Exclusive research reveals that greed for critical minerals is invading land reform settlements, mostly in the Amazon

By Fábio Bispo (data, graphics and text) and Lúcio Lambranho (research, interviews and text)

Editing: Maurício Angelo

Translated by Gabriela Sarmet

Food production, the reduction of the rural exodus and environmental protection, especially in the states of Amazonia and the Northeast, are threatened by the greed of mining companies attracted by the search for critical minerals in the country.

This is what the exclusive research carried out at the request of the Mining Observatory by Catarina LAB (Laboratory for Innovation in Journalism) shows about the interference of mining requirements related to strategic substances for the energy transition in settlements created by agrarian reform in Brazil.

The analysis identified 3,391 mining processes with overlaps in 1,432 areas demarcated by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (Incra). The distribution of these exploration interests covers 25 Brazilian states.

Almost half of the mining projects in search of strategic minerals that interfere with rural settlements are in the Legal Amazon, which concentrates 52 per cent of the mining areas in settlements. In the nine states of the Amazon, there are 1,765 mining projects overlapping with 729 settlements. Pará leads the ranking nationwide, with 1,207 mining processes in 460 settlements.

The Northeast is the region with the second highest number of mining processes with overlaps in rural settlements, accounting for 40 per cent of the occurrences. Bahia (426 mining processes in 188 settlements) and Ceará (358 processes in 177 settlements), concentrate a large number of areas in conflict. In the Southeast, Minas Gerais stands out with 82 processes overlapping 37 settlements.

Of the 3,391 mining processes with interference in rural settlements, 1,938 are at the research authorisation stage and 694 are at the research application stage. At least 108 processes are at the mining application stage and 70 are at the mining concession stage. Noteworthy is the large number of processes in the availability (322) and fit for availability (231) phases, which although active in the ANM system indicate that they will be returned to the agency and can be requested by other mining companies.

In this type of procedure, the agency selects interested parties to continue exploration that had already been granted, but for some reason (expiry of the title, abandonment of the deposit or mine, withdrawal and renunciation of the mining right) lost the right to carry out the projects.

The research considered key substances for the energy transition according to the International Energy Agency standard, such as copper, manganese, nickel, aluminium and bauxite, lithium, cobalt, vanadium, rare earths and niobium.

The list of companies with the highest number of requests regarding rural settlements includes multinational giants such as Luxembourg-based Nexa, Chile’s Codelco, Australia’s Fortscue and Rio Tinto, Brazil’s Vale, Britain’s Anglo American and Switzerland’s Glencore, among others.

In the following articles in this series, Observatório da Mineração will look at how these interests have affected settlements in different regions of Brazil.

Feature photo: Production of Brazil nuts by the indigenous Gavião people / Ingrid Barros / Mining Observatory

INCRA rule expands mining interest in rural settlements

After the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) issued Normative Instruction 112 on 22 December 2021, which established rules for the use of settlement areas by projects for mining activities, as well as energy and infrastructure projects, 982 processes with 1,337 overlaps in settlements have been opened since the beginning of 2022.

Most of them are still at the stage of applying for research and research authorisation, but 14 are suitable for availability, six are available and three have applications for mining, all requested by garimpeiro cooperatives, a gathering of wildcat mining workers.

Since the INCRA rule was issued under the Bolsonaro administration, social movements linked to the struggle for land and agrarian reform have been trying to overturn the rule which, in practice, opens up the possibility that the right to land and its social use in settlements already regulated by the federal government will be less than that of miners to exploit these minerals.

But attempts to stop the greed of mining companies, which has generated even more conflict in the countryside in regions already torn apart by land disputes, especially in the Amazon, have yet to win the support of even the Lula administration, which is following the logic of the previous government of prioritising the business that can be generated.

This includes promoting international agreements with little transparency and no guarantees for traditional communities and the environment, with the big players interested in Brazil’s potential, such as in the rapprochement with the United States, China and Arab dictatorships.

The rights of the settlers still seem to be less important than those defined in Brazil’s Pro-Strategic Minerals Policy (PME), created during the Jair Bolsonaro administration to incentivise projects to produce strategic minerals ‘for the country’s development’.

The PME still in force opted not to use the term ‘critical minerals’, but rather ‘strategic minerals’, considering a broader concept, which allowed for the inclusion of substances that have no relation to the energy transition, such as gold, iron and potassium, for example.

Even without a focus on climate adaptation, the PME in Brazil has been the basis for investments aimed at the climate issue in the mining sector. In May 2024, the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) and mining company Vale announced the creation of an investment fund focused on energy transition projects, with contributions of up to R$250 million from the public bank. The fund lists practically the same substances as the PME, with the exception of gold.

The new Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC), launched in 2023, also provides for public investment of around R$281 million by 2026 in mineral research for the energy transition.

Rural social movements want the Normative Instruction revoked

In June 2024, as part of the ‘Right to Land and Territory’ series, Fase (Solidarity and Education) published a technical note against INCRA’s rule: ‘Can mining override agrarian reform?’, with the support of 12 other organisations, calling on the current government to revoke the text.

In summary, the legal and political analysis of the note states that INCRA’s procedure ‘weakens the agrarian reform policy insofar as it creates provisions that make it easier to make settlement areas available to mining and large economic projects, bypassing the existing procedures for analysing the (in)compatibility between the nature of these projects and the destination given to the area for agrarian reform purposes’.

Before the signing of this technical note and the formation of a coalition of organisations opposed to the opening of mining in settlements, of which the Mining Observatory is a part, two other documents had already called for the revocation of the normative instruction.

One of them came from the Federal Public Defender’s Office in the November 2022 ‘Notes for transitional justice after the 2022 elections: A normative and public policy analysis’. The text suggests the repeal of IN 112/2021. According to the document, this rule leads to the ‘emptying of the agrarian reform policy, the transformation of settlements into financial assets and the “fuelling of conflicts in the countryside”. A document issued on 19 June 2023 by Cláudia Maria Dadico, director of Mediation and Conciliation of Agrarian Conflicts at INCRA, recommends the repeal of IN 112.

The lack of definition in the Lula III government, coupled with the drop in land reform actions, has been criticised by social movements, especially those linked to the settlers’ struggle for access to land.

‘Allowing mining to go ahead in settlement areas was a cowardly act, because everyone knows, and Incra knows best, that settlements are created for food production. We defend the idea that land should be understood as a space for environmental protection and a space where people can live a healthy life, respecting nature, of course,’ says Alair Luiz dos Santos, Secretary for Agrarian Policy at the National Confederation of Rural Farmers and Family Farmers (Contag).

According to the organisation’s leader, the current government is finding it very difficult to do what ‘the government itself wants’. Regarding the revocation of Incra’s rule, Alair says that, in the current situation, the government has ‘its hands and feet tied’.

‘We know that there are ministries that are part of the government that don’t give a damn about life in the countryside. The Ministry of Agriculture, which I can mention, defends agribusiness, defends economic expansion with a view to making money, whether in the production of agribusiness commodities or in mining,’ he says.

For the Contag representative, agrarian reform in Brazil has still not made any progress, especially since the fall of President Dilma in 2016. And under the current government, despite the announcement that 700 civil servants will be hired for INCRA, this contingent will be insufficient when it is divided into the federal agency’s 30 superintendencies.

‘The answers the government has been giving don’t meet our needs. So much so that the announcement made last week in Minas Gerais to settle just over 12,000 families in new settlement projects doesn’t make sense because we have almost 150,000 families registered, just among the families of those encamped. The government has a certain desire to carry out agrarian reform, but the rest of the national congress is against it. The big challenge for the social movements is to try to get the next Congress to take a different view of agrarian reform,’ he says.

Vanderly Scarabeli, one of the coordinators of the MST in Mato Grosso, believes that the government acts in two dimensions of Brazilian society, that of capital, which is the strongest and which rules Congress and the Judiciary and also, according to him, ‘in a way, the government’.

‘So there’s a correlation of forces, even a political project that doesn’t face up to this situation. And the regulations say that one of the winners is the workers, but with their regulations they only lose. Capital wins, Incra wins,’ he criticises.

For Scarabeli, it’s clear that sectors of INCRA, especially during the Bolsonaro administration and even now, are driven to encourage mining in peasant and quilombola areas. ‘What kind of gains did INCRA think it would make with these regulations? If it was something justified for expropriation, it wouldn’t be justified, because then you’d have to dispossess people, make them landless so they could settle again. It would be a mistaken measure,’ he says.

‘It’s the capital of mining companies and corrupt Incra officials who would gain from this. Obviously, I’m not generalising, far from it. But we also have no doubt that there are sectors within Incra itself that would be corrupted by encouraging the settlers to accept mining,’ he adds, mentioning that in one settlement in Mato Grosso, officials from the federal agency went to the settlers to encourage an agreement with mining companies.

Luiz Cláudio Teixeira, a historian and member of the Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre (MXVPS) also defends the revocation of the normative instruction, but believes that this act would not be enough to solve the problems in the settlements related to the lack of support for production and the sustainability of the families.

‘We need to create and establish rules that can be followed within the legal parameters for the future exploitation or otherwise of a settlement.  Directed towards the interests of the settlement and the settlers so that they can be in a position to produce. You can’t put something on the scales and say that gold weighs more than a kilo of beans,’ he says.

For Teixeira, this normative instruction comes as part of a process without a debate in society about what is wanted for the future of the country and without consultation with the rural settlers.

‘We understand that it is not a question of prior consultation, but that it is necessary to listen to the settlers. We know that many settlements have deficits, they don’t have structures for their production and many settlers are abandoned in this process because of Incra’s difficulty in fulfilling its mission and also because of the logistical difficulty of personnel, lack of personnel, lack of structure,’ he believes.

According to Teixeira, the normative instruction tramples all over this process and hands over what is the Union’s patrimony and what would be Incra’s fundamental mission, which is to promote agrarian reform, into the hands of mining interests, which are not the interests of the state. ‘We believe that fundamentally the state and the government should guarantee agrarian reform, guarantee structure and conditions for the settlers and those who demand land to produce food,’ he says.

ANM says that the attempt to stop mining in settlements in 2009 has not been confirmed and that there is no legislation preventing the granting of licences in areas titled by INCRA

The ANM confirmed, after being questioned by the report, that it grants concessions over settlement areas and that ‘in principle’ there is no legal prohibition on rejecting a request for a title that overlaps with areas destined for settlement projects, nor is there ‘any motivation to annul acts of authorisation or granting of processes inserted in settlement projects’.

The regulatory agency also states that it ‘does not have a special procedural rite for areas included in settlement projects’. And that Normative Instruction 112/2021 only applies to processes being processed by INCRA.

The last attempt to stop mineral exploration in settlements took place in 2009, during the second term of President Lula. Through Joint DNPM/INCRA Ordinance No. 01/2009, according to the opinion of the Federal Public Defender’s Office of November 2022 calling for the revocation of the normative instruction, INCRA considered mining activity incompatible when the undertaking directly affected the development of the settlement project, in whole or in part, or when it required the relocation of families or caused significant environmental damage, as well as when there is any conflict of interest.

According to the ANM, the ordinance led to a letter from INCRA to the then National Department of Mineral Production (DNPM) requesting that the agency, which was abolished with the creation of the current regulatory agency in 2017, ‘no longer grant mining titles in areas where families would be settled for land reform purposes, requiring the blocking of the area subject to expropriation for social purposes’. And that in order to ‘resolve this conflict’, a working group was set up made up of members from the technical and legal areas of both authorities – by means of Joint DNPM-INCRA Ordinance No. 104, of 25 March 2009.

But nothing has been resolved, according to the ANM’s response sent to the Mining Observatory. ‘Since both activities – mining and land reform – enjoy constitutional protection, the conflict between them must be resolved by the state through an understanding built by both authorities based on the characteristics of each specific case. However, negotiations have not progressed and have not culminated in the publication of any regulations,’ says the regulatory agency.

The Mining Observatory has been trying since 11 March to hear from INCRA about the overlapping mining processes in the settlements and the requests to revoke the normative instruction. We still haven’t been able to get a response to our enquiries, despite exchanges of messages and phone calls with the communications department. The space remains open for the federal agency responsible for land reform to comment.

Interest in transition minerals over rural settlements in Pará tends to exacerbate conflicts in a historically conflict-ridden area

Besides having the largest number of critical mineral interest processes overlapping rural settlement areas in Brazil, Pará concentrates, in the same area claimed by large mining companies, several conflicts over land tenure, access to land and water that could further complicate the lives of rural workers and food production.

In INCRA’s settlements located in cities in Pará marked by conflicts in the countryside, such as Canaã dos Carajás, Ourilândia do Norte, Parauapebas, Marabá, Eldorado dos Carajás and Tucumã, the research found 372 processes with 689 overlapping areas requested by mining companies at the ANM for the extraction of copper, nickel and manganese. This section of southeast Pará is part of the reality in Pará, which leads the ranking in the whole country, with 1,207 mining processes in 460 settlements.

Vale is the main company identified and the mining company’s interest is centred on the extraction of manganese, nickel and copper. Of the areas requested by the company, most are in the research phase at the National Mining Agency (ANM), but five are already in the more advanced mining phase.

In a settlement located in Tucumã, one of the demarcated areas with the highest number of processes and which, according to Incra, is home to 3,743 families of settlers, Vale is targeting nickel and copper exploration.

Questioned by this report about the overlapping of processes of interest in settlements, Vale claims that mining rights involve several stages and that ‘most investments in research do not result in the discovery of a mineral deposit’ and that even in those that are ‘successful’, ‘not all of the project materialises, as it depends on social, environmental, technical and economic viability’. ‘In other words, having a mining right in a settlement area does not mean that a mineral project will be realised there,’ says Vale.

A empresa também acredita que “informações constantes no site da ANM podem estar em processo de atualização, o que pode gerar análises imprecisas sobre a real titularidade das empresas em relação a seus direitos minerários vigentes”.

Another company that appears among the processes in the southeastern region of Pará with overlapping settlements is Codelco do Brasil, which focuses on copper and is a subsidiary of Chile’s Codelco, one of the largest copper companies in the world. The Observatory asked Codelco for a position on the processes, but as of the closing of this publication we had not received a response. The space remains open for the companies to comment.

Settlements around the National Forest in Pará feel the impacts of bauxite mining

The Saracá-Taquera National Forest, between the municipalities of Faro, Oriximiná and Terra Santa, has an area of more than 400,000 hectares that is more than 33 per cent occupied by mineral activity, in this case by Mineração Rio do Norte, controlled by the Swiss company Glencore, the world’s largest commodities trader.

The company has registered 47 processes for bauxite extraction, 44 of which are among the last stages before the ANM for mining concessions, all of which date back to 1967 and 1973, thus beginning during the military dictatorship, but which are still active.

The impacts and risks caused by MRN have been felt by the settlers, riverine communities and quilombolas who live around the Flona for years. As the Mining Observatory revealed in January 2024, records show dozens of alterations to MRN dams in Pará and, without communication, transparency and dialogue, quilombola and riverine families fear disasters.

José Domingos Rabelo, a settler who has lived in the region since 1993 and even before the creation of the Sapucuá Trombetas PAE (Agro-Extractivist Settlement Project) settlement in 2009, where 1,202 families are settled according to Incra data, says that everything has changed for the communities since the company started operating in the region.

‘Everything here is below this huge project. And there are 16 communities on Lake Sapucuá after this tailings pond. We live below it and we’ve already noticed a decrease in fish, wildlife, and the jaguars that live in their habitat are leaving there, going down and coming to areas near the houses,’ the farmer told Observatório da Mineração.

Map of PAE shows proximity to Flona and MRN operations / CPISP

MRN replied that ‘it has no mining rights overlapping with any settlement. All of its mining rights in the state of Pará are located within the boundaries of the Saracá-Taquera FLONA’.

Although they live on the outskirts of the Flona, as the map shows, the settlers, quilombolas and riverine communities feel the pressure of mineral expansion. This inequality in access and prerogative of use has been studied and criticised for many years by various researchers, as this report by the São Paulo Pro-Indian Commission exemplifies.

The Flona’s 1989 creation decree allows mineral activity, as does its Management Plan. The Flona concentrates the operations of the company that produces 12.5 million tonnes of bauxite every year, and is in the process of expanding. MRN’s bauxite, which becomes aluminium in the production chain, used in various renewable energies and in the manufacture of countless products, is exported to three continents and uses a complex of 29 tailings dams.

Even though there is a settlement with the same name as the Flona and the same area, which seems to be a mistake, as well as around 300 settled families according to the official document, INCRA has so far not clarified whether there is also a rural settlement inside the Flona.

In response to the Observatory, MRN added that it ‘acts to prevent, mitigate or compensate for the socio-environmental impacts identified and dealt with within the legal framework of the federal licensing process to which it is subject. From an environmental point of view, data on water quality, particulate emissions and noise, collected over more than a decade of monitoring, indicate that there are no significant environmental impacts in this region.’

The mining company states that it ‘carries out around 60 initiatives, including projects and programmes, which seek to provide adequate compensation to the communities in its area of influence. These are projects that combine environmental preservation with income generation, safeguarding the culture and way of life of the communities and also integrating them with their development aspirations for the future’ and that “it is committed to leaving a legacy for the region, even after its operations have ended, enabling a positive transformation in the surrounding communities”.

Zoning map of the Flona shows the primacy of mining occupation in the heart of the National Forest

The trend is for conflicts between settlers and mining companies to intensify

Charles Trocate, a member of the national coordination of the Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining (MAM), explains that mineral exploitation in settlements is already taking place, especially in the region where the largest number of mining processes are located in Pará.

Trocate cites operations, including one by the Federal Police in May 2024, Operation ‘12º Elemento’, which deactivated a clandestine manganese mine inside an Incra settlement project in Pará. According to the investigation, the project area is located in Cumaru do Norte, in the southeast of the state and on the border with the Kayapó Indigenous Land.

‘There is a group, a fraction of the local bourgeoisie that made a lot of money with the construction of the Grande Carajás project, but forty years later these steel centres were imploded because there was no forest left. So this elite found itself without a role. What did they do to make money? It associated itself with Bolsonaro and went to do this corporate ‘wildcat’ mining, which is done with backhoes that turn the soil over and the miner is a mere worker, almost enslaved to these people, which has generated a wave of these clandestine artisanal mining operations in many settlements in the region,’ explains Trocate.

Trocate in the countryside of Parauapebas / Ingrid Barros / Mining Observatory

For the MAM representative, the opening up to industrial exploitation by mining companies will have even worse consequences for agrarian reform settlers and the region, as well as increasing land conflicts. ‘Instead of this opening up to mining in the settlements being a redemption, it will be our curse because there is already a lack of areas for food production,’ he says.

Giliad de Souza Silva, a professor at the Federal University of Southern and Southeastern Pará (Unifesspa), says that ‘a set of interests and a set of conflicts’ overlap in the region, some of which are guided by the state, which first settled the families, especially in the Marabá region, and then encouraged mining projects after the 1980s.

‘It’s important to realise that this is a very tense and problematic situation, basically because it’s becoming increasingly clear that the territory where the Amazon biome is located is a territory that has a set of extremely dense and rich mineral provinces, and contradictorily has a set of people who live on these mineral provinces,’ says the researcher.

Giliad Silva in interview / Ingrid Barros / Mining Observatory

According to the Unifesspa professor, these places already had a set of tensions in the field of disputes over territory. ‘And basically the 1980s, 1990s and a part of the 2000s were years of not only discovery, but also the search to identify or quantify the size of this wealth,’ he says.

For Silva, the region is likely to experience an ‘acceleration of conflicts’. ‘The perspective we can see is one of deepening conflicts, where the role the State will play will be increasingly fundamental, whether it will be a role of intensifying conflicts or a role of, at some level, reducing them,’ he says.

Vale claims that Incra’s normative instruction allows overlapping processes in settlements

In another part of the note sent to the Mining Observatory, Vale suggests that there is no illegality in the settlement processes, since INCRA’s Normative Instruction 112/2021, a rule that rural social movements have been trying to revoke since the beginning of the current Lula 3 government, is still valid. ‘The possibility of mining or other projects overlapping with settlement areas is a situation provided for by law and regulated by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) itself. Vale strictly complies with the legislation, with respect for human rights and with dialogue with the competent bodies and the community as a premise for its actions,’ the statement said.

IN 112 established rules for the use of settlement areas by mining projects, as well as energy and infrastructure projects. Since its publication, 982 mining processes have been opened with 1,337 overlaps with settlements.

In a region marked by massacres, violence and water disputes, transitional minerals occupy a new chapter

Among the settlements most impacted by the search for strategic minerals, the top five overall are in Pará, located in the municipalities of Faro, Tucumã, Itupiranga, Canaã dos Carajás and Santarém.

This new chapter in the search for essential minerals for renewable energies and the manufacture of electric cars, among other applications, could worsen the history of a region already marked by violence and land disputes.

In a meeting this month with Paulo Teixeira, minister of the Ministry of Agrarian Development and Family Agriculture (MDA), the Pastoral Land Commission, an organisation that gathers data on conflicts in the countryside, said that the last decade has been marked by a ‘counter-reform of the land’. And that there has been a rise in ‘mining and energy projects’, as well as agribusiness, as ‘dominant forces in the Brazilian countryside’.

The booklet Conflitos no Campo 2024 will still be released by the organisation in April 2025, but the figures from the 2023 report show that Pará is in second place for conflicts among the states, with 227 cases, behind only Bahia. In 2023, the CPT registered 34 water conflicts involving mining companies and garimpo, which together account for 17 per cent of the conflicts registered.

In 2020, the New Social Cartography of the Amazon Project (PNCSA) already pointed out in a study the problems of settlements and encampments in the region, especially in conflicts caused by Vale.

Support organisations and encamped farmers report that the area under Vale’s control today affects old and new agricultural settlements set up by the state. This would be the case of the areas that once comprised the Settlement Projects Carajás I, II and III, in 1982. Still according to the campers, these areas, which are now affected by mining activities and other issues, are classified as ‘Terra Legal’ Park areas, in other words, Union areas,’ the study states.

According to the PNCSA, the mining company Vale, which acquires land for research, mining and reforestation in return for the areas impacted by mining projects, has the largest portions of land in the region. ‘The concentration of land goes even further, and that promoted by these projects is not restricted to the exploration area itself, but covers a wider area of the territory, which allows for greater control over natural resources,’ adds the PNCSA study.

In addition to historic massacres, such as those in Serra Pelada and Carajás, violence has also marked recent years. In June 2020, there was an attack by security guards hired by Vale. Around 150 people were surprised by rubber bullets fired at close range and gas bombs while they were praying in Parauapebas (PA).

At least 20 farmers were injured, but the case has gone unpunished ever since and an enquiry opened by the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) into flaws in the Pará Civil Police’s investigation was closed in June 2022.

In 2020, Vale claimed that its security guards acted in ‘self-defence’, but the farmers said that no one was armed (Photo: personal archive)

The southeast of Pará is marked by massacres, such as that of the 19 landless campers in Eldorado dos Carajás (PA) in 1996, and in addition to violence, there is a dispute over water. The farmers’ water problems, especially in Canaã dos Carajás, are caused by Vale’s new projects and the siege of illegal mining in the region.

A CPT survey, based on Incra data and court cases, shows that Vale bought 58,400 hectares of land in the Carajás region between 2000 and 2011. At least 41 per cent (24,000 hectares) are public lands belonging to the Union and settlements belonging to Incra.