Investment funds launched to finance Brazil’s agribusiness sector pool dozens of bonds, some of them labeled as “green,” are tied to socio-environmental violations. That was our hypothesis—but how could we confirm and prove it? We grabbed our pack of journalistic tools.
We dug into an investment fund when it was just in its infancy. Fiagro, a financial instrument created by the Brazilian parliament to mobilize private investment to fund agribusiness in the country, was entering its third year of operation when we decided to open it.
The fund was successful in its start in the market: It reached a net worth of U$8.1 billion on the Brazilian Stock Exchange (B3) from March 2023 to March 2025, while its major financial asset, Agribusiness Receivable Certificates (CRA, its acronym in Portuguese), increased in volume by 46% during the same period, reaching US$28.3 billion. '
Fiagro is like a big box filled with dozens of hidden packages or financial assets—each one tied to a different company or project in the agribusiness world. To understand what’s really inside, you have to open each package and look closely at what’s behind it. It takes time, tools and knowledge, particularly in financial and geospatial analysis, to answer our investigation question: Is Fiagro financing land grabbing and/or socio-environmental violations in the Amazon rainforest? With the support of Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network, we unpacked the box and published our findings in the series “Financial Market: A Black Box Over Green Areas.”
The "Indigenous man of the hole" lived within the Tanaru Indigenous land until 2022, when was found dead; the territory is central discussion of a court case whose parties are claiming for transforming in their private farms. (Video by Fernando Martinho)
Hypothesis
Initial suspicions about Fiagro arose from its own regulations. The Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission (Comissão de Valores Mobiliários/CVM), the government body responsible for regulating all financial instruments traded in the Brazilian capital market, has no rules preventing Fiagro’s resources from being accessed by farmers and companies engaged in illegal commercial activities.
The worldwide largest meatpacking company, JBS switched its debt instruments from traditional loans to capital market bonds. (Source: JBS Annual Reports)
Hence the hypothesis that we set out to prove was that farmers and companies were borrowing money from bonds pooled by Fiagro and applying it to expand their operations and profit from illegal activities.
Methodology and data sources
After some interviews with fund managers and financial workers, we identified datasets that would be useful to test the hypothesis. The starting point was a database maintained by the Brazilian Stock Exchange, which contains mandatory regular filings for all public investment funds. These reports, available as PDFs, list the financial assets like CRAs included in each Fiagro fund. That’s what led us to take a closer look at the assets themselves.
The documents related to these assets are stored in private databases, but they are also publicly accessible through the online database of securitization firms—the companies responsible for issuing CRAs, the bonds backed by agribusiness receivables. That’s where the real digging began: We coded several scrapers using Python, a programming language, to scrape more than 10,700 PDF files from the websites of eight different securitization firms: True/Opea, Virgo, Ecoagro, Provincia, Canal, Vert, and Ceres. These PDF files contain detailed information of the Fiagro assets, allowing us to identify the amount of money involved, where it was going, and most importantly, the names of both individuals (such as farmers) and companies (such as those in the biofuel and meatpacking industries) connected to each bond.
We uncovered companies that accessed huge amounts of credits through CRAs to fund their operations including meat giants JBS and Minerva Foods, as well as a “green” ethanol producer FS Fueling Sustainability.
Once thousands of PDFs containing reports and financial data were in hand, we could determine the amount of credit received by companies of interest. (Graph: O Joio e O Trigo)
There was more to keep diving into: Some documents contain lists of rural producers—such as corn and cattle suppliers—paid with funds from Fiagro assets. As those lists surpass hundreds of pages in PDF, we had to make use of table extraction tools including Tabula (open source) and ExtractTable (paid) to extract the data from the PDFs into a spreadsheet for further analysis.
After organizing and cleaning the names, we cross-referenced them with a range of environmental crime datasets downloaded from the official database of the Brazilian environmental agency (Ibama). This gave us details of each crime, such as terms of embargoes, notes of infraction, and fines. The cross reference was done on RIN Data, an internal data platform developed by the Pulitzer Center based on Aleph, the open source data platform by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to support investigative journalism.
Another helpful approach was to connect with research and data organizations specializing in the data we were interested in. We formed partnerships with the Center for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA) and Operação Amazônia Nativa (OPAN), which shared their databases and supported the investigation with their respective expertise in the field of meat supply chains and land conflict within Indigenous lands.
This analysis identified individuals and companies linked to land invasion and conflicts, Indigenous people’s expulsion from their territories, and illegal deforestation in the Amazon region. Using Brazilian government databases including the Land Management System (Sigef), Rural Environmental Registries (CAR), and Integrated Information System on Interstate Transactions with Goods and Services (Sintegra), we were able to identify the locations where these actors were carrying out commercial activities, such as raising cattle and growing crops. Such information guided our field reporting trips. It was crucial to visit the locations to verify what was happening on the ground and talk to affected communities.
Agribusiness bonds and investment funds in the capital market provide credit to farmers conducting activities within the Batelão Indigenous land, in the Amazonian state of Mato Gasso.
How this methodology could be replicated for other investigations
Journalists and newsrooms can replicate this methodology to help improve transparency in Brazil’s capital markets and beyond. It offers an investigative path that connects two key points. On one side are companies or farmers accessing credit through the stock exchange with little or no public scrutiny. On the other side are investors seeking financial returns through bonds and funds that may be linked to threats on Indigenous lands or protected territories.
The tools and datasets mentioned earlier can support investigations into other companies and supply chains, not only those involving meat and corn, as shown in this case. They can also serve as a starting point for uncovering other underreported aspects of the financial market.
Photo by Alexandre Perotto on Unsplash.
This article was originally published by the Pulitzer Center and is republished on IJNet with permission.