Presentation short abstract

The article shows how Brazil's Cerrado agribusiness uses policy dismantling and digital tools to legalize deforestation while feigning green compliance, amid emerging regulatory frameworks like EUDR, exposing state-private co-responsibility in ecosystem loss.

Presentation long abstract

As the European Union adopts new regulations targeting imports linked to deforestation, we examine how the Brazilian agribusiness sector both relies on and benefits from the legalization of deforestation in the Cerrado while cultivating an image of environmental compliance. Building on Christian Brannstrom’s work (2005) on western Bahia, we first show how the dismantling of environmental protections has intensified through decentralization, emerging through instruments meant to regulate large-scale agriculture, especially concerning deforestation and water use.

Since the 2000s, even as large agricultural enterprises have multiplied their average size and expanded their environmental footprint, successive Bahia administrations have anticipated—and at times deepened—reforms later adopted at the federal level, seeking to attract investors to the agricultural frontier. This dismantling involves not only relaxed rules through exemptions, amnesties, and legal loopholes, but also the simplification of administrative procedures through digitalization and self-declaration, supported by remote monitoring systems based on fragmented data infrastructures.

We then analyze how the digitization of environmental management tools has facilitated the legalization of deforestation, focusing on legal reserve compensation at a regional scale. Finally, we question the “land sparing” narrative, situating it within dynamics of green extractivism that allow agribusiness to promote sustainable intensification while masking its role in driving new deforestation fronts.

These perspectives stem from collaborations among French and Brazilian scholars and highlight the shared responsibility between agribusiness and the State in the accelerating degradation of Brazilian ecosystems, as well as the “biased transparency” produced by digital environmental governance.