‘Poison bill’ could progress this month, environment and human rights bodies are furious

In early March, thousands of Brazilians turned out to protest in front of Congress in Brasília. They were demonstrating against a series of environmentally harmful bills dubbed the ‘package of destruction,’ which the government and Congress seemed bent on approving despite public opposition and the bills’ damaging impact on the environment and human rights.

One of the bills in question passed the lower house just weeks earlier, after stalling in Congress for four years. The so-called ‘poison bill’ would revoke Brazil’s existing legislation on pesticides and relax use restrictions, with 301 votes to 150 in favor of approval. The bill was returned to the Senate, where maneuvers by its proponents have helped speed up the approval process.

In a slight victory for the bill’s critics, in mid-July the Senate’s Agriculture Committee agreed to hold another public hearing on the issue before tabling the bill for a vote. Had the committee approved the proposal that day, as seemed likely, it could have gone straight to a floor vote in the Senate and become law before the mid-year congressional recess began.

The push for pesticides

As an agricultural powerhouse, Brazil is one of the world’s largest consumers of pesticides. It became the biggest importer of these chemicals in 2012 and is now second only to the U.S. in terms of absolute quantities of pesticides used (over 377,000 tons in 2020, according to the UN Food & Agriculture Organization).  

Despite this, increased and less regulated use of pesticides has long...