Isolated and Without Food in Brazil's Corn Ethanol Capital


Why Is Brazil’s Climate Fund Giving Hundreds of Millions to Big Ag?

The first time I visited Lucas do Rio Verde, in Mato Grosso, was in May 2025.

On my first day there, I decided to head over to Bruce Rastetter’s ethanol refinery, FS, Fueling Sustainability, to take some photos.The day had dawned a bit cloudy, but it was hot—over 30 degrees celsius. After lunch, a cold wind started blowing. At three in the afternoon, when I was outside the refinery, the sky suddenly darkened.

The wind started whipping up sand, and everything turned reddish. I managed to film a few seconds of the scene before rushing into my car. The wind was shaking the imperial palm trees violently, and I was afraid one of them might fall on me.

On my drive back to the hotel, I saw palm branches scattered across the road, a fallen utility pole, and a torn billboard. Then the rain came, and the temperature dropped to about 15 degrees.

I kept wondering if that had been an extreme event or if this happened all the time.

: [03'39''] When I arrived here, it rained for six months and was sunny for six months

: Damasília Santos is an organic farmer who has lived in the region for 22 years. She says that everything is now hotter and more stifling. And she has a hunch as to why.

: [04'53''] We no longer have the tall, dense vegetation—that’s where it cools down, that’s where the breeze comes through [...] Now it’s just fields, just fields, clearing more and more, clearing more and more, clearing more and more, planting, just planting—that’s what happens.

Ana Paula Paes: When a cold front advances, it displaces the hot, dry air over the region, also generating very strong wind gusts. With the large area of dry, loose soil, dust is kicked up and creates sandstorms.

Ana Paula Paes is a meteorologist and climate analysis consultant with the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil.

Ana Paula Paes: Lucas do Rio Verde has been experiencing this more frequently because it is in an area of agricultural expansion, with large tracts of exposed soil during the dry season, which facilitates this type of phenomenon.

: She says the more open land there is, the greater the chance of windstorms like I saw in Lucas happening.

Ana Paula Paes: By 2050, the trend is toward hotter days, drier and longer seasons, and rainfall more concentrated in extreme events. For Lucas do Rio Verde, this means more challenges for agricultural management, greater pressure on water resources, and a need for urban adaptation, such as tree planting, soil management, and strategies to reduce heat islands.

Lucas markets itself as a city of opportunities because of agribusiness and its promise of a sustainable future. It’s also why people like Bruce and the Franz brothers, his partners in the Brazilian corn ethanol business, moved there. But what that storm of wind and sand showed me was another side of Lucas’s relationship with agribusiness. And it connects the city directly to Bruce’s legacy in Iowa.

 a podcast that tells the story of how a U.S. agribusiness tycoon managed to expand industrial agriculture in Brazil by promising to protect the climate. And how the Brazilian government is investing billions in sustainable promises that come with a whole lot of benefits for agribusiness.

Nilfo’s first visit: [12:52] The project was a model for producing fruits and vegetables, fresh produce. 

We fought to stop planting soybeans next door.

 We wanted to move toward agroecological and organic practices, so we wouldn’t have to use pesticides, right? 

There was a struggle there too. How are you going to produce organically if they dried up the soybean fields and the pests all came over here, into our vegetables? 

: Nilfo Wandscheer is a farmer from Santa Catarina. He has lived with his wife Hilária Wandscheer on a small farm in Lucas since 2007, it's roughly the size of five soccer fields. The property is located in a rural settlement half of it is designated as an environmental reserve.

There, they built a small paradise of pesticide-free food—both for their own consumption and for sale. The farm was part of a larger project to create settlements for 30 farming families. But over the years, with the advance of monoculture farming, few of these small farms have survived.

And those settlements in the region where no one ever imagined soybeans and corn would enter... today they have.

: The spread of these monoculture crops has brought the pesticides they were trying to keep at bay closer to them. The wind spreads these chemicals over the small farmers’ fields and contaminates their food. In the case of Nilfo and Hilária, this has undermined the couple’s production. The insects trying to escape the poison from the monocultures also end up in the fields of Nilfo and Hilária and the other families in the settlement.

Nilfo’s second visit: [11:17] Even the lemons—our lemon trees died. Citrus doesn’t last here. It doesn’t last more than five or six years here. [11:31]

There are lemons, avocados, carrots, beets, tomatoes, and potatoes. Potatoes don’t grow here. Beets and carrots do. 

The avocados that are blooming now… They’re blooming, but they’re not setting fruit. We don’t know if it’s something to do with the climate, or the region. Or pollination—

maybe there’s a lack of bees, since there aren’t any. 

You hardly see any bees at all, all because of the pesticides. [12:17]

: Even the water in their settlement is drying up.

Nilfo, second visit: [07:58] We have a community well, but we’ve been without water since yesterday. If it weren’t for my well, there’d be no way to water anything. Our production here isn’t commercial. [8:13]

[15:41] The Rio Verde no longer fills the reservoir, where it used to maintain the water level during the drought. 

That’s because there’s less rain. It rained a lot more this year, thankfully, but it hasn’t recovered yet; the water level hasn’t reached it.The rains have ended, and the water volume has already decreased. 

This is also due to the drainage of the water table—where they dug drainage channels to plant soybeans—so that sponge-like layer that used to hold water to release during the drought has shrunk significantly. We know this has a huge impact. [16:29]

: But the problems don’t just affect Nilfo and other small-scale farmers. They affect the whole city. An analysis conducted by InfoAmazonia and Tatiane Moraes, a researcher at the Climate and Health Observatory of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, shows that a child born in Lucas do Rio Verde has a 20% higher risk of being born with congenital anomalies than a child born in Juruena, another city in the same state, 670 kilometers away.

The reason for this is the widespread presence of industrial agriculture in Lucas.

Lucas now has thousands of hectares of monoculture crops like cotton, soy, and corn. These crops use an incredible amount of pesticides.

Débora Calheiros [7:01] - The contamination is immense—in the water, the air, the soil, and the people; everything is contaminated. And the effects are felt directly by the population, as in the case—you may be familiar with it—of breast milk….[7:31]

 Professor Débora Calheiros is a biologist for the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office of Mato Grosso do Sul. She researches pesticides in the environment. The case of breast milk she mentions was reported on national television.

 [00:01] A study conducted with 62 breastfeeding mothers in Mato Grosso revealed that all of their milk was contaminated. [00:08]

In addition to finding pesticides in all milk samples from the mothers who participated in the study, the researchers also discovered that in some cases there were six types of pesticides, including one that has been banned for over a decade.

The study was published in 2011 with participation of Professor Wanderlei Pignati from the Federal University of Mato Grosso. He says the problem hasn’t gone away

[27:49] The main cause is the heavy use of pesticides that contaminate the water, the air, the rain, and the food people are eating [27:56]

 Nilfo Wandscheer says that the larger producers—the ones who have made Lucas famous as an agricultural leader—could help small farmers like him. And it is at this point that he mentions some names we’ve heard before.

Nilfo: There is no incentive for a large-scale farmer who has accumulated land there. Who could say, ‘no, I’ll make a point of it here and subdivide that land for 20 families to grow vegetables and everything.’ The former mayor himself, who is from Fiagril, Miguel, right? I mean, Marino Franz, Mano Júlio, Paulo. They have a lot of land. Instead of giving it up for something like this, they want to buy more.

: Marino, Paulo, and Miguel are Bruce Rastetter’s partners in Brazil. Together they founded FS in Lucas 10 years ago. The company throws the word “sustainability” into its ads whenever it can.

 Helping to make the planet increasingly sustainable has been one of the main goals of major industries, which are working toward a better, net-zero-carbon world. FS [...] was founded with this purpose in mind, 

and has been leading the transformation of the global low-carbon biofuels sector.

 When Marino was mayor, Nilfo spoke with his administration about a dream of building a green belt. Nilfo's wife Hilaria says the deputy mayor at the time, a businessman in the home appliance industry, discouraged the project.

: [42:56] He told Nilfo, “You’ll never be able to do it.”

: Bruce and his partners say they started almost from scratch, as small farmers, and celebrate their rags-to-riches success story in agribusiness whenever they can. But in the city they chose as the birthplace of their empire in Brazil, farms like theirs are crushing the dreams of small farmers.

Much like what happened back in Iowa, as you heard in episode two.

Nilfo: Paulo, he says he’s American. He took courses and everything, studied in the United States. So he has this capitalist mindset, where he thinks that’s how it is—that we all depend on him. 46:38 That the jobs he creates are what matter. But he forgets that starting a company like this should also be about… making food production a priority. But for him, what is sustainable, what is economic development, is agribusiness.

: In August 2025, when Felipe went to interview Nilfo and Hilária for the second time at the settlement, they had just returned from the market. Some of the food they bought they actually grow on the farm, but the plants no longer produce enough to cover their household needs.

 This is the vision of a sustainable future that agribusiness is creating in Lucas. Kory Melby, the American agricultural consultant we heard from earlier in the season, says corn has transformed Mato Grosso over the past decade, and it was all Marino Franz's plan.

  [29:16]  the corn ethanol is what doubled land prices the past, 

in Mato Grosso, [29:48] Marino Franz you know, Paulo's brother there, 

blah, blah, blah. You know, I had investors. I mean, I,

 I was taking hedge fund guys around and he was the mayor at the time. You know, he was giving me all these cool little,

uh, documents with a radius. You know, here's Lucas and then, you know, these, these cool little

 charts with a, a 200 kilometer radius around Lucas. 

And, and he, he gave the same spiel again here just last week at the, at the egg, uh, show locally. Just thinking back, and

I remember it like yesterday, you know, Mar Grosso in, you know, 20 12, 20 14 was producing 15 million tons. We're talking about 55 million tons now and going higher. And he was the first to tell us,

 And he was the first to tell us, you know, 

Oppenheimer at the time, sitting there. Oh, right here. Uh, by, by, in, in, in a decade. You know, I mean, use 2012, but by,

 Mato Grosso will be producing 50 million tons of corn.  Marino, you, you're, you're fucking full of shit. I said, no way in hell is Mato Grosso going to produce 50 million tons in a decade. How wrong I was.

: They've turned Mato Grosso into a whole corn utopia. But it's not enough. Bruce and the guys wanted more. They started eyeing land near the Amazon River.

Kory Melby:  I kind of told them not to go there to begin with and then they asked me within a tour to help interpret because they wanted to buy more land. I said, you probably shouldn't.  It's not for gringos to start there. That's for experienced Brazilians with a plethora of lawyers behind them,

 Bruce didn’t take Kory's advice, but he still tried to be discreet. Except we found his flag planted in Amapá, on four thousand hectares of land in the heart of the Amazon.

Father Sisto CPT AP – [23:15] The Andiroba community is squeezed in between these agribusinesses. It’s a community of lake fishermen, but they’ve practically lost all their land [23:37]

 Father Sisto Magro is Italian, but has lived in Brazil since 1989. For 18 years he has worked for the Pastoral Land Commission in Amapá, with the territories of traditional peoples and communities.

The Andiroba community he mentions is one of these territories. It has about 300 inhabitants and is located in the rural area of the municipality of Tartarugalzinho, about 230 kilometers from the capital, Macapá.

Father Sisto 1 – [3:30] Starting in 2011, 2012, agribusiness began moving in en masse, right? in the logging sector, as well as in agriculture, specifically soybean monoculture [3:46]

 The São Manoel Farm is one of the agribusinesses squeezing the residents of Andiroba between soybean and corn fields. The property spans 4,000 hectares, and has a direct connection to Bruce Rastetter.

While sifting through documents Father Sisto gave him, Felipe ended up at the Tartarugalzinho registry office twice looking for more papers.

Registry Office – [1:05] I’d like to request some documents, please. I have the numbers here; can I tell you? Okay. It’s record 02M, page 43, book two, it’s registration, it’s registration... [1:25]

:  The documents Felipe obtained show that a company owned by Lucas' mayor and Bruce's partner, Miguel Vaz Ribeiro, purchased São Manuel Farm in November 2016. That same month and year, it sold the property to a second company, São Manuel Agricola Limitada.

Documents from the time show that one of the partners in that company was, would you believe it, Summit São Manuel LLC, based in Iowa in the United States at the same address as Bruce's office.

The other partner in the company was a firm owned by a co-founder of FS and the CEO of FS.

And here's a really important detail. In 2017, São Manuel Agricola Limitada pledged the São Manuel farm as collateral for a nearly six million dollar debt owed to Bruce's Summit São Manuel LLC. The debt is due in November of this year. If the debt isn't paid, the four thousand hectare farm planted with corn and soybeans could pass entirely into the hands of corn ethanol magnate, Bruce Rastetter.

It's worth noting here that in Brazil, foreigners face various restrictions on buying land, and that's especially true in the Amazon. But when a property is used to settle a debt, things work a little differently…

To get the environmental permits it needed to plant large-scale farms a few kilometers from the homes in Andiroba, São Manuel Agrícola had to get the consent of the community.

School interview – [32:12] They sent an invitation to our principal, the manager of the São Manoel farm, saying there would be a public hearing, that various organizations would be present, and that it would be good for the community to hear what they had to say, the benefits they would bring to the community.

This is Janilce Gonçalves Pantoja talking with Felipe and Marcia Reverdosa, our audio producer in Brazil. She is a resident of Andiroba, and a secretary at the school where a public hearing on the São Manoel Farm was held in September 2023. Present were São Manoel Agrícola's farm director and company employees, as well as public officials such as the state secretary of the environment and the superintendent of the Amapá Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage.

School Interview – [36:15] This was a public hearing for the company’s licensing. It was the public hearing that would lead to the licensing. [36:27]

[36:36] Did you understand that you were being consulted so that areas could be cleared?

[36:40] We didn’t know that part, though. We knew it was a public hearing where they were presenting their case to the community. Because if it were up to us, this soybean plantation thing would be a tough sell, since we don’t see any benefit. [36:54]

Felipe: Janice and others we interviewed at the Andiroba community school say they didn’t have enough information at the hearing to understand that this wasn't just a public meeting to learn about the project:  this meeting would decide whether or not the project happened.

They also say there was almost no room for public participation during the meeting.

School interview – [35:06] It ended up starting around 10 a.m., and each statement had to be a maximum of 3 minutes... They were already asking Father Sisto to stop talking. Then I spoke for 5 minutes and ‘enough! Enough!’, they didn’t want to let me speak. [35:24]

Felipe: Holding the meeting at 10am on a work day also limited participation.

Do you think the whole community was here because of the time and day they chose to hold it? 

Look, there were plenty of children; there were more children than adults. [35:36]

Felipe: The public hearing for the issuance of an environmental permit to plant soybeans and corn was composed, for the most part, of school kids, according to Janilce.

Felipe: In the environmental impact study São Manoel Agrícola submitted to the Department of the Environment to obtain the license, it argues that, without the jobs created by the farm, the population of Andiroba would lose its quality of life. They also say that this would lead to environmental degradation in the region due to hunting and resource extraction.

 [1:45] Regarding jobs, we see that at least seven direct jobs will be created for this specific project. [1:53]

Felipe: This is Lucas Paes, the farm’s director, in an interview he gave to a local website on the day of the hearing. Janilce Gonçalves Pantoja disagrees.

School interview – [16:09] We don’t see it creating jobs; sometimes they look for people from outside to work. Within the community itself, there are many heads of households who need jobs but don’t have them. So we don’t see this benefit, this return they say they give to the community. We don’t see it. [16:25]

Felipe: Despite all that, the public hearing, held before an audience made up mostly of children, was a success.

After interviewing people from the Andiroba community in Tartarugalzinho, Felipe went to the capital, Macapá, to speak with Amapá’s environmental prosecutor, Marcelo Moreira. Felipe asked him about this hearing held by São Manoel Agricola.

Interview with Marcelo Moreira – [10:20] The public hearing is crucial; in theory, it’s essential. But we didn’t hear about the public hearing, and I think that’s an indication that it wasn’t widely publicized, that it didn’t generate broad participation. What we did hear about was its outcome, through the Pastoral Land Commission, which is another sign, right? [10:43]

Moretta emphasisesHe draws attention to the damage that agriculture can cause in the region due to a peculiarity of the ecosystem itself.

Although Amapá is in the Amazon, the São Manoel farm is in a transition zone considered part of the Cerrado, a remnant from thousands of years ago when the planet was drier.

And this is strategic for business owners, since in the Cerrado biome, by law, the area protected from deforestation is 35% of the property. Much smaller than in the Amazon, where you would have to set aside80%. for conservation

Interview with Marcelo Moreira – [13:42] The Cerrado, within these Amazonian biomes, along with this area of Macapá—which we call the “ressaca,” a wetland or swamp—are the two ugly ducklings. We talk about the Amazon and only think of the forest. But when it comes to the wetland and the Cerrado, it’s like, “Oh, no, anything goes.” [14:00]

Felipe: The São Manoel Farm had a fine of nearly nine million reais for illegal deforestation. The penalty was imposed in 2019, but, even so, Bruce and his partners managed to obtain licenses to plant tons of corn and soybeans in the very same location where the environmental violation occurred. The operating license is valid until 2030 and the fine of nearly nine million was waived this year. After the break, what was so attractive for Bruce and the guys about the Amazon in the first place...

[sound of the boat slowing down and turning off the engine]

Arriving at the port [2:49] Good morning, how are you? We’d like to go inside; is it possible for us to pass through here, please? But where were you guys going? No, we’re just going to take a walk up there because we’re checking out the basic sanitation situation on the island. [3:04]

Felipe: After visiting Tartarugalzinho, in Amapa, we went to Santana Island, 25 kilometers from Macapá, on the banks of the Amazon River. It's the site of Miguel Vaz and Marino Franz's new venture.

Transcription

Industrial agriculture has wrapped itself in a green cloak in Mato Grosso, promising jobs, money and endless opportunities, all in the name of "sustainability." But the good times are only happening for a select few. Local residents are dealing with extreme weather, lack of access to fresh food, and a pesticide overload that has increased the risk of birth defects and lowered lifespans. Meanwhile, Bruce and the guys have now ventured into new territory: the Amazon.

This season is a  collaboration with the 

, funded in part by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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