Throughout 2023, the agribusiness caucus in Brazil’s Congress racked up several wins in the form of bills pushing back against the environmental agenda of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. These included the marco temporal, or time frame, legislation, which imposes a cutoff date for Indigenous land claims. The caucus also successfully passed legislation slashing regulations on pesticides. Other bills have been approved by the lower house, known as the Chamber of Deputies, but are still pending review by the Senate. One of these is a proposed framework for a carbon market that would exempt emissions from the agribusiness sector, while another is legislation that would facilitate the reconstruction of BR-319, the highway between the Amazonian cities of Manaus and Porto Velho, which critics say would boost deforestation in the rainforest. Most of the bills passed or poised to pass were championed by the Brazilian agribusiness lobby. Yet even under the highly favorable presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, from 2o19-2022, they failed to pass much of their agenda. But the 2022 election that saw the far-right Bolsonaro lose to the progressive Lula also created the perfect storm to set the agribusiness agenda into motion. Brazil elected a conservative Congress, which has managed to dominate Lula’s weak legislative base. Despite green speeches, vetoes by the president and rulings from the Supreme Court against bills deemed anti-environmental or anti-Indigenous, the caucus kept winning throughout 2023. Those victories, however, didn’t happen overnight. The agribusiness caucus has relied heavily on a think tank to draw…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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