Thread by @SmokeSignalBR

🇧🇷☠️🌎 In 2008, Brazil –the world's largest exporter of coffee, soybeans, and beef– became the world's largest consumer of pesticides, a situation that has worsened under Bolsonaro's administration.

But why? And who benefits from it?

Come with us ⬇️
#ClimateCrisis

The explosion of pesticides in Brazil began in 1965, during the military dictatorship, when the National Rural Credit System linked agricultural financing to the purchase of chemicals. +

In 1975, the National Agricultural Defense Program, a lax regulatory framework that lasted until 1989, ensured the increase in the registration of heavy poisons, including products banned in other countries... +

The approval of transgenic organisms, such as soybeans, from the late 1990s onwards, has also expanded the use of chemicals in the fields, as companies such as Monsanto sells transgenic seeds in combination with pesticides. +

The argument used by the agribusiness to justify so much poison is "to increase productivity and feed Brazilians".

So we ask:

Why 13 million people in Brazil were living in a situation of severe food insecurity in 2019 📈?
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#Pesticides #ClimateCrisis

The Brazilian land ownership structure, where 1% of owners own 45% of the country's land, favors monoculture for export, a production model based on the use of machinery and poison: 79% of pesticide consumption goes to grow commodities such as soy, corn, cotton & sugar cane. +

🇧🇷 Despite the agribusiness claims, we know this is not the only -nor the best- way to produce food.

In the next thread of this series we'll talk about the social and environmental impacts caused by the use of so much poison on Brazilian grown crops.

#Pesticides #ClimateCrisis