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After the 2008 economic crisis, Harvard University, one of the world’s most reputable educational institutions, sought to reallocate its donation budget to safer assets. He has invested more than $1 billion in land in Brazil, Africa, Oceania, Eastern Europe and the United States.
But a recent report shows that in Brazil, which accounts for nearly a portion of Harvard’s total investment of $450 million, the maximum of businesses acquired through the endowment are territories occupied by land hoarders in conflict with classical communities and quilombos of slave descendants in the Cerrado. Prairies. Array The report, written through GRAIN, a non-profit organization advocating for smallholder farmers, and Social Network of Justia e Direitos Humanos, a social justice NGO, also links the land with incidents of deforestation and death threats.
Most houses are speculative investments; land, even unproductive, is considered an investment in times of crisis or otherwise. To date, the university’s efforts to divest into these companies have been unsuccessful.
It has a total of 405,000 hectares (1 million acres), nearly 5,000 times the length of Harvard’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spread over about 40 farms. Most are found in the states of Maranhao, Tocantins, Piau and Bahia, in the domain of the Cerrado known as Matopiba. It is a region governed by agribusiness and has experienced excessive degrees of illegal deforestation and rural violence in recent years.
Contacted through Mongabay, The Harvard University press said it “doesn’t comment on express investments.”
In October 2019, Altamiran Lopes Ribeiro, who works with the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) affiliated with the Catholic Church in Piau, traveled to Harvard to communicate about the truth of the communities in which it operates and are now affected through foreign companies. He also sought to hear what academics and professors had to say.
Most of the other people he met at the university didn’t know how his cash was invested, Ribeiro said. “Our concept to make those other people aware of reality. To show them what’s going on so they can pressure executives to get their cash out of those companies. In 2019, the CPT recorded 376 land disputes in the 4 states of Matopiba.
Although the university has not acquired any land recently, Harvard officials have also been unable to sell the troubled farms. However, despite the difficulty of finding buyers, the university continues to gain merit with its properties, gaining value on land.
“Your goal is to produce anything. It’s about having the land as a monetary asset,” Ribeiro says. Brazilian law that prohibits foreigners from buying land directly, the endowment of Harvard and other similar corporations use phantom corporations. “And then they buy the land hoarders, whatever they are. They earn cash on the stock market, earn by renting, generating or making the land appreciate. It’s a safer investment than others,” ribeiro says.
Pouring millions of dollars into “conquered in exchange for blood” land, as Ribeiro says, is a difficult task. But it is also profitable when amnesty granted through states and the federal government to deforestations and land grabbers through state laws, interim measures, and expenses that have recently flown into Congress.
Even the pandemic, which has claimed more than 109,000 lives in Brazil, has not curbed what critics say is the federal government’s momentum to legalize land theft, in other words, the land process. This type of amnesty promotes all kinds of illicit transactions and foreign budgets also benefit.
Brazilian Environment Minister Ricardo Salles called COVID-19 an opportunity to “move in cattle,” and Bolsonaro’s administration was quick to undo environmental protections to gain advantages from agribusinesses and giant investors.
The so-called provisional land grab measure is now Bill 2633/20, and you can vote in Congress at any time. Criticized in detail through organizations, such as the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA) and Imazon, a non-profit conservation organization, the bill can provide an amnesty for abnormal appropriation of millions of hectares, aggravate conflicts, cause an even greater concentration of land in the hands of a few, and cause additional deforestation. Changes to the Terra Legal program under former President Michel Temer are already a big gain for criminals.
In Matopiba, state legislation already complied with or under discussion follows the same path. The risk is real, says Larissa Packer of GRAIN. “They grant an amnesty for invasions of public lands, which are then sold with a reduction of up to 90% of the costs established through INCRA [the Federal Agrarian Reform Agency] 20 years ago. In other words: free,” Says Packer. All this makes the Brazilian land market, however simple it may seem, very profitable.
According to Packer, Harvard’s foundation is “desperate to sell its rotten securities that have important everyday environmental jobs and face demands,” and that includes the land it owns in Brazil. But if the land is officially regulated through those bills, “then it’s over, the confrontation is erased.” The report shows that Harvard has been aware of local problems.
In a message sent through the Harvard Management Company press office, the foundation sometimes attempts to “reposition its portfolio” of herbal resources around the world. Investments deemed unsustainable have been reduced from 9% to 4% of the total over the more than 3 years, starting with the hiring of a new control team that has inherited “deeply problematic assets”.
According to the press office, Harvard has already disposed of more than $1 billion in such investments and expects to sell another $200 million in “good but not compliant” projects this year with its existing sustainable investment guidelines.
Daniela Stefano, from Social Rede of Justia and Direitos Humanos, visited the affected communities of Piau and Bahia through Harvard’s businesses. Local reality, he says, includes death threats, the presence of armed guards, arbitrarily constructed fences, the use of insecticides and the co-optation of local leaders.
Between the towns of Jerumenha and Floriano in Piau, Arthur Passos’ quilombola network experienced real devastation with the arrival of Terracal, the local corporation representing Harvard. “The land, which remains unproductive, is surrounded by fences and guarded,” Explains Stefano. As they are close to the river, these are the same lands that other people used for everything: planting, fishing, raising small animals and developing medicinal and culmination plants. “Today, the network is divided and dangers waste its name like a classic chilombola network,” Stefano says.
Symbol of the banner: Aerial symbol of an estate in the Matopiba region taken Operation Shoyo Matopiba, driven by Ibama. Photo: Vinícius Mendonca.
This story was first reported through Mongabay’s Brazilian team and was published here on our Brazilian online website on July 27, 2020.
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