In Agro's Defense. Brazil is split - we all know that. But no one can agree on how it is split.
Brazil is so very much split, that it's even split when splitting it. Some people say that it's split between people who put the beans over the rice versus those who put them side-by-side. Leaving the rice without a roof, and the beans without a bed, and the broth spreading throughout the plate, with nothing to contain and support the beans.
As you see, I have picked a side in this discussion. But some people say that what's actually splitting Brazil is the color of the beans. Because in most of Brazil, we eat "carioquinha" beans, that is beige-colored.
Funnily enough, cariocas - Rio people - eat black beans. So, the only people who don't eat the supposedly Rio beans are Rio people, and those who do call it "carioca". .
. The only plausible explanation is that no one wants to be associated with those flavorless, colorless beans. As you see, I also have picked a side in this debate.
But some always remind us that there is a deeper split in Brazil, related to neither the beans' placement nor their color, but rather, their presence, since due to inflation, much of the Brazilian population can no longer afford them. And those people, who remind us of the famine in Brazil, are excluded from their group, creating a new split. On one side, you have those who want to forget that Brazil heads to its ruin, and on the other, those can't stop thinking about the downfall not only of Brazil, but of humanity as a whole, right on a Friday night or a Saturday morning.
And yes, I know that you, Greg News viewer, has picked a side on that debate. My brothers! Well, then let us talk about this age-old Brazilian split, oft exploited by politicians: the split between big cities and the countryside.
Jair Bolsonaro gained a lot of presence over that split. In his, and many people's, eyes, on one side you have the snobbish cosmopolitan elite - the artistic, academic, intellectual class. And on the other, rural workers - poor, exploited, and undervalued, yet responsible for providing food for the Brazilian people.
Agro - the agribusiness - is the engine of our economy. We'll never campaign against Agro, because it - agriculture, livestock - really are the engine of our economy. The agribusiness is the engine of our economy.
And the agribusiness is satisfied with me. He's like a talking doll, built to say just one thing. He's like the Sérgio Malandro of politics.
He has three built-in buttons to activate his lines, and I wouldn't press one of them, because it could have a shrimp stuck there, and it could get ugly. So, avoid it. But I do like the way Bolsonaro pictures our economy as a train engine.
It says a lot about it. After all, Brazil hasn't invested in trains since the 1950's, and has one of the worst rail transport systems in the world. If Brazil is a train, then Bolsonaro is a cow over the tracks.
But not all artists oppose Agro - within the so-called artistic class, ruralists have sworn defenders, such as Leonardo, the singer. You, producers. .
. You make this country move! There's some artists, some half a dozen morons, who badmouth farmers.
. . Badmouthing those who sow the land!
Under sun and rain. . .
The sun on your heads, to bring food to the tables of those bums who never leave their apartments near the beach. All while badmouthing farmers. Note - I've never badmouthed those who SOW.
On the contrary, I've always been in favor of planting! Inside apartments, even! But Leonardo is right.
It's the farmers who bring food to all Brazilians. So, this show is fully in support of Agro. The true Agro.
The rural workers, those who do, indeed, feed us. Brazilian family farming alone is responsible for producing the 15 main types of food we consume. Things like rice, beans, cassava, onions, oranges.
. . Which equals circa 70% of everything Brazil eats.
It's a lot of food, and we all know that we only really love those who feed us. We're the puppy dogs of the farmers. Sorry for bringing up this sensitive subject, but your dog only likes you because you feed it.
Try stop feeding it to see if it loves you for your personality. "It's because of my pets". .
. No. "It's because of my musical taste!
" No, it's just the dog food. Currently, circa 25 million Brazilians work in farms. And for centuries, they've faced the worst working conditions of all Brazilians.
Basically, the average rural worker does not share Leonardo's lifestyle, who owns a farm with thousands of head of cattle, but lives in a mansion in Goiânia, and who's bought a luxury apartment in Santa Catarina last year. Meanwhile, the extreme poverty rate in rural areas is of 25%, while in urban areas, it's 5%. Rural workers also face the worst informal employment rates, placing their living conditions under extreme risk.
Rural workers knew "Uberization" way before Uber. In fact, they've been dealing with it since feudalism. In Brazil, few things changed over the last few centuries - those workers have the worst rates of labor analogous to slavery, which is how my legal team asks me to call "slavery".
Every year, thousands are rescued from farms that practice that kind of work, which is so similar to slavery that it's analogous to it. And you may be wondering - isn't the rural caucus defending them? Well, I don't know if you can count on them, because sometimes, a given rural congressman owns one of the farms analogous to slave quarters.
A 2018 study showed that one in every four rural business-owning congressmen had already been caught violating labor laws, and, once again, their workers were in conditions analogous to slavery. It's like labor laws are like a Nextel internet connection - only works in big cities. And you may say, "Well, labor laws aren't really great in big cities either".
Well, neither is Nextel. Meanwhile, it isn't Agro that's thriving in Brazil - it isn't the farmers who work on the fields. But rather, corporations specialized in sucking money from the fields and transferring it to an overseas bank account.
There's a great word for them - it's in vogue, really: oligarchs. In relation to war in Ukraine, a lot is said about oligarchs, about Putin, as if that's exclusively a Russia thing. But we have our own.
Oligarchs, by definition, are people who have lots of money and lots of influence in government, who benefit from that influence to make more money, and who benefit from that money to have more influence. Well, the corporations that make money over our farm workers are a true oligarchy. Like Bunge.
Bunge is a Netherlands-born multinational, but that's currently registered in the Bermuda tax haven. Yes, the company's name is "Bunge", as in "shake your bun-ges", and funnily enough, its shares are "down" in Bermuda. Bunge, huge bun.
. . ge.
. . , 50 inches wide, is the biggest oil seed - mainly soy - processing company in the world, a multi-billion dollar business with insane gains in the financial market for thousands of shareholders, most of them in affluent countries.
But where do these Bunge profits come from? Well, they get them out their bun. .
. ge! A big share of Bunge's profits is yanked from Brazil's soil.
In their last published survey, over 1/4 of Bunge's profits came from here, and that fortune has only grown recently. Yes, they did some work on the bun. .
. ge. And nine months later, the results showed!
Until recently, Bunge's CEO was this guy, Raúl Padilla. Not to be confused with that other Raúl Padilla - the actor that played Jaimito the postman in "El Chavo". "To avoid fatigue" and whatnot.
Bunge's Padilla doesn't really look like a farmer. Maybe it's the suit, maybe it's the slicked back hair, covering his bald spot. .
. And yes, as a bald man, I have the right to make bald-phobic jokes. I make "bald" stances.
At the tail end of 2021, Padilla announced his retirement and was replaced by Julio Garros, this other guy, with more hair, yet the same suit, and the same shirt, unbuttoned at the same point, just to show how "caszh" he is. A "I may lose a friend, but never a joke! " kind of guy, who laughs like this.
"Yep, I'm a joker! " Yet another giant in the soy business, Cargill, an American multinational, is represented in Brazil by Paulo Sousa. Not the Portuguese guy who coaches Flamengo, but this guy in a tight suit who works with plantations, yet his head is completely deforested.
The hypocrisy. . .
And the same shirt with the first button unbuttoned, because "he's a player! " He was the guy who celebrated the devaluation of the real and the increase in agribusiness exportation, saying, "I know it's not cool seeing the bright side to such a big crisis, but all this is going to help us. The devaluation of the real gave men of the field the desire to sell their products".
Yep - this guy speaks for "men of the field". Maybe golf fields, or the administration field. Because real men of the field?
I'm not sure they can pick what to sell and when. I love how he says that "the devaluation of the real gave men of the field the DESIRE to sell. .
. " Yeah - farmers really didn't want to sell them before. They'd grow soy to make bracelets, or to keep in the living room.
. . Safeguard them to make crafts.
The people who decide what to do with what "men of the field" produce are people like Paulo Sousa. Guys in suits, at Berrini offices. Because it's in Berrini, not in Mato Grosso, where Cargill's Brazilian office is located.
He says he's a farmer by birth, but it's by Berrini. His resume also says that he worked as a global soy trader at Cargill's World Trading Unit in Geneva, Switzerland, for five years. Because Geneva is so the home of the Brazilian rural worker.
In Geneva, Paulo got a better understanding of the rural workers' desires. Via Zoom call. People currently making banks with fields are people far away from fields, like the man accused of being the biggest land-grabber in Brazil.
He's called Antônio José Junqueira Vilela Filho, and he's charged with invading and deforesting over 115 square miles of the Amazon and selling them to oligarchies. Yes, because land-grabbing only exists to feed that sector. Antônio José is more well-known as "AJ".
AJ Vilela. That's great. He's a land-grabber who likes to be called "AJ", or "loan shark".
Maybe he thinks it's better than land-grabber. "Just call me a loan shark". AJ is under investigation for cooperating with a million-dollar loan shark scam.
. . no.
A million-dollar scheme with his apartments in São Paulo. He's been accused of keeping workers in conditions analogous to slavery. AJ was fined over 300 million reais, but didn't pay them.
He's a real Brazilian legend, both a loan shark and a swindler. All self-sufficient. Funnily enough, Leonardo the singer doesn't see people like AJ as the enemies of the rural workers.
Not the people who make money off of slavery-analogous work. But rather, artists who live in apartments, THEY'RE screwing with rural workers. But the disconnect between rural workers and the de facto big wigs of plantations goes beyond that.
Because right now, the biggest oligarchs in the sector aren't really farmers, like many of us think, but rather, financial market investors. BTG, the biggest investment fund in Latin America, has announced that it will be releasing the first billionaire funds tied to agribusiness. So, the financial market wants to convince us that this is Agro's new "look".
So much diversity, huh? People with vests, people without vests. .
. Here, no one's forced to wear vests! You can go without, if you want!
Diversity! They're the famous iPhone ruralists. Truth is, there happens a cultural and financial appropriation over the concept of "Agro" by corporations, and we often fall for it, calling those companies, and the people that make money through them, "Agro".
But "agro" just means "fields", and those folks are far away from Brazilian fields. And they definitely do not know what a hoe is, unless they're doing DA - distance agriculture. In the Congress, the rural caucus, too, is less and less field-y.
Just look at its main leaders. The Agricultural Parliamentary Front is currently headed by MDB's Sérgio Souza, but used to be headed by Alceu Moreira and Nilson Leitão, whose last name means "pig", but who has never slept on a pig pen. In common they all have that none of them own rural properties.
They're mainly tied not to fields, but to the sector's oligarchies. Sérgio Souza alone was given over 400,000 reais to finance his campaign by sector owners. And multinationals like Bunge, Cargill, and Syngenta maintain the Pensar Agro Institute, which is the rural caucus' logistical engine.
Which should really be called the "oligarch caucus", since the only farm those guys know is that Record show, and the only harvest they oversee is in FarmVille. Through the oligarch caucus, people with bank accounts in Bermuda and living in Geneva gained a lot of power in Brazil. After all, it's the Congress that passes things such as tax exemption for soy and pesticides.
Yes, Brazilian soy does not pay exportation taxes, and every pesticide has a reduction of at least 60% in VAT rates. Pesticides also don't need to pay PIS, PASEP, or Cofins. Which is super unfair, because cachaça is fined 80% in tax rates, despite Corote working as a pesticide!
I can prove it to you. And as result, last year the government passed the biggest number of pesticides in history. And pesticides aren't "a different sector", divorced from agribusiness - they're the same sector.
And that's what's so hard for us to understand. Companies that produce pesticides, such as Basf, Bayer, and Syngenta, also finance that rural caucus. Monsanto, for instance, one of the world's main producers of transgenic soy, belongs to Bayer - and it says a lot that Monsanto belongs to Bayer, and not vice-versa.
Because it wasn't the soy company that made so much money that it could afford to buy the poison company. It was the poison company that got so loaded that it bought the soy company. It's like pesticides aren't a way of producing more soy, but rather that planting soy is a way to sell more pesticides.
After all, you can't have a soy latifundium without pesticides. But making food for people in large scale without poison? That is possible.
The UN released a report confirming that agroecology is totally capable of producing quality food and in sufficient quantity to feed the world's population, no pesticide or transgenics required, all while preserving the environment. But it was the UN saying that, and no one takes the UN seriously. .
. Shoulda been in a chat group chain mail. When's the UN firing those?
UN on Telegram, UN stickers. . .
Over 1500 pesticides have been passed in these three years of Bolsonaro government. That's almost half of all pesticides we've approved in history. One of these new poisons is the cyna.
. . cycani.
. . cypro.
. . cycla.
. . It's this one.
I'm feeling like Zema. "It's written down here! " Right?
The name itself points to it sucking, because whoever names a product like this probably doesn't want people to know what they're consuming, or you'd call it "Sazon", not cynacli. . .
cyclari. . .
cyclaniliprole! I did it! It is also classified as "very dangerous" by Ibama, which, mind you, is an agency that rescues cobras.
Since the rest of the world's been pushing pesticides away, the sector will need somewhere to dump all of that unwanted junk, and Brazil, as you all know, is the Craig's List of misery. "Send it here, we'll handle it". From pesticides to Nazi generals to hydroxychloroquine to Iron Maiden.
. . Give it to us!
We're a big yard sale, we're sick of the planet. And just now, in early February, the Chamber passed bill 6299, the so-called "poison bill", which the Senate will intubate you with at any moment now. This bill, described thusly in a TV ad produced by Syngenta, the biggest pesticide company in the world.
WHY CHANGE THE LAWS OF PESTICIDES? SYNGENTA BIOLOGIST -Cooking is great, huh? And if you, like me, worry about what your family eats, then you may have heard of the new draft bill that aims to change the laws ruling pesticides in Brazil.
Did you read on it and got worried? Then maybe I can help you. Can she, though?
I don't know. . .
because she works for Syngenta, and she lives in Basel, Switzerland. Maybe she can help by sending us some organic food from there. Or a plane ticket.
Because in Switzerland, she won't need to consume the many pesticides her company produces. Many of them are banned there, in fact, so they have to sell them here. That's the case of profenophos, for instance, a strong neurotoxin that affects human beings' brain development, especially children.
And it's produced by Syngenta. But the children of that Syngenta biologist-slash-actress won't need to consume profenophos, as long as they stay in Basel. To be fair, she seems to have filmed the ad back when she still lived in Brazil.
In fact, maybe that's why she keeps slicing vegetables, but never puts them in her mouth. We've watched the whole thing. She cooks them, and when it's time to taste test them, they cut away.
How can she know what's in them, right? The Syngenta ad doesn't make it clear that the bill the company defends will take away from Anvisa and Ibama the power to prohibit a substance that contaminates the soil and kills people. The Ministry of Agriculture alone will decide.
But the Ministry is controlled by the sector's oligarchs, not by rural workers. Minister Tereza Cristina had part of her campaign funded by Syngenta associates, and she's surrounded by people like Sérgio Luiz Bortolozzo, an Arararaquara oligarch who owns a latifundium in the Brazilian savannah. Bortolozzo is responsible for the sectoral chamber of corn and sorghum, tied to the Ministry of Agriculture.
Bortolozzo's farm was once involved in a scandal of contamination of people in a neighboring town with glyphosate. Studies point out to 83% of the mothers in the town having their breast milk contaminated, and one in every four pregnant women having suffered miscarriages. He should get his name changed to "Abortionlozzo".
Abortions are only outlawed in Brazil if they have the mother's consent. If pregnant women want to have an abortion, they just have to work on soy farms. And that's not all - the poison bill also wants to dictate that should a pesticide not receive a conclusive evaluation within two years, the Ministry has to issue a temporary registration authorizing its use.
The bill basically makes it so that if it's being hard getting it approved, they it can be used even without approval. But if it's being hard getting it approved, then maybe that's a sign that it SHOULDN'T be approved. "So, Mr Eymael since you're trying to be President for 20 years now.
. . Oh, just take the position already!
" But one of the things the Syngenta biologist says is true: cooking really is great! No, something else she says right after the excerpt we showed. She says that the approval of pesticides in Brazil takes very long.
True. That because the agencies responsible don't have enough funds. Anvisa only has 26 technicians in the whole country overseeing the evaluation of hundreds of pesticides every year.
In the USA, their agency has 850 people. Anvisa hires less people than Greg News to deal with even more toxic content. And our show has to deal with the Minister of Tourism playing the accordion.
Ever seen it? Wouldn't recommend it. It's like musical profenophos.
The agencies responsible for evaluating pesticides in Brazil are completely devalued and underfunded, partially because the companies won't help them. In the US, requesting the evaluation of a new product costs around US$ 630,000. In Brazil, companies pay, at most, US$ 1,000.
And in some cases, it can get to as low as US$ 53. Not US$ 53,000. US$ 53.
That's 260 reais. So, approving a pesticide can be cheaper than filling up your car. And drinking the gas may be safer.
If the poison bill is approved, we'll worsen an already-unsustainable issue. They already spill so much poison on our soils that all of Brazil's water is contaminated. In 2019, the Ministry of Health revealed that the water in 92% of Brazilian cities had a pesticide in them.
Special props for the people of Rio, who are drinking a mix of pesticides, coliforms, and geosmin. And no, I'm sorry to say. .
. Maybe Rio people are thinking, "the pesticide can kill the coliforms! " No.
Not a thing. Actually, it's more likely that they form some kind of Megazord. So, if you try to buy an organic vegetable - like I do, though I often fail - you then go home and fill them with pesticides when washing them.
Maybe just eat the dirty carrot, because dirt kills less than glyphosate, I think. That same Ministry of Health study tested 27 different types of poison, and 1/4 of the cities studied had all 27 pesticides in their water. Among those 27, 16 are registered by Anvisa as extremely or highly toxic, and 11 are tied to the development of chronic diseases, like cancer, fetal malformations, and hormonal and reproductive dysfunctions.
WHO estimates that 80% of all cancer cases are caused by exposure to those poisons. See? You always say that the Bolsonaro government never gave you anything, but it may have given you a tumor, or a polycystic ovary, or a limp dick.
Don't be ungrateful! But in this process of collective poisoning, the main victim isn't the urban Brazilian, who only eats some poison on a lettuce, drinks some pesticide drops. .
. Rather, it's the rural worker, again. They're the first and main victims of poisoning by pesticides.
They're the ones suffering miscarriages thanks to glyphosate. They're the ones getting countless diseases due to exposure to poison, from cancer to depression. After all, only a tiny amount of the pesticides stay on the plants.
Almost half of the poison contaminates the soil, and another share is taken to neighboring communities via the wind, where rural workers live. Our poison oligarchies spread pesticides like Bolsonaro eats farofa. Ever seen it?
Stuff gets everywhere - land, sea. . .
They're the ones who are attacking the workers who are not only hit by the sun, like Leonardo said, but also glyphosate and profenophos. And yet, despite all of those attacks on the rural workers, Leonardo the singer, who came from fields, and who's admired by men of the field, believes that their enemy is the "apartment artist", rather than the poison oligarchs. Leonardo, of all people, whose art allowed him to live far from pesticide-related work.
But he's not the only one at fault - so are we, who constantly point our weapons at the fields, at Agro. . .
We bought into this idea that Brazil is split between city and the countryside, when they are a single country. What isn't "this country" are corporations, that exploit our fields and benefit from that idea that city folk are enemies of farmers. City and fields are compatible.
What isn't is rural work and depression, miscarriages, slavery, mass contamination. What isn't compatible is billionaire profits exempt from taxes, with bank accounts in Bermuda. The fields and the cities have to stop this love-hate relationship.
"I won't stop being a dreamer". Agro isn't our enemy. Brazil needs to save Agro.
Saving its own soil and everyone who lives on it. And that isn't a struggle for city folk, who want to stop eating pesticides. It is also - more fiercely - a struggle for rural workers, who are already dying, being exploited and poisoned.
We need to "learn how to say goodbye" to the poison oligarchy. But we have to "let it go without tears in our eyes. When that day comes, it'll come thundering down, we'll see a love storm".
That's it for this Greg News! See you.
