The battle to preserve our environment is intrinsically linked to the defense of our national sovereignty. How our country positions itself on the global stage, who our natural resources serve, and who dictates the rules of the environmental game are central issues in ensuring a sustainable future for the Brazilian population.

The increasing frequency of prolonged droughts, devastating floods, and suffocating heat waves are not mere accidents of nature; they are symptoms of a deep environmental crisis that affects all Brazilian biomes. For popular movements in rural areas, the root of the environmental problem lies in the logic of the capitalist system, which prioritizes profit over life and nature. This model of production, consolidated over the last two hundred years, has transformed nature’s common goods, such as forests, water, and minerals, into mere sources of raw materials for the incessant production of goods. The result is rampant exploitation that leads to the constant impoverishment of the soil and workers, while concentrating wealth in the hands of a few landowners. To understand and combat this crisis, we must go beyond individual and superficial solutions.

In this context, two factors stand out as drivers of environmental degradation: the massive use of fossil fuels and the agribusiness model. The consumption of energy generated from coal, gas, and oil continues to rise, driven mainly by the richest nations. Data from 2022 show that per capita consumption in the United States was 63,836 kWh, while in Brazil it was 8,700 kW. This disparity reveals that responsibility for the climate crisis is uneven, although its most devastating effects and consequences fall on the poorest populations of the Global South countries.

In Brazil, agribusiness is one of the main drivers of the worsening environmental and social crisis. Characterized by land concentration, monoculture of commodities for export, deforestation for agricultural expansion, and the intensive use of pesticides and water, this model is proving increasingly unsustainable. In 2023 alone, 3.7 million hectares of forest were cleared worldwide, largely to make way for livestock and agribusiness crops.

The environmental struggle is directly linked to the struggle for sovereignty when we realize that decisions about the use of our land and resources are influenced and often determined by external interests. Large transnational corporations and financial capital, agents of capital, are primarily responsible for an increasingly accelerated pace of exploitation. International pressure for agricultural and mineral commodities drives a development model that depletes our biomes and poisons our waters, without leaving real benefits for the majority of the population.

Faced with the climate emergency, the response of the ruling classes and the countries at the center of capitalism has been to propose “green capitalism”. Under the banner of sustainability, mechanisms such as carbon markets have emerged, which, in practice, create new forms of capital accumulation through the commodification and financialization of nature.

The mechanism is perverse: the “right to pollute” is transformed into a commodity. Polluting companies and countries, located mainly in the Global North, can offset their greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing “carbon credits”. These credits are linked to forests in countries in the Global South, such as Brazil. Thus, a natural biophysical process of plants, photosynthesis, becomes commodified, and our forests, cared for by generations of indigenous peoples and traditional communities, become assets traded on stock exchanges.

This logic reinforces dependence and subordination. Instead of attacking the root of the problem by changing production and consumption patterns, the most polluting countries buy the right to continue polluting, appropriating territories in the South to compensate for their damage. National sovereignty is directly affected when our forests and the lives of the communities that inhabit them are controlled by the interests of the international financial market.

This violation of territorial, environmental, and food sovereignty is also expressed in politics. Is it mere coincidence that the same protesters who unfurled a giant United States flag on September 7 are the same ones who had their camps against democracy and in favor of a coup d’état financed by agribusiness, as stated in the trial records of the coup plotters? Is it a coincidence that the only class organization that did not participate in the meetings convened by the federal government to discuss reactions to Trump’s tariff hike was the National Confederation of Agriculture, the institutional arm of agribusiness? Is it surprising that the Congressional Agriculture Committee suspended its session to address the same tariff hike in order to participate in the riot that prevented voting in Congress in protest against the arrest of Jair Bolsonaro?

The popular response: sovereignty to care for the territory

Overcoming the environmental crisis will not come from those who profit from its existence. The solution lies in building a popular and sovereign project for the country that puts the life and needs of the population first. This means fighting for Popular Agrarian Reform, which decentralizes land and promotes agroecology as opposed to the destructive agribusiness model.

The defense of food sovereignty, that is, the right of peoples to decide and have control over food production and distribution, is another fundamental pillar. It is about radically changing the meaning of agricultural production, moving away from being a mere generator of commodities for export and turning to the production of healthy food for the Brazilian people.

The concrete proposals of the rural and forest movements for a sustainable future include ending illegal deforestation by 2025 and achieving zero legal deforestation by 2027, halting the expansion of the agricultural frontier. Furthermore, the legal recognition of 100% of the territories of indigenous peoples and traditional communities in the Amazon, guaranteeing the security and collective ownership of these areas, which are essential for environmental protection.

The environmental struggle is therefore inseparable from the struggle for national sovereignty because it questions who has decision-making power over our territories and common goods. Without sovereign control over our land, water, and forests, Brazil will continue to be a mere supplier of raw materials to a global market that enriches a few and leaves a trail of destruction for the majority. Building a future where nature and people are at the center requires a national project that is capable of breaking with external dependence and asserting its ability to decide its own course in a fair, democratic, and sustainable manner.

Miguel Enrique Stedile is a member of the National Coordination of the MST and the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

This was first published on the MST website.

The post National sovereignty is at the root of the environmental struggle in Brazil appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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