No dia 16 de outubro, o Grupo de Investigação SPARC organiza um seminário sobre Green Rhetoric, Conservative Votes: Analyzing Brazil’s Agribusiness Caucus on Environmental Legislation. Beatriz Rey (ICS-ULisboa) será a oradora convidada. A partr das 14h30, exclusivamente online.

Brazil is the world’s sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, with agribusiness accounting for nearly 70% of its total. Understanding the country’s climate politics, therefore, requires close attention to this sector’s political dynamics. Existing research highlights sharp intra-sectoral divisions in agribusiness rhetoric on climate and environmental issues: exporters integrated into global value chains often adopt pro-environmental discourses, while farmers—shielded from international scrutiny by their reliance on intermediaries—tend to downplay environmental concerns. This paper relies on voting and campaign finance data to examine whether such rhetorical differences extend to legislative behavior within the Agribusiness Caucus (FPA), distinguishing between legislators financed by farmers and those supported by exporters. Contrary to expectations, our findings show that FPA members vote in near-unanimous alignment with climate-skeptical positions, regardless of donor profile. If a “green” segment of agribusiness exists, its influence in Congress is negligible. International pressures may shape discourse on climate and the environment, but they have yet to affect legislative outcomes—a disconnect that severely constrains Brazil’s capacity for climate leadership. Contributing to the emerging field of comparative environmental politics, this paper underscores the limits of external pressures in reshaping legislative behavior in major greenhouse-gas-emitting democracies.

Beatriz Rey holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of São Paulo (USP), a Visiting Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Studies on the Brazilian Congress at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She also worked as a legislative assistant at the U.S. House of Representatives as a 2021-2022 APSA Congressional Fellow. She is the author of the book MyNews Explica: Congresso Brasileiro, published by Almedina Brasil.