Jair Bolsonaro administration released 2,182 pesticides between 2019 and 2022, the highest number for a presidential administration since 2003, according to data from the General Coordination of Pesticides and Related Products (CGAA) of the Ministry of Agriculture.

The survey shows that pesticide registrations have been growing year by year in the country since 2016. It also points out that of the 2,182 pesticides released in the Bolsonaro government, 98 are totally new, which is also an all time high for a government in the historical series; the rest are considered generic, i.e., they are “copies” of raw materials or final products based on ingredients already on the market; of the total releases, 1. 816 are chemical and 366 are biological: the biologicals have low environmental impact and are focused on organic agriculture – under Brazilian law, they are also called pesticides; the registrations of biologicals during the Bolsonaro government also broke a record for a presidential administration.

Last year alone, 652 pesticides entered the market, the highest number for one year in the historical series. The figure also represents a 16% increase over the 2021 total, which had already been a record. Of the 35 released for rural producers, 22 were considered “very dangerous to the environment” by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama).

“We did a lot with very little, President, because there was no corruption in your government”. On March 29, this was how the Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply, Tereza Cristina, said goodbye to the position, in a speech, next to Jair Bolsonaro. A great ally of the president and of the agribusiness agenda, Cristina left to run for the Senate in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

Since the beginning of her administration, which started on January 1, 2019, she tried to loosen the rules for pesticide approval. This administration has released 1654 new pesticide products, a record high.

The executive secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Marcos Montes, was announced as the new minister and took office on March 31. Pontes is former president of the Parliamentary Front for Agribusiness and federal representative for the PSD party in Minas Gerais. In a statement about the change, the Federal Government said that the new minister takes office “with a policy of continuity of the management implemented in the last three years”.

The Ministry of Agriculture published in the Official Federal Gazette the release of 56 new pesticide products – 51 generic and 5 new substances, according to a survey made by the G1 news channel. Of these, 37 are chemical pesticides and only 19 are biological, which can be used in commercial crops and in organic food production, for example.

Since the beginning of its mandate, the Bolsonaro administration has broken records in the number of agrochemicals allowed for agriculture. In 2020, there were 461 new registers, just behind the historic 474 mark, reached in 2019, according to the report.

The newspaper Folha de São Paulo, in partnership with the Política por Inteiro initiative, launched the Environmental Policy Monitor, a tool that gathers official acts related to the environment published in the government official gazette . Through keyword mining, they select publications of interest, which undergo analysis by a team of experts responsible for indicating the most relevant and suggesting a classification. So far, 606 standards and regulations issued by Bolsonaro’s administration have been identified and classified.

With biweekly updates, the project’s goal is “to allow the public to have more knowledge about the federal government activity regarding the environment, which is not always simple, considering that norms for the sector are published together with thousands more related to other areas”.

Agrochemicals that have 2.4-D (dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) in their composition, used for weed control in soybean plantations, have caused serious damage to rural producers of various crops in the region of Campanha, Rio Grande do Sul State, especially among wine growers.

In an interview with the newspaper Brasil de Fato, Valter Potter, president of local wine producers association, reported that they have observed the effects of the contamination over time, but the impacts have worsened in the last three years. In 2020, a laboratory analysis conducted by the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM) on leaves and other affected materials identified 2.4-D in 87% of the samples, which corresponds to the loss of 1 million liters of wine, just among the members of the association, estimates Potter. The effects were harsher among small and medium producers.

When sprayed, the herbicide can spread for up to 30 kilometers, which makes it difficult to identify its origin and possible claims for compensation. The producers who ask for the suspension of the use of dichlorophenoxyacetic acid in Rio Grande do Sul. After several attempts at dialogue with the municipality and the State, two associations of wine farmers filed a public civil lawsuit against the state to prevent even greater financial losses.

In less than two years, Bolsonaro’s administration has approved the trade and use  of 910 new agrochemicals in Brazil. The information comes from Robotox, a project by Agência Pública and Reporter Brasil, that monitors the authorization for use and commercialization of new agrochemicals via Twitter.

The 910 new agrochemicals represent 30% of the number of products sold and used in Brazil – 2976, according to the project.

The National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) issued a warning of “great danger” until October 9 because of the high temperatures recorded at the beginning of the month. In the Midwest and Tocantins State, there is a risk of death from hyperthermia. In an interview to CNN Brazil, Mamedes Luiz Melo, an Inmet meteorologist, pointed out that the scenario is caused by a “myriad of factors”, such as the long period without rain and the recent fires that struck the Amazon and the Pantanal.

The effects of the heat wave are already being felt in the economy. In the city of Bastos, the largest egg producer in São Paulo State, the heat — which reached 41ºC throughout the week — caused great losses to the region’s poultry farmers. Heard by Globo Rural, Sérgio Kakimoto estimates that his farm lost between 40,000 and 45,000 animals and predicts that the loss could reach 70,000 hens. According to an article on the G1 portal, the damage led the cost of eggs to rise by approximately 10%.

In Belo Horizonte (MG), an inquiry carried out in 17 food stores  in the capital found an increase in the price of fruits and vegetables because of the powerful heat that affects the region. For the newspaper Hoje em Dia, Feliciano Abreu, coordinator of the Mercado Mineiro website, pointed out that the transportation of goods is compromised by high temperatures.

While Pantanal wetlands face record breaking rates of forest fires, Agriculture Minister Teresa Cristina stated that the problem could be mitigated if there was more livestock activity in the biome. She also said that the devastation was because of the sizeable amount of “dry organic matter” in the region. The minister’s speech alludes to the “thesis” of the “firefighter cattle”, presented by the livestock leader Leopoldo Mário in an article in Folha de S. Paulo in September. The farmer stated that cattle would be the “fireman of the Pantanal” for cleaning up the pasture, and defended the permission of controlled burning as a measure to reduce fires in the region.

According to data from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), 14% of the Pantanal area was burned only in September, a historical record of annual devastation since the beginning of the monitoring work carried out by the agency in 2002. In addition to the drought that marked the period, data from the Integrated Multiagencies Center for Operational Coordination of Mato Grosso (Ciman-MT) point out that the fires recorded in the state were caused by intentional human action. According to an analysis by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), INPE’s partner in monitoring the region affected by the fires, the fires consumed 26% of the total area of ​​the Pantanal in 2020, from January to September.

Tereza Cristina, Brazilian minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply, stated that her ministry will start a land regularization process in the Amazon via “remote monitoring and detection” systems. According to an article by the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, this will happen based on satellite imagery. “We have people working in many regions of the nine Amazonian States, but we will start with three”, she said.

According to the newspaper Estado de São Paulo, the government will evaluate over 93,000 irregular properties, with an average size of 280 hectares.

The regularization is the vice president’s Mourão, head of the Amazon Council, bet to curb deforestation. His argument is that it’s hard to hold accountability when the landowner is unknown.

On a live streaming on YouTube, President Bolsonaro once again called the oil spill a “criminal act” and that the government has known and worked on it for the past two months.

Together with the National Secretary of Fishery on the video, they assured that fishing is not  forbidden in the affected  areas. “There is no  notification about  contaminations. The few we received were  about people covered in some oil  that used remover to  clean up,” the Fishery Secretary said, adding: “The fish is a smart animal. When he sees an oil patch there,  Captain (referring to president Bolsonaro), he  escapes, he is scared. So obviously you can eat your little  fish with  no worries; lobster, shrimp, all perfectly sane”, in another epic moment for the Brazilian internet. 

President Bolsonaro agreed with the Secretary of Fishery, complementing: “Obviously, sometimes, a turtle gets caught there in the oil patch – not to say that nothing happens right? One fish, one dolphin, it might happen, but it’s fine”. 

President Bolsonaro also affirmed that the investigations continue and that “it  is more than proven that the oil is from Venezuela. Maybe the  ‘left’ will  attack me because I said that”. He promised that, despite his busy agenda, he would visit the affected areas and “take a dive somewhere”. 

Still streaming, the president jumped on, to once again,  talk about how he plans to revoke the conservation status for the Angra dos Reis Bay, where he fantasizes of the “Brazilian Cancun” to attract foreign investors.

Since taking office in January, Bolsonaro’s administration accelerated the  release of 262 new pesticides and  agrochemicals, an unprecedented pace. Approximately ⅓ of the approved products contain  substances forbidden by the European Union, including Acephate and Atrazine which have been banned from the EU for more than 15 years.

The government also changed the classificatory system used for toxicity, now adopting one called GHS, which NGOs and experts say is weaker than current standards used in Brazil. The National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) published the new regulatory framework for the assessment of the risk of pesticides. The measure changes the way packaging presents the risks of using products.

The institution says that the criterion follows an “international” standard but admits that very toxic products may have a “softer” classification. As there are now six categories, instead of four, it will be more difficult for a product to be classified as “extremely toxic”. The packages will feature fewer images of “skulls” and more informative texts. Entities criticize the measure, saying that it may bring more risk to rural workers with low literacy.

A Greenpeace report shows that the release of agrochemicals increased by 42% in the first few  months of Bolsonaro’s government. Between January 1st and April 30th, the federal government approved the use of 166 new agrochemicals  in the country. Of the newly released products, 44%  are “highly or extremely toxic” and only 6% are biological; 28% are not allowed in the European Union due to toxicity risks.

During a public hearing with specialised commissions at the National Congress, Tereza Cristina, Minister of Agriculture, detailed plans to release the use of dozens of new agrochemicals in Brazil, highlighting that the National Sanitation Agency (ANVISA) changed the process to make it ‘simpler’. 

She claimed that it was important to speed up authorizations to stop the use of smuggled/uncontrolled products, while also labelling as “misinformation” the scientific studies that indicated health and environmental risks of the newly authorized agrochemicals. In the first 100 days of Bolsonaro government, 152 new agrochemical products were officially approved by agricultural and sanitary agencies; on the day after the public hearing, another 31 products were approved, of which 16 were categorized as highly toxic by the sanitary authorities. She referred to the toxic products as “medicine for plants” and declared that most contamination cases happened due to individual mismanagement of the products. As an example, she mentioned that “sometimes the person smokes a cigarette while applying the chemical product and ends up ingesting it”.