In June, a small farmer from Maranhão, in northeastern Brazil, described to me her horror when, in 2021, her eight-year-old son appeared soaked after a plane sprayed pesticides over her community. The child thought he had been splashed with water. “That plane is spraying poison,” she remembers saying before rushing him to the shower. The woman said that when the boy came out of the shower, his skin was completely red, and when they woke up the next day, he was covered in blisters and rashes. The wounds covering his body became infected to the point that “people said he was starting to rot.”
Their experience is that of many communities on the front lines of agribusiness expansion in Brazil, where the spraying of pesticides is part of the pressure imposed on small farmers and quilombola and indigenous communities to give up their lands to make way for industrial farms. In some cases, large landowners have used pesticides to deforest the forest, a practice called "chemical deforestation ."
This year's global climate summit, COP30, to be held in Belém from November 10 to 21, will be a battleground between agricultural companies that use pesticides and family farmers, who will present differing views on the damage caused by these industrial practices and the future of sustainable food production.
It will be an uphill battle for farmers who adopt a holistic approach, avoiding harmful pesticides. The Global Alliance for the Future of Food found that only 1.5% of climate finance is being directed towards sustainable agroecological systems . Climate Focus, a group of climate policy analysts, estimated that smallholder farmers receive about 0.3% of international climate finance, despite producing about a third of the world's food .
At the same time, many powerful agricultural companies will be present at COP30 to protect the status quo that promotes and finances their pesticide-driven businesses. These agricultural companies will reinforce their presence at COP30 through "Agrizone," an event space dedicated to the sector, financed with private resources and organized by Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation), a public company.
However, COP30's emphasis on implementing sustainable food systems should address the issue of human rights violations by agribusiness against those living on the margins of its farms.
Despite the risks of exposure to certain pesticides, which include cancer , hormonal disorders , infertility, miscarriage, negative impacts on fetal development , neurological diseases , and death, Brazilian lawmakers continue to reduce protections for communities neighboring industrial farms, including shrinking safety zones and weakening regulatory systems . As protections weaken, the intensity and risk of pesticide-related harm increase.
“There are families who try to resist,” a rural union organizer in Pará told me. “But there comes a point when they can’t because they really can’t take the pesticide problem anymore.” Under this pressure, the entire community structure disappears. The school closes, the church closes. For those who remain, the threats increase. She said that thugs from neighboring farms go to the remaining families and threaten: “Either you sell your land or you will suffer the consequences… Let’s see how long you can hold out.” And then more pesticides are sprayed.
A small farmer from Maranhão said she spent a fortune on medical care for her son, sometimes leaving the family without food to pay for the medicine. She said that since then, the boy has developed asthma, which is triggered every time pesticides are sprayed on the fields of the large industrial farms around the community, through which he needs to pass to get to school. After the woman and her neighbors filed a lawsuit against the neighboring farm because of the spraying, she said that thugs appeared threatening her: if she didn't give up, she would "wake up with her mouth full of ants."
When we asked this farmer if she had ever considered moving because of the threats and constant exposure to pesticides, she said no. “We were born here; we love this place. The only forested area we have is where we live. We live in the middle of the farms, but we belong to this community.”
The COP30 delegations should listen to smallholder farmers and make financial commitments to support agroecological approaches to food production. Smallholder farmers may not have an “Agrizone” at COP30, but they do have solutions for food production in the face of the climate crisis.
