Know better. Do better.

It's a hard time to be a farmer in Brazil. 

Prolonged droughts and recent floods have devastated harvests. The flooding in June, which claimed around 170 lives and displaced half a million people, is expected to cause up to a 15% drop in the soybean harvest. Grain production will likely fall by 7% in 2023/24. 

Now, as André Cabette Fábio reports, farmers want to fell more trees and convert grasslands to make up for their losses.

"I now have debt from the droughts and from last year's crop," said Graziele de Camargo, a soy and wheat producer in São Sepé municipality, who had invested heavily to try to make up for previous losses. "But I haven't reaped anything." 

Climate change cost the agricultural sector 240 billion reais ($44.3 billion) between 2020 and 2023, according to analysis of government data carried out by Eduardo Monteiro, a researcher at the agricultural research agency Embrapa.

But farmers in the world's seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gases are often reluctant to discuss climate change, Monteiro said, with some seeing it as an excuse to promote "conservationist practices". 

And the sector is pushing back against calls to rein in deforestation and slow down the conversion of wild spaces to grow crops or rear animals.

Farmers say that the country's 2012 Forest Code guarantees their right to cut down trees on sections of their properties; this could lead to around 85 million hectares (around 210 million acres) within private properties being legally deforested, according to one analysis. 

Deforestation and land conversion exacerbate the effects of climate change, especially in the Amazon, which is approaching a "tipping point" that could turn it into a drier environment resembling a savannah. 

Three-quarters of Brazil's emissions are caused by ranching and the conversion of forests and other wild spaces to farmland.

International efforts to stop deforestation include the European Union's Regulation on Deforestation Free Products (EUDR), which will bar agricultural products produced on recently deforested land from entering the bloc from December. 

But Brazil's farmers are largely undeterred. 

Such bans "come from American and European (environmental) foundations, and we don't even sell to them," said Luis Marasca Fuchs, vice president of the Rio Grande do Sul section of Aprosoja, the association of soybean growers. "Our markets are much more in China and the Middle East." 

Now the situation hinges on domestic battles in court and government, including a Supreme Court ruling expected on a bill from lawmakers with agribusiness ties to limit Indigenous land claims. 

In all, Brazil's Climate Observatory network of NGOs found that there were 25 bills and three proposed constitutional amendments that could expand what is considered legal deforestation, including in the Amazon, if passed. 

Private properties in the Amazon biome must protect the natural vegetation on 80% of their land, but a new bill would reduce that threshold to 50% in municipalities where half the territory is natural reserves. 

Having promised to crack down on deforestation and end illegal clearing by 2030, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seems to have his work cut out.

See you next week, 

Jack