From Belém - Formally, it is supposed to be a space dedicated to sustainable agriculture and technological innovation. In reality, it welcomes and gives a voice to all Brazilian and international agribusiness players. After part of the sector had opposed the decision to host COP30 in Brazil, the federal agency Embada, i.e. the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, decided to set up an area, not far from the Blue Zone, dedicated entirely to agri-food companies. While associations, public bodies and companies competed for space in the Green Zone, as they do every year, all the big names in agribusiness have been invited to participate, with pavilions and events, in the AgriZone or, as the sign at the entrance says, the “Casa da agricultura sustentavel” (House of Sustainable Agriculture).
The AgriZone is financed mainly by the CNA (Confederação da Agricultura e Pecuária do Brasil) and then by the big names in agribusiness: diamond sponsors include Nestlé, Bayer and even the Gates Foundation, which in a panel presentation describes Africa as the next new frontier for agribusiness. The programme of events, however, is endless.
A lobby out in the open
It is the first time that something like this has happened at a climate conference, activists say: there have always been many side events around COPs, but they were privately hosted. And, for the most part, held in the so-called Green Zone. The anomaly here is that the AgriZone is a space set up by a public entity with funds coming from private individuals, i.e. agribusiness companies, one of the most controversial sectors in Brazil due to its practices, from monoculture to deforestation to the violation of the rights of indigenous peoples.
Companies such as JBS (a Brazilian meat company, considered the largest in the world), Nestlé and Bayer (the world’s second-largest pesticide manufacturer) are always regular guests at COPs. But if last year at the climate conference in Baku there were over 200 agribusiness lobbyists among the national delegations, most of them precisely from Brazil – 35 lobbyists from the agricultural sector, including over twenty representatives from meat companies JBS, BRF and Marfrig, as well as industrial groups such as the Brazilian Beef Exporters Association, according to data from DeSmog and The Guardian – there was no need to hide their identities behind national badges this year.
“Brazil, in general, has been the only country controlled by the Portuguese in the Americas since colonial times whose main economic activity has been agriculture, with crops such as sugar cane, cotton, coffee and latex, typical of the Amazon,” Valmir da Costa Albuquerque, president of the Associação dos Pequenos Produtores Rurais e Moradores de Murutinga, active in the state of Parà, Belém, tells Renewable Matter. “At present, monoculture continues to thrive in the Pantanal and Amazon biomes, with soya, cotton and maize destined for the export market.”
Greenwashing and controversy
AgriZone’s mission, not even concealed, is to debunk the idea that agribusiness is synonymous with deforestation, stress activists and associations. After all, according to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), global food systems are responsible for about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions. There will be no solution to the climate crisis, says the latest report from the United Nations’ scientific body, unless rapid reductions in food system emissions and radical changes in the way we produce and consume food are made.
This AgriZone really appears to be a counter-offensive by agribusiness: according to an analysis by DeSmog, published in recent days, large companies in the sector are ramping up a campaign to present themselves as the “solution” to climate change, rather than the cause, promoting ambiguous concepts and controversial technologies.
The report lists several themes that businesses resort to in order to engage in greenwashing, and which are the subject of forums both within the COP programme and among the AgriZone panels. The names are appealing and reflect careful study in communication: “Tropical agriculture” (regenerative agriculture, carbon offsets); “No additional warming” (climate neutrality, GWP for counting emissions); “Bioeconomy” (circular economy, biogas, biofuels, socio-bioeconomy); “Feeding the world” (sustainable development goals, nutrition, “Brazil has just been removed from the world hunger map”); “Big Agri as progress and development” (agri-food as a modernising force throughout the Global South); “Efficiency is enough”, or even: “Fossil fuels are the real problem”. The list goes on. Any other examples? “Net-zero emissions’ dairy farming”, “low-carbon soy”, as advertised by the Brazilian federal agency Embrapa to relaunch Brazil’s “green” agribusiness in its collaborations with Nestlé and Bayer.
The mechanics are reminiscent of those put in place over the years by oil lobbyists promoting “green” technologies: to pesticide use and methane emissions from livestock farming, food companies, accused of being linked to the expansion of deforestation, are presenting themselves as part of the solution, despite actually being the primary contributors to these structural problems.
In short, AgriZone clearly intends to create a counter-narrative to the indigenous one of the Amazon COP. At the very least, to counterbalance it. But given the power that the sector wields in Brazil (which shifts consensus and votes, and Lula himself was arrested for bribes linked to agribusiness), this space represents a clear political message: agribusinesses don’t need to infiltrate the Blue Zone, like oil lobbyists, and are saying “we are at home here, where we operate openly. And once the spotlights are turned off, we will not stay in the corner. Quite the contrary.”
AgriZone: companies attending and programme
Many names are featured among the pavilions of AgriZone: PepsiCo and agrochemical giants Bayer and Yara, industry lobby groups such as CropLife (an international association for companies involved in pesticides, seeds and agricultural biotechnology) whose official mission, as stated on its website homepage, is to “drive innovation for sustainable agriculture.” Furthermore, the US Dairy Export Council, a non-profit organisation representing the commercial interests of the US dairy industry and US milk exports, and Netafim, an Israeli irrigation company reported by the UN Special Rapporteur for its involvement in the illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
On the other side are the numbers. Ahead of COP30, Foodrise, Friends of the Earth U.S., Greenpeace Nordic and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy published a 50-page independent analysis on industrial animal agriculture, Roasting the Planet: Big Meat and Dairy's Big Emissions: between 2022 and 2023, the 45 leading meat and dairy multinationals produced over 1.02 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases, more than Saudi Arabia as a whole, the research points out.
The study revealed that the five largest emitters in this group – JBS, Marfrig, Tyson, Minerva and Cargill – jointly produced approximately 480 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions (CO₂ equivalents), mainly methane, in the supply chain from livestock farming to production; this exceeds the emissions recorded by large oil companies such as Chevron, Shell and BP.
Over half of the emissions are methane, the most potent gas in the short term and critical for staying close to 1.5 °C, as confirmed by the first report on the global state of methane by UNEP (the United Nations Environment Programme), published just a few days ago: emissions are still rising, albeit at a slower rate than in the past, and countries need to do much more to meet their commitment to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030 compared to 2020 levels.
The Caminho Verde Brasil project
At another COP, in Dubai, when Brazil had just been chosen to host COP30, the Brazilian government announced a $100 billion public-private partnership to convert 40 million hectares of degraded pastureland into monocultures of soybeans, sugar cane and other export crops.
The stated “green” objective was to restore carbon to the soil through these crops and to give companies around the world the opportunity to invest in these lands to offset their fossil fuel emissions. Since then, the Brazilian government has dispatched missions around the world, from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi, from Beijing to Europe, in search of foreign investors for the project, now called Caminho Verde Brasil.
The Saudi sovereign wealth fund Salic has expressed interest in the project: the latest mission by the Brazilian government dates back to early 2025. The United Arab Emirates’ sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala, through a Brazilian subsidiary, is planting 180,000 hectares of macaúba trees in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savannah, an area unique in the world for its biodiversity, to produce biofuels for jet aircraft (a biofuel often advertised in the Emirati media).
According to the NGO Grain, which for decades has been active in supporting small farmers and preserving biodiversity, large agri-food credit institutions have also joined the Caminho Verde Brasil project. These include the Dutch Rabobank and the Brazilian BTG, both of which are purchasing land for tree plantations to produce carbon credits for Microsoft. “Supporting deforestation-free agriculture for the Cerrado biome,” says Rabobank.
Not to speak of interests in the livestock sector. The Brazilian meat processing company BRF and the Halal Products Development Company (HPDC), a subsidiary of the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), announced in April a $160 million investment in a new food plant in Saudi Arabia. The plant is scheduled to start operating in mid-2026 in Jeddah, through a joint venture between BRF and HPDC, BRF Arabia Holding Company.
“Caminho Verde Brasil is a strategic initiative by the federal government that aims to promote environmental recovery and productivity in the agricultural sector by rehabilitating degraded areas and promoting sustainable practices,” says the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock. At present, Brazil has around 280 million hectares dedicated to agriculture, of which 165 million are pastures, with around 82 million hectares degraded in some way. The programme aims to recover up to 40 million hectares of low-productivity pastureland over the next ten years, converting these areas “into high-yielding arable land without the need for deforestation,” the Ministry points out. The search is open for international investors “interested in promoting sustainable development.” And AgriZone, attended by government delegations from around the world, also serves this purpose.
The activists’ viewpoint
During COP30 in Belém, the subject of agribusiness was central, as mentioned. The demands of NGO activists could be heard in every corner of the hallways, and also at the large rally on Saturday 15 October, the first since Glasgow at a UN climate conference. The stances reflect a wide range of nuances. Anna Cárcamo, a climate policy expert at Greenpeace, believes that spaces such as AgriZone tend to influence negotiations in subtle ways: “In themselves, these spaces do not determine the outcomes of the COP, yet the pressure exercised by major economic sectors carries considerable weight.” Cárcamo urges the United Nations and COP organisers to establish clearer rules to prevent conflicts of interest and unwarranted influence from stakeholders with commercial interests in the negotiations.
However, some are more decisive. According to Valmir da Costa Albuquerque, “over the last twenty years, we have observed the uncontrolled advance of agribusiness in various Brazilian biomes, particularly in the Cerrado and the Amazon, with the continued monoculture of soya, dendê, beef cattle farming and illegal mining advancing into the forest, seizing land owned by the state and traditional communities, causing enormous and irreparable damage, such as the contamination of rivers with heavy metals, disrupting the production chain that sustains the forest peoples. In the second week of the climate conference, the forest peoples appealed for the defence of their lands, their communities and their lives, with boat parades on the rivers and demonstrations in the streets.”
Wanun Permpibul, from Climate Watch Thailand, explains that “when Big Agriculture dominates the discussion, the voices of frontline communities – particularly the small-scale farmers, indigenous peoples, women and local food producers – are systematically excluded. Yet these are the people who have been living in harmony with nature for generations, using traditional knowledge to manage ecosystems, preserve biodiversity and sustain local food systems.”
Even on the streets, however, people talk of agribusiness. The identity of the state of Pará, of which Belém is the capital, is strong: little known even to Brazilians, who consider it underdeveloped, its inhabitants feel Amazonian and experience the problems of deforestation and pressure from companies. “Here, mainly in Pará, we have indigenous populations and many Afro-descendants, in short, a great variety,” says Cecilia, 53, who works as a musician and dancer. We meet her one evening in one of the many bars in Cidade Velha, where she has just finished performing with her band and is relaxing over a mango juice. “For me, diplomatic negotiations are important, but the real COP30 is taking place outside the Blue Zone. The climate conference, this time, is on the streets.” And it has changed the city, bringing brand-new infrastructure, as well as a highly controversial highway blamed for being created by deforestation.
It is the eternal contradiction between development and environmentalism. Rumour also has it that some families were evicted to make way for housing, which in the city was scarce. We were unable to verify this rumour. Certainly, the city has given itself a lick of paint, and the conference has brought in new energy. Selma, the owner of the Pimienta da Cuia restaurant, makes it clear: “This is a space of resistance against the aggression of capitalism. We will fight to the end to defend our land, which gives us the products we cook for our dishes.” Looking at her, you have to believe her.
Nestlé, with whom contact was made during the writing of this piece, did not respond to our request for an interview.
Cover: AgriZone © Embrapa @guilemosph-40