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cerrado
US Pension Fund TIAA Linked to Brutal Land Grabs and Evictions of Farmers in Brazil
The 10 largest transnational landowners in the world control an area larger than Japan, according to a new report. This accumulation fuels human rights abuse, inequalities, and environmental destruction, and underlines the need for redistributive policies.
Jun 03, 2025
Angelim is a small rural community in Piauí, northeastern Brazil, where small-scale farmers and artisans have lived for generations. Their way of life dramatically changed a few years ago when a company arrived, claiming it had purchased the land. Residents report being threatened by armed men. They have faced forest clearances and the destruction of native vegetation that is essential for their livelihoods and way of life. New monoculture plantations began to dry up the wetlands. The plantations also used pesticides, polluting the ecosystem and threatening residents’ health and livelihoods.
Angelim is located in the municipality of Santa Filomena and is just one of many communities affected by land acquisitions by Radar Propriedades Agrícolas, a company formed in 2008 as a joint venture between U.S. pension fund TIAA and Brazilian agribusiness giant Cosan. In recent years, Radar has acquired more than 3,000 hectares in Santa Filomena, adding to the land it already owns throughout the Matopiba region, which includes the Brazilian states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia—the latest frontier of industrial agriculture in Brazil.
Elite Group
This region sits in the Cerrado, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas, home to 12,000 plant species (35% endemic) and 25 million people, including Indigenous Peoples and small-scale food providers. But 40-55% of the Cerrado has already been converted to commercial tree plantations, large agro-industrial monocultures, and pastures for cattle production. Land grabs, speculation, and deforestation are displacing communities and damaging the environment. One of the major players in this expansion is TIAA and its asset management company, Nuveen.
Tackling land inequality is crucial for a more just and sustainable future.
As revealed in our new report, TIAA is one of the world’s largest landowners and has almost quadrupled its landholdings since 2012. Managing 1.2 million hectares across 10 countries, it ranks 7th among the world’s top 10 transnational landowners, who together control 404,457 square kilometers—an area the size of Japan.
Others in this elite group include financial investors like Blue Carbon from the UAE, Australia-based Macquarie, and Canada’s Manulife; agribusiness giants Olam and Wilmar from Singapore; Chilean timber company Arauco; and U.K.-based Shell via Raízen, a Brazilian subsidiary.
Global Land Grabbing and Concentration Trends
This accumulation of land in the hands of a few transnational companies is part of a global trend of land grabbing that surged after the 2008 financial crisis. Since 2000, transnational investors have acquired an estimated 65 million hectares of land—twice the size of Germany. This has accelerated a dynamic of land concentration, which has resulted in 1% of farms controlling 70% of global farmland, a trend that jeopardizes the livelihoods of 2.5 billion smallholder farmers and 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest, most of whom depend on agriculture.
As the case of the Angelim community shows, land grabbing and land concentration have devastating consequences for communities and ecosystems. Like U.S.-based TIAA, virtually all the top global landowners have reportedly been implicated in forced displacements, environmental destruction, and violence against local people.
Land concentration exacerbates inequality, erodes social cohesion, and fuels conflict. But there are deeper consequences as well: The fact that vast tracts of land, located across different state jurisdictions, are brought under the control of distant corporate entities for the sake of global supply chains or global financial capital flows runs diametrically counter to the principles of state sovereignty and people’s self-determination. In particular, it undermines states’ ability to ensure that land tenure serves the public good and enables the transition to more sustainable economic models.
“Net Zero” Fueling Evictions
The question of who should own and manage land becomes even more pressing in light of climate change and biodiversity loss. Transnational landowners are associated with industrial monoculture plantations, deforestation, and other extractive practices. In contrast, up to 80% of intact forests are found on lands managed by Indigenous Peoples and other rural communities. Moreover, small-scale food providers practicing agroecology support higher biodiversity, better water management, and produce over half the world’s food using just 35% of global cropland.
Ironically, the environmental value of community-managed land has sparked a new wave of land grabs. So-called “green grabs” (land grabs for alleged environmental purposes) now account for about 20% of large-scale land deals. Since 2016, more than 5.2 million hectares in Africa have been acquired for carbon offset projects. The global carbon market is expected to quadruple in the next seven years, and over half of the top 10 global landowners now claim participation in carbon and biodiversity markets. “Net zero” has become a pretext for expelling communities from their lands.
From Deregulation to Redistribution
While global land policy debates in the past 10 years have focused on limiting the harm of land grabs on people and nature, the scale and severity of these trends demand a shift from regulation to redistribution. Neoliberal deregulation, as well as trade and other economic policies, have fueled the massive transfer of land and wealth to the corporate sector and the ultra-rich. Redistributive policies are needed to reverse this trend.
Tackling land inequality is crucial for a more just and sustainable future. However, only very few countries implement land policies and agrarian reform programs that actively attempt to redistribute and return land to dispossessed peoples and communities.
The international human rights framework requires states to structure their land tenure systems in ways that ensure broad and equitable distribution of natural resources and their sustainable use. The tools at the disposal of governments include redistribution, restitution, and the protection of collective and customary tenure systems, as well as measures such as ceilings on land ownership (including by corporate entities), protection and facilitation of use rights over publicly owned land, and participatory and inclusive land-use planning. These efforts must also be matched by redistributive fiscal policies, such as progressive land and property taxes, which remain regressive or ineffective in most countries today, thus perpetuating inequality and enabling wealth concentration.
International Cooperation
Because land grabbing is driven by global capital and the accumulation of land across jurisdictions by transnational corporations and financial entities, international cooperation is essential. The upcoming International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in Colombia in February 2026 offers a critical moment for governments to agree on measures that end land grabbing, reverse land concentration, and ensure broad and sustainable distribution of natural resources.
To be effective, these discussions should connect with initiatives on a global tax convention and an international mechanism to address sovereign debt, empowering states to have the fiscal space to implement human rights-based, redistributive policies and just transitions. Also important are binding legal provisions that prevent transnational corporations from using the power of their money to bend national rules in their pursuit of profits.
In a world facing intersecting crises—climate breakdown, food insecurity, persisting poverty, and social inequality—and a reconfiguration of the global balance of power, there is an opportunity to move away from neoliberal policies that have benefited very few, and to create a more just and sustainable global future for all.
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Cerrado Deforestation Called a 'Stain' on Lula's Environmental Record
While Amazon deforestation fell nearly 50% in 2023, it rose by almost 43% in the unique and important grassland.
Jan 15, 2024
Deforestation in Brazil's vital Cerrado region jumped by 43% in 2023 compared to 2022, the highest level since deforestation measurements began in 2019.
The news, released by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research this month, came as deforestation in the more widely known Amazon rainforest fell by nearly 50% in 2023. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has promised to end deforestation by 2030, but environmental campaigners say agriculture in the Cerrado could undermine that goal.
"Lula's sacrifice of the Cerrado to beef and soy production is a major stain on his environmental credentials, and needs to be reversed and rectified urgently," Mighty Earth senior director Alex Wijeratna told the Financial Times. "The Cerrado savanna is being massively overlooked in Brazil and by the global community."
Brazil's Cerrado is the most biodiverse grassland ecosystem in the world, hosting 5% of all plant and animal species, according to WWF. The roughly 200 mammal species that live there include giant anteaters and armadillos. It is also home to 860 species of birds, 1,200 species of fish, and 90 million species of insects. Almost half of its more than 11,000 species of plants only grow there and are important to the survival and culture of local communities.
Beyond providing biodiversity, the savanna is important for Brazil's water system. It provides the spring for six of the country's 12 most important hydrological regions. Globally, it, like the Amazon, is an important carbon sink. It is home to shorter trees with vast underground root systems that may keep as many as 118 tons of carbon per acre out of the atmosphere.
"If destruction of the Cerrado is not stopped, the global commitment to cap global warming at 1.5°C will become unattainable," WWF said.
"Unlike the Amazon where prevention can be done via law enforcement, in the Cerrado incentives have to be created for landowners to give up their right to deforest."
Despite its ecological importance, the Cerrado has not received the same global attention as the Amazon, and experts say this has hampered conservation efforts.
"Internationally, the Cerrado is not very well known. If it had a name like the Amazon, we would have more (public) policies that benefit the conservation of the biome," Ane Alencar, science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (APIM), told The Associated Press.
Alencar said the Cerrado is currently harder to protect because of the laws in place. In the Amazon, Lula's government had success by cracking down on illegal logging, ranching, and mining, the Financial Times explained.
But in the Cerrado, most deforestation occurs on private land, and a significant amount of it is currently legal, Alencar explained. While landowners in the Amazon may only clear 20% of the trees on their property, landowners in the Cerrado may clear 65% to 80%. The Amazon also has more protected nature reserves and Indigenous territories.
"In many cases, the suppression of native vegetation is allowed by the forest code. So, unlike the Amazon where prevention can be done via law enforcement, in the Cerrado incentives have to be created for landowners to give up their right to deforest," APIM executive director André Guimarães told the Financial Times.
Deforestation in the Amazon soared to its highest level in 12 years under right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, according to BBC News. Bolsnaro favored extractive industries over conservation and Indigenous rights, while Lula has promised to safeguard the forest. In 2023, 5,153 square kilometers of forest were lost, compared to 10,278 square kilometers in 2022. Officials said it was the lowest deforestation rate in five years.
In the Cerrado, meanwhile, 7,852 square kilometers of vegetation were lost in 2023, AP reported.
"We saw some important victories on the environment in 2023. The significant reduction in deforestation in the Amazon was a highlight," Mariana Napolitano of WWF-Brasil told Agence France-Presse.
"But unfortunately we aren't seeing the same trend in the Cerrado... That is harming the biome and the extremely important ecosystem services it provides," Napolitano added. "And we saw the impact at the end of the year, with extremely high temperatures."
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