An O Joio e O Trigo investigation found 67 lawsuits reporting crop and livestock losses in 12 states. Delays in expert examinations make it harder to hold farmers and mills accountable, and family farmers, Indigenous peoples, and quilombolas are being forced to abandon production
“Mitã opyrõ hatã haguã ko yvyre” is a prayer repeated by the Avá-Guarani Indigenous people during a ceremony that is important to their nhanderekó, or “way of life”: the presentation of newborns to the farm plots. The phrase can be translated as “so that the children may step firmly on this land.”
“It’s so they can grow up without illness, like the seeds that have kept resisting throughout the process of colonization, which tries to erase not only our existence but also our traditional cultivation,” explains Vilma Vera Rios, an Avá-Guarani Indigenous woman and regional coordinator of the Guarani Yvyrupa Commission (CGY).
In this ceremony, care is mutual. Babies are carried among the crops so that the bond established between them can strengthen both plants and children. There is also another ritual, held in prayer houses, to ensure the farm plots thrive: the baptism of the Avá-Guarani native seeds.
The extra protection is not unwarranted. Across the Tekoha Guasu Guavirá, a 24,000-hectare Indigenous land claimed by the Avá-Guarani in western Paraná, in southern Brazil, violent conflicts with farmers whose land overlaps the territory have directly affected food production. One of the main threats is contamination from pesticides sprayed by about 165 farms that produce soy and corn.
“We are surrounded by agribusiness, which keeps advancing deeper into the territory. The poison spreads through the air and the ground. When the rain comes, it runs off in every direction,” says Vilma, stressing the impact on every form of life: humans, animals, and plants. “Everything is connected in one single body,” she adds.
Vilma has seen many traditional plants in her territory disappear because of pesticides, from herbs used for medicinal purposes to varieties of peanuts and corn, crops that are at the foundation of Guarani food culture. “Today the elders are afraid that we’ll plant and lose the seeds,” she says.
O Joio visited the Tekoha Guasu Guavirá, in western Paraná, and other regions of the country to document this disappearance. The effort is part of the Mapa das Perdas Alimentares (Food Loss Map), a project that investigates the causes of declining food diversity in Brazil. The contamination of farm plots by pesticides from neighboring farms occurs in many places across the country.
In a survey of court cases, Joio found 67 unique cases related to losses caused by pesticide drift beyond the application area, in 12 states. The survey identified 55 different crops and livestock lost to this contamination.
The reporting team searched the case-law filter of the Jusbrasil platform for the terms “pesticide drift” (deriva de agrotóxico) and “losses” (perdas) and selected cases whose documents linked pesticide dispersal to damage to crops or livestock. Because not all of them contained a ruling on responsibility for the contamination, the analysis of court outcomes was limited to 59 civil actions with a valid ruling on the merits.
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Food losses from contamination
Addressing biodiversity loss is part of the work of rural technical assistant Elisa Koefender, who works with the Avá-Guarani through the Guarani Yvyrupa Commission. “There is an attempt to homogenize everything. Indigenous people ended up losing biodiversity both through violence and through lack of access to their own territory,” she says.
For this reason, trying to recover lost varieties of native seeds is part of Elisa’s routine. “They always said there was a specific avaty [corn in Guarani] maizena that was used to make chicha, a sacred drink, and that it was lost.”
Pesticide spraying and the cross-contamination of native corn with the transgenic corn grown by the farms have been obstacles to this recovery. “Many plants we bring into the territory die because of drift. It does a lot of harm. It’s hard even to put up a barrier, because the farmers destroy it, they drive tractors over it,” explains the rural technical assistant.
Drift is the technical term for pesticide droplets dispersed by the wind. How far it travels varies with the application method (tractor, airplane, or drone), the weather conditions, and whether minimum safety distances are respected. Under certain conditions, it can reach several kilometers and contaminate neighboring areas.
Precisely because these conditions are not met, there is a growing understanding of this contamination as a chemical weapon, not simply an accidental phenomenon. That is the explanation given by agronomist and researcher Fran Paula, a member of the coordination of the Permanent Campaign Against Pesticides and For Life.
“If this is something that can be monitored and prevented, then the contamination and destruction of farm plots in areas near monoculture farms that use pesticides excessively must be considered an attack on the sovereignty, the food security, and the survival of these communities. They generate not only productive and economic losses, but social, cultural, and identity losses,” she points out.
For Fran, Brazil is experiencing a true chemical war, similar to the attacks on food-producing areas during wars. “Where pesticides were also used as a weapon, with the intent of destroying the enemy’s production areas and food,” she stresses.
The agronomist reiterates that, in many cases, contamination in regions of land conflict is intentional, used as a strategy of pressure and to drive rural exodus.
In the Tekoha Guasu Guavirá, Elisa describes episodes that, in her view, go beyond accidental drift. “Sometimes it is not even drift; they spray the poison directly over houses, people, and crops, indiscriminately. No one can escape. They do it to drive Indigenous people away,” Elisa says.
These accounts come amid a sharp rise in pesticide contamination recorded in rural conflicts. According to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), the number of families affected rose from 377 in 2010 to 17,027 in 2024 — more than 45 times the total recorded 14 years earlier.
The growth in records, however, has not been matched by responses capable of stopping the contamination or repairing the losses. The Guarani village, part of the Tekoha Guasu Guavirá, is living through one of the most critical scenarios of this contamination. There, Indigenous children often end up in the emergency room with symptoms of acute poisoning, and crops rarely thrive. That is what Chief Ronaldo Martines Esquivel reports.
“For the children, it’s headaches and vomiting. For what we plant, production is very weak because of the pesticide. We no longer have access to many varieties: potato, cassava, peanuts — everything rots,” he says.
The community has already taken legal action over the contamination but has yet to receive a response from the courts. Meanwhile, the cases continue. “Even getting them to comply with minimum safety distances is a struggle. They keep spraying pesticides until a judge orders them to respect the safety perimeter,” the chief says.
The case was also taken to an international body for corporate accountability. The contamination of the Avá-Guarani was one of four cases presented by six organizations in a complaint against Bayer, filed in April 2024 with the German body responsible for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.
The organizations argued that the company, which has owned Monsanto since 2018, failed in its duty to prevent impacts associated with the sale and use of glyphosate-resistant transgenic soybean seeds and glyphosate-based pesticides. In the Brazilian case, the complaint cited analyses that detected glyphosate and its metabolite, AMPA, in water sources in Avá-Guarani villages in western Paraná.
In June 2026, the German body agreed to discuss only Bayer’s general prevention policies, leaving out of the mediation the harm suffered by the communities and the requests for reparations. It argued that assessing the company’s responsibility would require scientific and legal analyses beyond the scope of the mechanism. The organizations rejected the proposal, and the procedure was closed. Bayer told DW that the outcome confirmed that it operates in line with international standards.
The difficulties faced by the Avá-Guarani are repeated in lawsuits brought by other communities and rural producers. In the survey of court cases conducted by Joio, most lawsuits involve victims of drift who seek compensation for material and moral damages. There are also public civil actions reporting cases of collective contamination, as well as actions aimed at preventing new spraying that could contaminate neighboring areas.
In 35 of the 67 cases (52%), soybeans and/or sugarcane were being grown in the area identified as the source of the spraying. Soybeans appear in 20 cases (30%) and sugarcane in 16 (24%); one case involves both crops. In 15 cases (22%), the documents collected did not make it possible to identify the crop to which the pesticide was being applied.
One of the main obstacles faced by those seeking compensation is proving the causal link between the spraying attributed to the defendant and the losses suffered. The lack of sufficient proof of this link appears repeatedly as grounds for rejecting claims.
“An open-and-shut case, but we lost” — the Regência Settlement case
“It’s hard even to tell something like this: an open-and-shut case, and we lost. The courts went against us,” sums up José Luiz das Chagas, a farmer who lives in the Regência Settlement Project, in Paulicéia, a municipality in the far west of São Paulo state.
He and his fellow settlers have lived for years with production losses from contamination by drift from pesticides sprayed by Usina Caeté, a sugar mill that grows sugarcane on the other side of the rural road that runs alongside the settlement.
The mill’s arrival was a rude awakening for the farmers. They had already spent a decade camped in tarp shacks to win the land where the settlement would be created, then an unproductive farm. During that time, they faced 15 evictions through repossession lawsuits.
In 2004, part of the land was finally designated for the creation of Regência and another neighboring settlement. Most of the land, however — an area equivalent to about 1,600 soccer fields — was left out of the project.
Two years later, Caeté set up in Paulicéia and began leasing thousands of hectares in the municipality. It started growing sugarcane on that same piece of the farm that did not become a settlement. And it wasn’t long before it began causing problems for the newly settled farmers: from fires set by the mill to the contamination of farm plots.
Two decades later, in March 2023, the most severe episode of contamination occurred.
“They started spraying poison at seven in the morning. By ten, we couldn’t stand the strong smell anymore, and the plants began to wilt. Everything that bordered the sugarcane, across nine lots in the settlement, wilted instantly: annatto, beans, cassava,” recalls José, who at the time was president of the settlement’s Family Farmers Association.
At the time, José was raising bees and lost dozens of hives to the mill’s poison. “I’ve already lost many swarms to pesticide. There were so many dead bees that it even stank,” he recalls.
Vegetables, pumpkin, watermelon, fruit trees: crops that sustained the Regência farmers and provided their income year-round were destroyed overnight. The damage was extensively documented. The settlers estimated material and moral damages at R$ 2,3 million (US$ 455.256).
“We had a police report, testimony from a city council member, and a record of a visit by the mill itself to the area confirming that the poison had killed everything,” says José. The case also gathered agronomic reports on earlier contamination. To preserve the evidence of the contamination, they turned to the courts with an action for early production of evidence, a procedure for carrying out the expert examination that could support a future compensation lawsuit.
None of it was enough: the action was dismissed at both the trial and appellate levels. According to Eduardo de Macedo Cunha, an attorney for the Pastoral Land Commission who represented the Regência farmers in the case, six months passed before the expert examination was carried out. The result was inconclusive.
“Six months after the incident, you don’t find the poison, or the loss itself. You only find accounts, people who suffered and are still suffering from this situation,” he said. Eduardo also notes that, at the time of the incident, the Environmental Military Police refused to carry out an examination at the settlement. Contacted, the institution did not respond.
After the evidence was produced, the trial court closed the proceeding. In November 2025, the 34th Private Law Chamber of the São Paulo State Court of Justice denied the farmers’ appeal and held that an action for early production of evidence could not be turned into a compensation lawsuit.
The appeals judges did not decide whether Usina Caeté had caused the contamination, or whether the farmers were entitled to compensation. In Eduardo’s assessment, however, the delay that made the examination inconclusive deprived them of the main evidence needed to file a new lawsuit.
Emiliano Maldonado, a professor at the Law School of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and a member of the Permanent Campaign Against Pesticides and For Life, explains that the problem begins with the legal framing of these episodes. Rather than being treated as environmental damage, subject to the precautionary, prevention, and polluter-pays principles, they end up being analyzed through the logic of a private dispute between neighbors.
“These are basic principles found in international treaties that the Brazilian state has signed. But judges are working from the view that this is just a traditional civil-law relationship, a neighbors’ quarrel,” he explains.
“Proving that causal link requires collecting samples from the plants that were lost. But this kind of collection would require firm and swift action by the authorities, which in the vast majority of cases does not happen, making accountability difficult,” he says.
The difficulty is compounded by the scarcity, especially in the interior of the country, of laboratories capable of identifying pesticide residues in plants, soil, and water.
“In this asymmetric relationship between large farms and small communities, the one who has to prove that a poison was applied properly is the one applying it, not the victim,” Emiliano adds.
Caeté has headquarters in different states and, according to a survey conducted by the reporting team, has received at least 17 environmental violation notices from the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) in different municipalities in Alagoas, Mato Grosso do Sul, and the interior of São Paulo — including Paulicéia. “We see that the mill is very powerful, that it frightens the political and judicial authorities,” says farmer José Luiz das Chagas.
The 2023 case was not the first time the Paulicéia settlers have complained of being ignored by the courts when trying to report contamination caused by Caeté. Farmer Atair Aparecido Bertão, also a Regência settler, took to a local prosecutor a complaint about contamination that occurred in the mill’s first years of operation in the region.
“They burned all my plants. I gathered ten settlers and went straight to the prosecutor. It was the worst thing I ever did. He just laughed. He even sent the experts out, but they went down a different road, not anywhere near here. They wrote that nothing had happened, and we lost,” he summarizes. It was not possible to identify the prosecutor who handled the case.
In the 2023 contamination, Atair lost hives and dairy cows, along with a thousand grapevines, a loss that, including the structure built for the crop, was estimated at R$ 300 mil (US$ 59.381). “There’s no point in appealing, we lost. It’s in the hands of senators, of the guys up top, and you know that the law of money is stronger,” he laments.
Contacted by the reporting team, Usina Caeté said it “respects the decisions handed down by the courts,” that it has a “commitment to complying with legislation and adopting responsible practices in its activities,” and that it “maintains a commitment to respect and dialogue with the communities around its operations.” Read the statement in full.
Aerial spraying and the agricultural drone boom
“The plane turns around right above our area, they circle back to apply poison on their soybeans. So, of course, it all falls over here, right?” asks Siran Nunes Souza, a quilombola farmer from the Baião community, in the municipality of Almas, in Tocantins, in Brazil’s North region.
He lists species important to the local diet that have disappeared lately, after the community became surrounded by soy monocultures.
“Our trees keep dying, especially the fruit trees, mangaba [a sweet-and-sour tropical fruit native to Brazil], pequi [a yellow fruit from the Brazilian Cerrado], what we had that was precious,” laments Siran.
Pesticide spraying can be done on the ground, with manual sprayers or tractors, or from the air, with planes or drones. There is no single federal minimum distance for all ground applications, although restrictions may appear on product labels and in state and municipal rules.
Aerial applications, such as the one Siran describes, generally cause more severe drift and are subject to specific regulations.
For agricultural planes, federal regulations prohibit spraying within 500 meters of populated areas and of water sources used for public supply, and within 250 meters of other bodies of water, isolated dwellings, and groups of animals. For drones, Ordinance 298/2021 of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (Mapa) sets a minimum buffer of only 20 meters from sensitive areas, subject to other restrictions that apply to the product being applied.
This regulatory framework is considered permissive, as Fran Paula points out. “It serves the interests of agribusiness and the chemical industry, not food production in territories under constant threat,” she notes.
The safety of this distance, however, is questioned in a technical opinion published in March 2026 by the Permanent Campaign Against Pesticides and For Life. “There is no knowledge of the criteria used to determine this distance, nor technical guarantees to state that this distance is safe,” the authors say. Contacted, Mapa did not explain the basis for setting the distance limits for pesticide application.
The document also shows the rapid expansion of the technology. In 2025, Brazil had 2,722 manned agricultural aircraft. In June of the same year, the National Civil Aviation Agency (Anac) had 8,586 drones with valid registration for pesticide spraying.
The number actually in operation may be higher. The National Union of Agricultural Aviation Companies (Sindag) estimated that there are as many as 25,000 units. The figures, however, come from different sources and criteria and do not make it possible to determine how many units are used to spray pesticides or how many operate irregularly.
Emiliano Maldonado, one of the authors of the Campaign’s study, estimates that for every drone flying legally, two are operating without meeting legal requirements. “What we’ve seen is that Mapa has no control over this whatsoever,” says Emiliano.
As well as being cheaper and more accessible than planes, drones are also harder to monitor, making it easier to disregard proper spraying conditions. “The drone can operate in this legal limbo,” the professor sums up.
It is no coincidence that reports of pesticide contamination are rising alongside the boom in agricultural drones. In this context, researchers, farmers, and activists have widely considered the 20-meter distance ineffective at containing drift.
Amid the contamination cases, reports of agricultural losses caused by drone drift are also growing. That is the case of the contamination of the farm plots in the Regência Settlement in 2023. “For about four years now they’ve only used drones. Now they fly the drone at night so that we can’t see it, you can only see its little light,” said farmer Atair.
Bills seek to ban aerial spraying
There are successful cases of bans on aerial pesticide application in Brazilian municipalities. One is the bill introduced in Rosana, in far western São Paulo. The text bans only spraying by airplanes.
In an interview with Joio, they said the law was designed as a preventive measure, following initial reports of production losses in settlements caused by pesticides. A large share of the municipality’s population is made up of families settled through agrarian reform. “There are about 680 settled families in Rosana, so it has a big impact on tax revenue,” explains José Rogério Toso, currently the council president and author of the bill.
With the recent arrival of eucalyptus farms in Rosana, they feared new cases of contamination and won approval of the ban on spraying by airplane. Spraying by drones, however, remains permitted. “There’s an understanding that the drone is less aggressive,” the council member explains.
Even when limited to spraying by airplanes, laws of this kind have struggled to pass, as happened in a municipality neighboring Rosana, Euclides da Cunha (SP). “They tried several times to get it approved, but they couldn’t,” said Vera.
In different municipalities, industry groups have worked against these proposals. In 2025, Joio investigated the lobbying machine of Sindag, aligned with local farmers, to make sure that these laws do not advance in city councils across the country.
But banning this method is not the only measure being taken to prevent contamination. In 2019, Florianópolis (SC) designated its island region as a pesticide-free zone.
Maranhão is one of the states leading measures of this kind. There, in 2024, Sindag attended a session of the Lago do Junco city council to persuade councilors to vote against a bill that would have established a pesticide-free zone in the area, which is full of extractivist communities. Today, 12 municipalities in Maranhão ban aerial spraying.
These initiatives are advancing in a state that also leads the country in recorded conflicts involving pesticide contamination, according to the Pastoral Land Commission’s 2024 Conflicts in the Countryside report. In the first four months of 2026 alone, 200 rural communities in Maranhão, in 31 municipalities, were hit by poison sprayed by neighboring farms, according to data from the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA). Drones are behind most of the complaints in the state.
