- Local and regional actors, particularly commercial and landowner elites in mid-sized cities, play an important role in the expansion and improvement of road networks. In Brazil, lobbying by private interests played a big role in the development of Rodovia Transamazônica and BR-319.
- In Brazil, agribusinesses exert political power via the Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária (FPA), often referred to as the Bancada Ruralista, a multi-party congressional voting bloc.
- One of the most significant accomplishment of the ruralistas was their 2012 campaign to modify Brazil’s the Forest Code. Changes included amnesty for property owners who had illegally deforested land before 2008 and adjusted requirements to reforest portions of landholdings that had exceeded legal deforestation limits.
The private sector is the largest single promoter of conventional development. Its lobbying organizations tend to be well-funded and staffed with competent individuals grounded in the analytical abilities of traditional economics and the communication skills of public relations professionals. Its members are the quintessential vested interests whose business models rely on access to mineral resources and arable land. They form alliances with labor unions and producer associations that benefit from investments in transportation infrastructure and affordable energy.
Most grower associations and business groups have embraced the principles of sustainability, and many participate in high-profile initiatives to improve the environmental and social performance of their sector. Nonetheless, they interpret sustainability within the context of their current production model, which they tend to view as ‘essential’ to the national economy; consequently, any potential impact is one that must be managed, rather than avoided.
Individuals and corporations join organizations that represent their economic interests; this includes producer associations, landholder syndicates, worker unions, business guilds and chambers of commerce. Some exert influence locally, while others lobby elected officials and regulatory agencies at the national level. The most influential operate within vertical frameworks that communicate the opinions of their base constituency to the higher echelons of the national power structure. Their political influence is directly correlated with their economic power and they form alliances among themselves.
Local and regional actors, particularly commercial and landowner elites in mid-sized cities, play an important role in the expansion and improvement of road networks. In Brazil, for example, local leaders from more than fifteen municipalities have long promoted the improvement of the Rodovia Transamazônica (BR-230). In 2010, they extracted a commitment from President Lula da Silva to pave 1,000 kilometers between Marabá and Itaituba. Like many political promises, the highway improvements have yet to fully materialize, but his successor, President Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016), approved the construction of the Belo Monte hydropower project, which included funds to build a bridge over the Rio Xingu. President Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) celebrated the completion of paving between Itupiranga and Novo Repartimento in 2022.
The same dynamic is now repeating itself via the improvement of BR-319 between Manaus and Porto Velho. Like the Transamazônica, this highway was ‘opened’ in the 1970s during the first stages of the Operação Amazônia. The highway was paved initially, but because of the low quality of the pavement, it decomposed within a few years into an impassable dirt/mud track with only limited deforestation along its 700-kilometer extent between the Amazon River and Humaitá near the border of Rondônia. BR-319 has been significantly upgraded over the past decade, thanks to the efforts of a group of Manaus-based businessmen who organized an association dedicated to its completion (Associação Amigos e Defensores da BR-319).
The newly elected President Lula made a campaign promise to finish paving the highway in 2022, a policy opposed by Marina Silva, his environment minister. Improving the highway has broad support in both Rondônia and Amazonas. Because of the highway’s remoteness, INCRA did not organize colonization projects along it during the 1980s and, in the 2000s, the government established protected areas and sustainable-use reserves in the area. The southern sector, near Humaitá, is now a deforestation hotpot, as migrants and land speculators move into the area in anticipation of a land rush and settlement boom.
In Brazil, agribusinesses exert political power via the Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária (FPA), often referred to as the Bancada Ruralista, a multi-party congressional voting bloc formed in the 1980s to protect the property rights of rural landowners at a time when the landless movement was agitating for the redistribution of large estates. Ruralistas have expanded their political agenda to pursue pro-development legislation that supports industrial mining in protected areas, hydropower development and road building through wilderness landscapes. In 2023, it was the most powerful voting bloc in Congress, with about 300 deputies in the lower house (out of 513) and 47 senators (out of 81).
Perhaps the most significant accomplishment of the ruralistas was their campaign in 2012 to modify the Forest Code. Among the features of the ‘reformed’ regulatory system was an amnesty for property owners who had illegally deforested land before 2008 and a modification of the requirement to reforest portions of landholdings that had exceeded legal deforestation limits. In 2019, the coalition’s leader, Tereza Cristina Corrêa, joined Bolsonaro’s cabinet as agriculture minister, where she implemented policies to strengthen property rights, weaken environmental regulations and promote agricultural exports, while executing Bolsonaro’s policy to defund the delimitation of Indigenous territories.
The ruralistas are considered one of a trio of interest groups with exceptional influence over Brazilian politics, which represented the base of Bolsonaro’s electoral coalition. The popular press calls them Boi, Bíblia e Balas (Beef, Bible and Bullets), a reference to conservative voters who support the expansion of the agricultural frontier, socially conservative evangelical Christians and supporters of law-and-order policies based on aggressive police action. Some voters, such as a gun-toting, God-fearing owner of a small ranch, incorporate all three elements, but others are motivated by a tribal-like affiliation with a particular group that supports politicians who respond to their collective and individual fears. These might include a culturally conservative evangelical smallholder who dislikes gender-equality policies or an urban resident who supports extrajudicial police operations to fight crime.
Although these coalitions are influential, they are not sufficiently cohesive to control Congress, because their members belong to political parties more interested in transactional politics than ideology. The two-tier presidential election ensures that the chief executive has an electoral mandate, but the proportional system used to elect the lower house of Congress ensures that whoever wins the presidency will be forced to negotiate a legislative agenda. In 2023, the coalition backing the Lula administration had the declared support of only 44 per cent of the lower house, of which only thirteen per cent were members of the president’s Partido do Trabalhadores (PT). His congressional coalition depends on centrist parties with a history of joining whatever coalition is being cobbled together by the election winner. Transactional politics ensure that interest groups like the Bancada Ruralista retain veto power over the environmental and social policies needed to ensure conservation of the Amazon.
Banner image: Newly cleared section of Amazon forest from South Brazil. Credit: Rhett A. Butler.
“A Perfect Storm in the Amazon” is a book by Timothy Killeen and contains the author’s viewpoints and analysis. The second edition was published by The White Horse in 2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).
To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, Chapter Three here, Chapter Four here and Chapter Five here.
Chapter 6. Culture and demographic defines the present
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