Brazil presidential candidates make ag industry pitch

Brazil's leading presidential contenders Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and incumbent Jair Bolsonaro aim to raise agricultural production and exports while reducing environmental impacts, but fail to provide details on how to achieve those goals.

Brazil's leading spot in global agribusiness and the sector's key role in the domestic economy, accounting for more than 25pc of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) in recent years, make agriculture a key issue for candidates vying for the country's presidency on 2 October.

Left-leaning Lula — who led the country from 2003-2010 — is seen by European countries as a politician more committed to environmental preservation policies. Conservative Bolsonaro has taken positions less friendly toward environmental concerns and has been accused of actively bolstering deforestation.

Lula proposes a "zero net deforestation" policy, vowing to aid the "reforestation of degraded areas and forest recomposition in biomes." Bolsonaro pledges to combat illegal deforestation and promote sustainable agriculture. The term "illegal" is widely used by rural leaders aligned with Bolsonaro to distinguish between an environmental movement that wants to stop all deforestation and current legislation that requires farmers in the Amazon to preserve 80pc of the property's total area, but allows the remainder to be used for crops.

Land reform

Lula's government plan mentions the commitment "to a new model of urban and rural land use, through an agrarian and agroecological reform."

Governments before Bolsonaro have expropriated unproductive lands that were then distributed in small plots to families. Those families were often part of the landless workers movement (MST) — a group aligned to left-wing political parties that aims to redistribute land to rural workers for small-scale farming in a family production model.

By contrast, Bolsonaro's administration has highlighted the policy of granting property titles to 326,000 farming families. Known as land title regularization, the policy tries to document ownership families who were encouraged by the Brazilian government in the 1970s and 1980s to populate and plant food crops in certain regions of the country — especially in the north and northeast.

Bolsonaro's plan does not mention expropriations — where land is seized from farmers who it determines are not using the land as they should and given to families connect to MST. Instead, it aims to reduce conflicts in the countryside. Another section of the program, related to security in rural areas, mentions "the strengthening of legal institutions that ensure access to firearms," signaling the continuity of policies adopted in favor of arming the population, which would help farmers fight members of MST from illegally occupying their unused farm land, which has been a significant source of conflict in some areas.

Agriculture and cattle-raising

The candidates promise to keep creating policies to support financing to the agriculture section, and argue over who has offered the most through the government's long-running subsidized loan program for farmers.

Both presidential campaigns also vow to facilitate financing lines for the adoption of sustainable practices that reduce carbon emissions.

Recently, statements made by Lula on possibly regulating agribusiness and the need to "discuss the price of meat in the country" — whether to continue current export levels or leave more for the domestic market — caused controversy among rural leaders.

On the first topic, the former president's plan speaks of recreating public food stock programs to guarantee minimum prices to farmers and prevent excessive increases in consumer prices, which contribute to higher inflation. Lula's team denied any kind of formal regulation and released two statements in September highlighting the candidate's commitment to encourage agribusiness, including rural producers of all sizes, especially small ones.

As for the export issue, Brazil is the world's largest beef exporter, so decreasing exports would be seen as detrimental to domestic producers. China is the main buyer of Brazilian meat.

Neither candidate mentions how they would conduct their relations with the Asian country, which is also the biggest buyer of Brazilian soybeans.

Leadership

Although most of the country's agribusiness leaders have been aligned with Bolsonaro since the 2018 election, Lula's connections with the sector has been growing. Some politicians from Mato Grosso, the country's largest agricultural state, have even declared their support to the former president.

The best example is Lula's former agriculture minister, Blairo Maggi, who was once considered the largest soybean grower in the world through his family's company.

Lula is leading in the polls, with 48pc of tallied voter intentions, 17 percentage points above Bolsonaro's 31pc, according to an Ipec poll conducted from 25-26 September.

Regardless of whether the election is determined in one or two rounds of voting, negotiations between the winner and the agricultural sector must advance, as both candidates' proposals lack key details.

By Alessandra Mello