A new landscape is taking over the dense Amazon rainforest. Where before one’s gaze could get lost among the different shades of green forest that was imagined to be endless, today it comes across a sad reality: small patches of forest, here and there, surrounded by vast fields of soybean monoculture. A forest in ruins. This is the landscape that dominates the Lower Tapajós, located in western Pará (Brazil), especially on the right bank of the river. But how was this landscape formed? What are the social, political, and ecological dimensions implicated in the shaping of this landscape? What forms of violence were involved?

This text is divided into three parts, each of them corresponding to a figure to reflect on finance: firstly, poisons; secondly, viruses; and thirdly, infrastructures. This is an invitation to dive into this nebulous and intricate multicausality between finances, grains, poison, and viruses in the Brazilian Amazon.

The financialisation of the Amazon rainforest goes hand in hand with the expansion of soybean plantations. The advance of monoculture promotes the clearing of multispecies forests, and pesticides play a central role in destroying the complex webs of human and non-human life that compose the forest. Glyphosate is used as a kind of chemical weapon, a political technology to empty these territories, so that soybeans can advance. Those grains enhance the spatialisation of finance. What follows is that this process of deforestation and ecological simplification (i.e., reduction in the number of species) favours contact between rodents carrying viruses that do not circulate among humans (like hantavirus) and people - leading to a high incidence of outbreaks around highway BR-163 (Cuiabá-Santarém). To conclude the analysis, it is important to reflect on how the region has also been transformed, in recent years, into a construction site: several infrastructures aimed at exporting soybeans are being built. River ports, railways, waterways, silos, and highway paving are under work, financed by large agribusiness multinationals, Chinese construction companies, and the Brazilian State. In the face of a virtually infinite demand for grains from Europe, China, and Middle Eastern countries, deforestation is then incentivised by these constructions, as they facilitate grain exports and create new markets in the forest.

Before focusing on the Amazon forest specifically, it is worth bringing up a short definition of finance as a process in which the financial market and its elites garner economic and political influence.

Madeleine Fairbairn argues that the interest of the financial sector in lands derives from its stability. She argues that land, similar to gold, is “a safe haven for capital”, as it is both a real and finite asset: its value tends to increase over time, and it can be used to reduce the risk of portfolios susceptible to inflation. Nevertheless, the focus of economic activity, including that of grain traders has shifted. Non-financial firms “have become increasingly dependent on the portfolio income they generate from financial activities”, she writes. That’s why it is so important for the main grain traders operating in the Amazon, to keep amassing land, and for financial conglomerates to invest in the grain traders.¹  

It’s a long inextricable relationship between grains and finance. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney put it, referring to the colonisation of the Americas based on plantations: finance is the planters’ science.²

This relationship between grains and elites amassing power is not new. We can trace it back to Ancient Mesopotamia, following James Scott. He argues that there has been an affinity between states, power concentration, and grains since the early States, as grain seasonality and the fact they grow above the ground (contrary to tubercles), facilitates taxation.³

As I drove through the Curuá-Una road in November 2019, Mr. Manioc, a small farmer from a traditional riverside Amazonian community was guiding me around, he shouted from the backseat: “The farce of the communities!”. He has been experiencing the dire effects of the glyphosate fumigation and was forced to leave his house several times, as the plantations expanded. “What do you mean Mr. Manioc?” I asked. He remained silent for a few minutes and then resumed his reasoning: “The farce they left behind”, he continued, referring to the owners of the soy farms and pointing to the narrow strips of remaining forest, surrounded by soy fields. “Just a few trees there”. And then he concluded: “Behind it is all soy”. 

Glyphosate being used by the agricultural industry in soy plantations has a key role in emptying the territory from people and the forest. Indigenous, quilombola, and riverside traditional communities are prevented from keeping their ecological practices. Their mutual relation of constituency with the territory is destroyed. All the plants that are not genetically modified to support glyphosate application end up dying. This is why I consider herbicides, and agrochemicals in general, a political technology used to asphyxiate traditional populations whose homelands are located on the path of soy expansion, a process I’ve been calling expulsion by suffocation. That is to say: all the forms of life that are not genetically engineered to support glyphosate application end up dying. 

This ecological simplification, so beneficial to soy farmers, depends on the killing of all the other forms of life that are not considered assets. A quote from Anna Tsing synthesises it: “Using the term plantation in its largest sense, I point to simplified ecologies designed to create assets for future investments—and to knock out resurgence. Plantations kill off beings that are not recognized as assets. They also sponsor new ecologies of proliferation, the unmanageable spread of plantation-augmented life in the form of disease and pollution.”⁴

As Seu Curica, a member of a riverside community surrounded by soy, says: “Some people who tried to resist failed. The soy farmers bought here and there, and those who stayed in the middle were forced to sell their properties because they couldn’t stand the poison. The poison kills everything, it takes everything, it goes everywhere. That’s why the people from the communities sold everything. They no longer had conditions to plant.”

These are sick territories, certainly, as I tried to describe, following the use of pesticides harming traditional communities. But, dialectically, these are also disease-producing territories; diseases whose emergence can only be described taking into account multispecific relations. The word monoculture has a reason for existing: it describes simplified ecologies, with less variability, and therefore more fragile. However, although imagined and designed as terra nullius, soybean fields also interweave multispecific relationships, although poorer, simpler, and with less diversity, between humans, plants, rodents, and viruses. 

The emergence of hantaviruses along the Tapajós River and BR-163 is an unexpected result of the process through which the conversion of the tropical forest into soy fields occurs. It can be considered a feature of a financial-neoliberal ecology that shapes certain modes of relationships between species, as they facilitate the emergence of diseases in Tapajós’ territories. As Tsing puts it, these hantaviruses that emerge from forests in ruins can be considered feral, in the sense given by her: “ecologies that have been encouraged by human-built infrastructures, but which have developed and spread beyond human control.”⁵

Hantavirus is not the unique one spreading due to human-animal interactions. Indeed, there are a few like Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (popularly known as mad cow syndrome), in 1996; SARS, in 2003; swine flu in 2009; and Ebola in 2014. Therefore the importance of looking into how humans relate to the soil, plants, and other animals as well as the role of finance in changing these patterns of relations. A newly published study reveals that the primary environmental catalyst for infectious disease outbreaks is the decline in biodiversity.⁶

Inspiration for this part of the text comes from Rob Wallace’s work on the relationship between capitalism and epidemics. In the chapter named  Did Neoliberalizing West African Forests Produce a New Niche for Ebola? where he and other authors explain in detail how armed conflicts, forced migration, deforestation, and the investments of international finance institutions have intensified palm oil monocultures (and therefore incentivised more deforestation). As the article says:

Let’s go back to the Tapajós. Hantavirus is an acute viral zoonosis. The natural reservoir of hantaviruses is wild rodents, which can carry the virus without ever becoming ill. These rodents can pass on viruses through faeces, urine, or saliva. Contamination of humans occurs mainly from aerosols of excreta from infected rodents, although there are other forms of transmission to humans, such as skin abrasions or rodent bites and person-to-person transmission sporadically reported in Argentina and Chile (related to Andes Hantavirus). This contact between humans and the excreta of contaminated rodents can lead to different forms of the disease, from non-specific acute febrile illness to more severe and characteristic pulmonary and cardiovascular conditions, which can progress to respiratory distress syndrome.

This contact between humans and rodent excreta is catalysed by the conversion of land use from forests to monoculture fields. One of the main focal points of hantavirus outbreaks in Brazil is precisely the region along the Tapajós River and the area of influence of highway BR-163. Deforestation favours the increase in the rodent population – and consequently of interactions between humans and rodents.

The recurrence of local outbreaks and sporadic cases of hantaviruses among humans raises fears regarding the worsening of public health in the region, including the possibility of epidemics with pandemic potential. One of the factors highlighted by epidemiologists for this increase in cases in Pará is related to the advancement of the paving of highway BR-163, linking infrastructures for transporting soybeans and viruses since a more functional road implies more deforestation, and greater chances for the emergence of new, possibly more virulent and/or more transmissible, strains of hantavirus. 

Anthropogenic change is a main driver in emerging infectious diseases, a recent meta-analysis published in Nature found.⁷ And it is no exaggeration to place finance at the heart of environmental degradation enhancing an ecology prone to the emergency of new viruses – in the Amazon and elsewhere.

“Those are not great projects for our region. We should call them monster-projects”, said a woman taking part in one of the discussions that marked the Second Caravan in Defense of the Tapajós River, its Peoples, and its Cultures, in 2016. She referred to an infrastructural hub under construction in the region, centred on soy transport ports, in Santarém, on Lake Maicá, and in Miritituba. 

But what is monstrous about these development projects? How does this classification of development projects as monsters allow us to understand the dynamics of destruction caused by these infrastructures? Monsters are deformed, fantastic, threatening, outsized beings. It refers to a creature that takes on a life of its own, and desires and actions escape its creator, like in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Monsters are beings whose ways of acting and consequences often cannot be controlled, creating realities beyond those that had been predestined. As infrastructure, these ports, railroads, and waterways create the conditions for the conversion of forests into soybean fields to become more profitable, as they increase the region’s export capacity, in the face of growing international demand. Hence, they are critical in the process through which the financialisation of the forest operates, making this agricultural frontier under expansion possible, by incorporating the region into a global market.

 These monster infrastructural projects have consequences much beyond the purpose for which they were first built. They enhance deforestation and, analogous to the Portuguese and Spanish ships at the time of the colonisation, these infrastructures are drivers of new diseases and new forms of contamination, be it through toxic agrochemicals or viruses responsible for new epidemics.

I’ve been working on Agri-necrocapitalism, as a concept, to characterise the particular modes of production of death on capitalism’s frontiers. It  helps me to better describe the interactions between these monster infrastructural projects and expulsion by suffocation, understanding both of them as techniques of industrial agriculture to empty space and exercising the power to control who and what lives—how to live—and who and what dies—how to die. Or in other words, it refers to the particular ways of killing which expanding financial capitalism depends on - and the chemical infrastructures that amplify this process.

As a concept, agri-necrocapitalism helps to articulate with more precision the intertwined elements that compose the financialisation of the forest, including the ongoing development and spread of plantations over forested areas, the forms of death enhanced by industrial agriculture, the emergence of new viruses and the development of these monster infrastructures – each of them highlighting specific features to the other.