A recent report by Brasil de Fato highlights a shocking contradiction at the heart of Brazil’s agricultural economy. The country is on track to achieve a record harvest this year, with nearly 330 million tons of crops expected. Yet food prices continue to rise, and inflation is hitting working-class families hardest. This contradiction is no accident. It is the result of a system designed to serve profits, not people.
What Brazil is producing in record quantities is not food for its own population, but raw materials for the world market. Soybeans and corn dominate the harvest, but they are not staple foods for most Brazilians. These crops are produced for export, especially to major powers such as China, and produce huge profits for multinational agribusiness and the capitalist class. In other words, the land, water, and labor of Brazilian workers are used to supply markets in wealthy, imperialist nations while millions in Brazil struggle to afford rice, beans, and meat.
This is not just a Brazilian problem. It is the logical outcome of a global capitalist food system in which production is controlled by private interests and geared toward export. Instead of growing healthy and diverse food to meet the needs of the population, agriculture is treated as just another engine for profit.
The result is hunger amid plenty. Despite record crop yields, families increasingly pay more at the supermarket and rural communities are displaced or excluded. Meanwhile, systematic deforestation constantly creates more land devoted to export crops, devastating ecosystems and indigenous lands to feed foreign demand.
Promises of cheaper food or greener development will always fall short if the structural causes are not addressed: imperialism and capitalist control of agriculture. What is needed is not better management of the current system, but a break with it, putting food, land, and labor under democratic control to meet the needs of the population, not the profits of a few.
This crisis is international. So must be our resistance.
