansin — in kind affects those with lower incomes. Rent for middle-class homes in the western part of the city (two bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom, powder room and two-car garage) can be more than 6,000 reais ($1,120) per month. Rent in the eastern part of town, where the poorest people live is, almost always more than 2,000 reais ($375) per month for a simple one-bedroom home with a single living and cooking area and one bathroom.
During the period between the eviction and subsequent resettlement at Alvorecer, Milton and Eva Batista lived for a few months in the borough called Nova Fraternidade, located on the outskirts of town. There, they shared a four-bedroom home with another family, paying 1,500 reais ($280) a month for half of the rent, which ate up nearly all of their family income. “There were days when I’d work all day just to be able to buy food for dinner in the evening. Sometimes I didn’t even manage that much, and I had to ask other people for help,” Milton Batista says.
“We have to keep a garden because everything is too expensive,” Eva complains. She shows our reporters their cassava, sugar cane, watermelon, orange, banana, avocado, okra and passionfruit plants on the plot of land they work in the settlement. “It’s all just for us to eat. We do the work ourselves so we don’t have to buy it.”
Batista’s concern is justified if one looks at the prices in the supermarket: Mato Grosso’s basic food allotment (called “cesta basica” in Brazil) is one of the five most expensive in the country; and in Sorriso, it costs more than in the rest of the state.
The life-threatening work of agribusiness laborers
Those who don’t have access to land need to work and, obviously, nearly all the jobs are related to agribusiness. The average national wage for agricultural workers is 2,381 reais ($445), (according to December 2023 data from CEPEA Esalq/USP, the USP Center for Advanced Studies in Applied Economics) — about 15% less than the average pay for service jobs.
Workers trapped between the high cost of living in Sorriso and low salaries end up taking on jobs with longer workweeks and insufficient job safety conditions. And this is an equation that oftentimes results in tragedy.
In a study titled “Agribusiness and lethal workplace accidents in grain storage facilities in Mato Grosso,” researchers Luciano Bomfim and Jacob Binsztok at Fluminense Federal University gathered nationwide data from 2019-21. The study found that the majority of work-related deaths happened in the state of Mato Grosso, with 17 lives of the total 37 lost in Brazil. It also identified noncompliance with safety norms as the main cause of the deaths: In 70% of the cases, the company employees were not using the necessary safety equipment at the time of death.
The predominant type of accident in these cases was grain entrapment or engulfment: 28 workers died by drowning in grain silos; the other causes of death were collapse (three), falls (three) and gas inhalation (three). It was in this manner, by asphyxiation inside a soybean silo, that Francisco Neves da Silva lost his life at the age of 36 in May 2021. Two of his colleagues also died in the accident: Francisco Carvalho dos Santos, 32, and Francisco das Chagas Abreu, 21.
Like thousands of people working in agriculture in Sorriso, Francisco Neves had migrated from the state of Maranhão. Since he was a young man, he had used his physical strength to work in grain storage, where he earned enough money to support himself and to send money home to his mother in Maranhão. He married hairstylist Beatriz Bandeira, and they raised a family for more than 10 years, including three of her children from a previous marriage.
Beatriz was present during part of the fire department’s rescue attempt, which lasted more than 10 hours. That afternoon, she had received a number of phone calls from a friend of theirs asking for news of Rap, which was Francisco Neves’ nickname. The tone of voice seemed serious, so she insisted that the friend tell her what was going on. It was then that she learned that three men had been engulfed on the farm where her husband worked in Nova Ubiratã, a neighboring city 30 km from Sorriso.
“I grabbed my things and went straight there. Every time I tried calling my husband and he didn’t pick up, I knew he had been involved,” she recalls. At 3:15 the following morning, the first body was recovered, that of Francisco Carvalho. Then, another body appeared. “When the firemen lifted the stretcher up to the top, I could tell it was him. I recognized my husband by the boot he was wearing. When they lowered him down, my brother-in-law and I went over and we could see that he was gone,” she remembers.
The third victim, Francisco das Chagas, was still alive when he was taken out of the silo. While his colleagues had been buried under tons of soybean grains, his body had slid to an area where the entrance of grain had been blocked. As there was no room available for him at the local public hospital, he was taken to the Sinop Regional Hospital where he died three days later; the cause of death was poisoning due to the more than 10 hours during which he inhaled the air between the soybeans.
At the time, Fire Sergeant BM Moraes told the website MT Notícias, “Unfortunately, none of the workers were using safety equipment. It was a case of negligence that will be investigated at a later date by the authorities.” At present, no one has been found guilty.
Exploding urban violence rates: Organized crime co-opts young people
Beatriz Bandeira has lived through two tragedies exemplifying the misfortunes suffered by the part of Sorriso’s population that is isolated from agribusiness-driven wealth. Aside from losing her husband in a soybean silo, she also lost two sons to organized crime: the oldest was shot and killed while riding his motorcycle and, six months later, the youngest was kidnapped by heavily armed bandits wearing hoods who broke into their home. He has been missing for four years now.
Crimes like this continue to swell statistics in Sorriso. A ranking created by the Brazilian Court of Public Safety in 2023 places the city at sixth nationwide for homicides (with 70.5 killings per 100,000 inhabitants). It is the first on the list outside northeastern Brazil and the only city in Brazil’s central-west to appear among the nation’s 50 most violent. Sorriso’s murder rate is three times the national average, at 23.4 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
This wave of violence began in 2013 but has intensified over the last two years, according to Naldson Ramos, coordinator of the University of Mato Grosso’s Nucleus for the Study of Violence and Citizenship. Just over 10 years ago, the Sao Paulo-based criminal faction PCC began to position itself at strategic points in the state of Mato Grosso in an attempt to control drug trafficking routes between Bolivia and Brazil. Territorial control had long been in the hands of the Rio de Janeiro-based Comando Vermelho (Red Command), or CV.
The situation turned critical in 2022. An internal divide within the CV in Sorriso resulted in the creation of a new faction composed exclusively of local criminals. The dissident group identified as Tropa Castelar allied itself with the PCC, which then gained its first entry to the city. The dispute for sales points, territorial control and co-option of agents from public safety forces set off a war that kills indiscriminately — victims may or may not be associated with the warring factions.
Ramos, who studies the data on violence in Sorriso, affirms that it is a mistake to believe this is merely a case of “criminals killing criminals,” as state Governor Mauro Mendes (União Brasil) has stated. When looking closely at homicide numbers, he has also identified an increase in deaths resulting from police violence and common conflicts between armed men.
“There is a very wealthy drug consumer market in Sorriso. We have reports that young rich people’s parties in the city are fueled by alcohol, cocaine, skank and amphetamines,” Ramos says. “So it’s become very profitable territory for drug traffickers. This has increased the risk of conflicts involving the use of firearms.”
Increased crime is, perhaps, the collateral effect of the social and economic inequality that most affects those who benefit from it. The concentration of wealth among the rich and lousy wages for average working-class citizens compose a perfect storm for criminal factions to co-opt young people into the world of crime.
Banner image: Contrasting landscapes in Sorriso, Mato Grosso: above, soybean monoculture farming; below, family agroforestry farms. Image by Fellipe Abreu/Mongabay.
*Fellipe Abreu and Camila Quaresma collaborated on this article.
