‘My dream is to buy a piece of land’: the ‘outsiders’ farming at the Amazon’s last frontiers
Onésio Nascimento has worked the land his whole life, moving from one Brazilian farming frontier to the next. During the coronavirus pandemic, he sold 20 hectares (50 acres) of land in northwest Mato Grosso state and used the money to buy another 100 hectares further north in the Amazon, in south Roraima.
Today, he grows cassava and bananas on his land, an hour’s drive down a bumpy dirt road, which turns to mud during the rainy season. Flanked by small herds of cattle, the road is used by loggers to extract valuable Amazon hardwoods from nearby pristine forest.
Even in this far-flung part of the Amazon, Nascimento, 59, is not alone as an “outsider”. Almost all his neighbours on Road 34, in the banana and timber town of Caroebe, migrated from other Amazon states such as Mato Grosso, Rondônia and Pará, attracted by cheap land.
In recent years, infrastructure mega-projects, large-scale cattle farming operations and soy plantations have driven up land prices in settled regions of the Brazilian Amazon, many of which were colonised during the country’s military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
The spike in land prices, combined with other difficulties faced by family farmers in the region, such as access to credit, has encouraged many to sell up and search for opportunities on ever more distant frontiers, perpetuating a cycle of displacement and deforestation.
South Roraima’s vast expanse of “vacant lands”, which are not conservation areas or privately owned, have sparked interest from a range of groups, including small farmers, squatters, speculators, cattle ranchers and land-grabbers, who demarcate land and attempt to sell it to third parties. In many cases this is Indigenous land they have illegally entered and have no rights over.
“It is one of the last frontiers of the Brazilian Amazon,” says Paulo Barni, a professor of forestry management at the State University of Roraima. “And the vacant lands are sitting there, available for people to demarcate and then take possession of.”
While attention has been focused on the billion-dollar illegal gold and tin ore mining industry operating in Roraima’s Yanomami Indigenous land, Amazon deforestation in the state’s southern municipalities has exploded in recent years.
According to data from Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE), total deforestation in the four municipalities that make up south Roraima – Caroebe, Rorainópolis, São João da Baliza and São Luiz – more than doubled in the 2019-21 period from the previous three-year period, to 27,800 hectares from 12,700 hectares.
The destruction continued to increase in 2022 and 2023, with 19,100 hectares cleared. Within the first few weeks of 2024, preliminary data suggests at least 800 hectares were cleared, half in Caroebe, where Nascimento lives.
In February this year, Caroebe was the eighth worst- affected of the municipalities hit by Brazil’s forest fires, as Roraima saw an unprecedented burning season.
Meanwhile, invasions of Indigenous lands by loggers and land-grabbers have also increased in south Roraima.
“We are surrounded on all sides by dirt roads,” says Levi da Silva Kaykûwû, chief of the WaiWái Indigenous people, whose 406,000-hectare territory is often targeted by loggers. “These days, they are getting ever closer.”
***
Nascimento had heard about the opportunity to buy land in south Roraima from an informal land broker, a travelling salesperson typical in the Brazilian Amazon, who profits from transactions between landowners and buyers.
Born in Paraná state in Brazil’s south in the late 1970s, Nascimento’s family were among millions of poor farmers who flocked north to the Amazon, squeezed out by a shift to mechanised agriculture and monoculture crops. They settled in Vilhena in the state of Rondônia, where the family grew coffee, rice, beans and corn on a small patch of land but suffered great hardship, he says.
By the time Nascimento was a young man, in the late 1980s, growing crops and working at a logging firm, large-scale cattle ranchers were moving into Rondônia, putting the Amazon crisis firmly in the international spotlight.
In 2020, after 18 years, he decided to sell his small farm in Aripuanã – a logging and cattle-rearing town with one of the highest deforestation rates in the Amazon – in Mato Grosso state: by then, Brazil’s agricultural powerhouse.
Working conditions had become more difficult for smallholders as wealthier farmers with mechanised equipment moved in, outcompeting them on crop yields.
Today, Nascimento lives next door to his ex-wife and her new husband, who also bought property on Road 34 in south Roraima.
He says environmental officials began “persecuting” him and his neighbours after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who ran for president on a pro-environment platform, took office in January 2023. “They only go after the little guys,” says Nascimento. “With Bolsonaro, at least we could work.”
Brazil’s far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, under whom Amazon deforestation rates soared, won Roraima with a higher percentage of votes than any other state in the 2022 elections.
Nascimento has no real land title, just an informal sales document. This fragile paperwork doesn’t allow him access to bank credit. “To legalise, you have to have a lot of money. It’s difficult,” he says.
An hour’s drive deeper down the road where Nascimento lives, which is being opened little by little – probably by illegal loggers according to local sources – recently cleared land abuts the native forest.
Celia Regina da Silva, 53, arrived recently from Rondônia, where she quit her job as a sales supervisor at a telephone company. Her husband and son were hired by the owner of a patch of land, 300 hectares of native forest, to take an inventory of which trees are valuable, so they can be removed and sold to sawmills in the region.
“I’ve only been here a short time, but now my dream is to buy a piece of land and move in,” da Silva says.
Deeper down the dirt road, recently constructed wooden huts sit on cleared land, empty except for some basic furniture and sawdust, suggesting logging activity; roads used to remove hardwoods already snake through the forest.
The road ends close to the Trombetas/Mapuera Indigenous Territory, which loggers and land-grabbers have targeted.
***
South Roraima has long been a hotspot for the illegal logging trade. In 2020, a logger was killed during an enforcement operation in the municipality of Rorainópolis. The National Force, a joint military and civil police unit, was deployed there last year to protect the Pirititi Indigenous territory, home to an isolated Indigenous group, after land-grabbers invaded it. In December, the National Force’s presence was extended for another 90 days.
“There is an extremely well-organised group [of land-grabbers] working there,” says Alisson Marugal, a federal prosecutor in Roraima.
Such is the land boom in Roraima that dedicated brokers use social media to advertise large properties.
But Evanilson Ribeiro da Silva, who uses Facebook to broker property sales, says the migration rush he has witnessed over the past six years in the region stalled in 2023.
Fears about the Lula administration’s crackdown on environmental violations has discouraged new settlers and large cattle ranchers from buying land, he says. “People are desperate because they have a problem with the Workers’ party government, which is very strict with inspections.”
Daniel Alves da Silva, 59, says he feels the same. A veteran Amazonian journeyman from São Paulo, he has bought and sold 13 properties in 26 years in Rondônia and south Roraima, where he has lived for the past 11 years.
“Anyone who wants to sell land isn’t selling because people are afraid of this change of government,” says da Silva, who is returning to Rondônia to take up sawmill work.
If the BR-319 highway is paved, as planned, it would connect the Rondônia capital of Porto Velho with Manaus, in Amazonas state, and Roraima would be less isolated from the rest of Brazil. Experts say this would raise land prices and the rate of deforestation.
“It would be catastrophic for the region,” says Barni, the forestry professor. “One of the things that keep the forests maintained is the state’s relative isolation.”
Despite the drought that has affected his banana crops and the threat of environmental officials knocking on his door, after a lifetime of moving around, Nascimento hopes to stay in south Roraima.
“It’s more peaceful here,” he says. “God willing, I’ll bring my kids.”