Cerrado: U.S. investment spurs land theft, deforestation in Brazil, say experts

Twenty years ago, these men lost the basis for their livelihoods. Possessing little money, they relied on the land on which they farmed to provide them with food. Today, they only get by with the support of state assistance. Photo by Alicia Prager This is the sixth of six stories in a series by journalists Alicia Prager and Flávia Milhorance who travelled to the Cerrado in February for Mongabay to assess the impacts of agribusiness on the region’s environment and people. Edjarsson Cardoso places folders full of documents — some more than 20 years old — on the pool table of a dimly lit bar in the rural Brazilian town of Riachão das Neves. With him stand seven other men who wish to prove their right to use farmland, a place they called home, stolen from them all those years ago. One-by-one, all of them were driven off the land where they once grew their food. After changing ownership for decades, today that property belongs to a Brazilian subsidiary of Harvard University’s endowment fund. It appears that Harvard’s US$37.1 billion endowment fund and its manager Harvard Management Company (HMC) has invested in the Brazilian agribusiness frontier — investments steeped in past accusations of forged land titles, illegal deforestation and violent expulsion of small-scale farmers from their homes. This is not an isolated case of financial investments fuelling land grabbing. During the global financial crisis of 2007/08, international investment firms, when faced with turbulent financial markets, increasingly turned toward rural farmland…

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