Agribusiness in Brazil and its dependence on the use of pesticides

By virtue of its availability of arable land, tropical climate, and abundance of water resources, Brazil is one of the largest agricultural and livestock producers in the world, with agribusiness geared towards global trade. Consequently, the country appears on the international scene as one of the main consumers of pesticides. This article presents the current panorama of pesticide use in Brazil and highlights the tendency of government permissiveness and support in this sector, through the increase in the number of registrations granted annually and strategies to modify the current legislation. The methodological procedures were: discussion about causes and consequences of pesticide use, considering economic interests, social and environmental impacts; collection and analysis of data made available by official Brazilian agencies on the pesticides marketing and main cultivated products; study of Bill 6,299/2002; and positioning of public institutions linked to work, health and the environment, through the technical notes issued by them. Conceptually, we found our arguments on Political Ecology and Geography ideas to demonstrate that the exacerbated use of pesticides in Brazil is a great environmental and social injustice, contaminating natural resources and the Brazilian population that handles or consumes food and water with high levels of residues. The data reveal that the productive specialization has led to a progressive increase in the use of pesticides in Brazil, and the government has been extremely permissive of, and even conniving with, the interests of companies linked to agribusiness, making the process of evaluating and releasing pesticide products even less rigid.