“Agro giants buy grains from farmers fined for using Indigenous land in Brazil”, 29 May 2023

An illegal grain distribution scheme in Mato Grosso, publicly acknowledged by farmers and civil servants, may have taken soybeans and corn planted without permits on Indigenous lands in the state...to warehouses of some of the largest global commodity tradings.

A joint investigation by Repórter Brasil and O Joio e O Trigo reveals commercial relations between seven agribusiness giants (Bunge, Cargill, COFCO, Amaggi, ADM do Brasil, Viterra and General Mills) and farmers fined...for irregularly cultivating crops inside the Pareci, Utiariti and Rio Formoso Indigenous lands (ILs), from the Paresí people...

However, the grain sales invoices accessed by the report do not identify the farms as being inside the Indigenous lands as the location of the production — this would make business unviable since it is illegal to plant and to purchase production from interdicted lands. The documents indicate other agricultural properties as the origin of the grains, but all of them are neighboring (in some cases, next to) the IL and belong to the same producers fined by IBAMA for carrying out irregular plantations...

Questioned by the report, most companies guarantee to keep a “rigid control” over their suppliers’ social and environmental situation. General Mills..said Edson Fermino Bacchi was no longer a supplier or “a fixed business partner,” “having only occasionally supplied ingredients to the company in the past.”

Bunge did not comment on its relationship with the producers mentioned but assured that its monitoring “is able to identify changes in land use and soybean planting on each of the farms” where the company originated and that it calculated whether the volume of soybean delivered was in line with a farm’s production capacity, which reduced the risk of triangulation. Amaggi, meanwhile, said it used “satellite images and geospatial information” to trace the origin of soybeans. ADM and Viterra did not respond to our attempts to contact them, but the space remains open for comment.

Cargill and COFCO have appointed ABIOVE — the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries — as their spokesperson. The entity, in turn, guaranteed that soybean produced “in areas interdicted by environmental inspection agencies and overlapping with Indigenous Lands [among others] does not enter the sector’s supply chain.” But although it makes reference to “the potential risk of triangulation” of cases pointed out by this report, ABIOVE did not make specific statements about it, limiting itself to listing measures that “are routinely used” by its members to reduce the problem. The full text of all statements can be read here. After the publication of this story, Abiove informed that its statement also represented the position of ADM and Viterra...