Brazil’s Cerrado is facing a severe deforestation crisis, driven largely by the expansion of agribusiness. This report shows how the U.S. pension giant TIAA has played a major role in converting vast areas of land in western Bahia into soy and cotton plantations, worsening the already serious impacts on local communities and the environment. Hidden behind a complex corporate structure, TIAA appears to have taken advantage of loopholes in Brazil’s foreign land ownership laws, allowing it to expand further across the Cerrado and fueling land grabbing and ecocide.
The Brazilian Cerrado is the world’s most biodiverse savannah and is critical for ecological, cultural, and economic reasons. It is home to Indigenous, quilombola, and peasant communities who hold valuable knowledge of the biome and protect its biodiversity through long-standing cultural practices, communities that also possess unique, inalienable rights under Brazilian law and international conventions. The region contains 5% of the world’s plant and animal species, including more than 12,000 plant species, almost 40% of which exist nowhere else on Earth. The Cerrado is also a crucial water source, feeding some of South America’s most important rivers, and it plays a major role in climate regulation by storing large amounts of carbon in its deep root systems and soil. Protecting the Cerrado is essential not only for Brazil but for the planet as a whole.
Despite its importance, the Cerrado is one of Brazil’s most threatened ecosystems, with more than half of its original area already deforested or converted to agriculture. Within it, the MATOPIBA region – covering Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia – has become the new frontier of soy expansion, where land grabbers are destroying native vegetation to make way for enormous industrial monoculture plantations. Agribusiness growth in the Cerrado is being pushed by farmland speculation from transnational financial and trading corporations closely linked to local business elites. TIAA is a major actor in this process, both in Brazil and around the world, targeting more than three million acres of land across several countries.
This report draws on land ownership records, remote sensing data, field research, and firsthand testimony to add to the growing body of evidence on the impacts of farmland speculation in the MATOPIBA region.
Research and writing: Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos, AidEnvironment, Friends of the Earth US
Maps, satellite images, and geospatial analysis: AidEnvironment
Photos: Shutterstock/RAPALAXIS
Communications adviser: Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos
Translation: Karen Lang
Research and fieldwork collaborators: We would like to thank our interviewees, who were fundamental to this research, but whose names have not been revealed to ensure their security. Our special thanks to the Fundo e Fecho de Pasto communities in Vereda da Felicidade; Cap.o do Modesto; Cupim; Porcos, Guar. e Pombas; the Mato Grosso geraizeira community, and the brejeira communities living on the banks of the Sap.o River in the municipalities of Correntina and Formosa do Rio Preto.
Date published: November 2025