How Political Influence Shapes Agricultural Expansion in the Amazon
In many communities across the Amazon region, there has long been a quiet assumption: wealthy landowners don’t just shape the landscape with tractors and chainsaws, they also shape local politics with money. For years, this idea floated around as an open secret—widely believed, rarely proven. Now, new academic research has put hard evidence behind what many residents have suspected all along.
A recent study by Erik Katovich, an assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Connecticut, shows that political influence plays a measurable role in how agriculture expands in the Amazon. The findings suggest that large landholders who financially support winning local politicians are significantly more likely to convert their land to soybean farming than those who back losing candidates.
This research adds a crucial new layer to how we understand deforestation, land inequality, and agricultural growth in one of the most ecologically important regions on Earth.
The Rise of Soybeans in the Amazon
To understand why soybeans are at the center of this story, it helps to look at Brazil’s agricultural trajectory. Over the past few decades, soybeans have become one of the most important crops in the Brazilian economy. This shift accelerated in the early 2000s, when genetically modified soy seeds were legalized. These new varieties made it far easier to grow soybeans in tropical climates like the Amazon, where traditional soy cultivation had previously been difficult.
Today, Brazil is the world’s largest producer of soybeans, exporting massive quantities for animal feed, cooking oil, and biofuels. Compared to cattle ranching—another dominant land use in the Amazon—soy farming can generate far higher profits per hectare. That potential return has made soy especially attractive to landowners with access to large tracts of land.
But profitability alone doesn’t explain everything.
Why Switching to Soy Is Not Easy
Converting land from cattle pasture to soy fields is a complex and expensive process. Amazonian soils are naturally acidic and poorly suited for soy without heavy modification. Preparing the land requires removing tree stumps, leveling terrain, applying lime and fertilizers, purchasing expensive machinery, and hiring specialized labor and technical experts.
These high upfront costs create major barriers, even for wealthy landowners. According to Katovich’s research, this is where political influence becomes a strategic investment. Rather than relying solely on market forces, large landholders increasingly turn to local politics to reduce these barriers.
Following the Money and the Land
What makes this study stand out is its data-driven approach. Katovich and his collaborators combined three powerful data sources:
- Detailed land ownership records
- Political campaign donation data
- Satellite imagery tracking land-use changes over time
This allowed the researchers to trace how political donations, election outcomes, and land-use decisions are connected at the property level.
Their findings are striking. Large landowners who donated to mayoral candidates who went on to win elections were significantly more likely to adopt soybean farming on their properties than those who supported losing candidates. This effect was especially strong among first-time soy adopters, suggesting political access matters most when landholders are making major transitions.
Importantly, this pattern does not hold for small, family-run farms. The political advantage is concentrated among landowners controlling thousands of hectares, highlighting how size and wealth shape access to power.
How Local Politicians Can Help Farmers
In Brazil, municipal politicians—especially mayors—have meaningful influence over agricultural development. They can help farmers access rural credit programs, which provide loans for equipment, inputs, and land preparation. They can also influence decisions around infrastructure, such as road construction, making it easier to transport heavy machinery and crops.
Beyond formal policies, politicians can act as connectors, helping landholders find suppliers, contractors, and technical expertise. While none of these actions are illegal on their own, the study shows that political support often flows back to donors in tangible ways, lowering the cost of adopting soy.
This dynamic reinforces existing inequalities. As Katovich points out, land inequality in the Amazon is already extremely high, and political influence allows the largest landowners to pull even further ahead by gaining early access to profitable agricultural technologies.
From Individual Benefits to Broader Policy Effects
The study didn’t stop at individual properties. The researchers also looked at how donations shape governance more broadly. At the policy level, politicians who receive large contributions from agricultural landholders are more likely to govern in ways that favor agriculture overall.
This includes increased agricultural spending and looser enforcement of environmental protections. However, these pro-agriculture policies are often poorly targeted, benefiting entire regions rather than specific donors. The result is a spillover effect: increased soy cultivation, higher rates of deforestation, and more environmental violations—even on land owned by people who never donated at all.
In other words, money in local politics doesn’t just affect individual farms; it reshapes entire landscapes.
Environmental and Social Consequences
Agriculture remains the single biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon, and soy expansion plays a significant role. Locally, forest loss leads to higher temperatures, reduced rainfall stability, lower agricultural productivity over time, and major biodiversity losses.
Globally, the stakes are even higher. The Amazon is often described as the “lungs of the planet”, not because it produces most of the world’s oxygen, but because it plays a critical role in carbon storage, climate regulation, and water cycling. Moisture generated in the Amazon helps regulate rainfall patterns across South America, supporting agriculture far beyond Brazil’s borders.
There are also public health concerns. Soy production in Brazil has been linked in some studies to higher rates of childhood cancers, likely due to increased exposure to agricultural chemicals.
Is Soy Always the Villain?
The researchers acknowledge that soybean expansion isn’t inherently destructive. In theory, converting already-cleared cattle pastures into high-yield soy fields could increase productivity without causing additional deforestation. From an economic perspective, this could benefit Brazil, landowners, and the environment at the same time.
But in practice, that’s not what’s happening. Instead of intensifying land use on existing cleared areas, soy expansion often triggers indirect land-use change. As pastures are converted to soy fields, cattle operations move elsewhere, pushing deforestation deeper into the forest.
A New Question for Future Research
One of the most intriguing questions raised by this study is about timing. Did large landholders always invest heavily in politics, or did the rise of soybeans change their incentives? It’s possible that new agricultural technologies shifted political priorities—from influencing policies that enable deforestation to influencing policies that support crop expansion.
Katovich and his team are now exploring this question, aiming to better understand how technological change reshapes political behavior in frontier regions like the Amazon.
Why This Research Matters
This study provides rare, property-level evidence that local politics directly shapes land-use decisions in tropical forests. It highlights a clear mechanism through which money, power, and environmental change intersect. Perhaps most importantly, it shows that efforts to protect the Amazon cannot focus only on markets or enforcement—they must also grapple with the political economy of land and influence.
Research paper:
Katovich, E. et al. (2025). Does Local Politics Drive Tropical Land-Use Change? Property-Level Evidence From the Amazon. The Economic Journal. https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueaf123
