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Mongabay | 3 February 2021 by Caio de Freitas Paes (Translated by Roberto Cataldo) In the far west of Brazil’s Bahia state, sprawling soybean plantations extend from the edges of the highways right up to the horizon. The region is considered Brazil’s new grain frontier, its roads bustling with trucks hauling agrochemicals, cattle, and tons of soybeans. The 2019-2020 harvest was the second best in the history of Bahia: more than 6 million tons of soybeans were produced in the state. That kind of output has attracted major companies such as SLC Agrícola, one of the largest grain producers in Brazil. ....
Trader Cargill, pension fund TIAA linked to land grabs in Brazil’s Cerrado Global commodities giant Cargill continues to buy soybeans from a farm in Brazil that cultivates on illegally acquired and deforested land. The Parceiro farm in Bahia state, owned by SLC Agrícola, has been implicated in a $200 million land-grabbing scheme being investigated by Brazilian authorities. Also implicated in the case is the U.S. teachers’ pension fund TIAA, an investor in one of the parcels of illegally acquired land that effectively overlaps with SLC’s farm. Cargill, which has a zero-deforestation commitment for its supply chain from the Cerrado, says it placed no restrictions on soybean purchases from SLC in 2020; it bought more than a quarter of the grower’s crop the previous year. ....