Protect the Brazilian Cerrado from land grabbing and deforestation. Add your name now! >>

Land grabbers in Brazil have pushed Indigenous and local communities off their land to turn some of the world’s largest tropical savanna into stretches of cropland.

The Brazilian Cerrado contains some of the world’s most unique creatures and has been stewarded by Indigenous communities for generations. But it’s plagued by violent land grabbers and big agribusiness companies who are destroying the forest.

Insurance giant TIAA purchases land from some of these notorious landgrabbers – and we need your help to make them stop.

Comments

Dear Members of TIAA’s Corporate Governance and Social Responsibility Committee:

I'm writing because I have serious concerns about TIAA’s involvement in land grabbing, deforestation, and human rights violations through its direct acquisitions of farmland. I ask you to address these concerns now by stopping all acquisition of farmland and returning acquired land in Brazil to impacted communities. These actions will spare TIAA clients from further risks and repair much of the damage caused by TIAA’s farmland deals.

TIAA has direct connections to land grabbing and deforestation through its speculative farmland deals in Brazil. Through its wholly-owned subsidiary TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture LLC (TCGA), TIAA has bought 738,907 acres of land, according to TIAA’s 2018 report “Responsible Investing in Farmland”, in violation of Brazilian law which restricts land ownership by foreign individuals and corporations. Additionally, TCGA bought land in the state of Piaui from notorious land grabber Euclides de Carli, found to have illegally acquired 15 farms totaling 307,000 acres. TIAA is putting clients’ retirement savings, and your firm’s reputation, at risk by getting involved with known land grabbers.

Even where TIAA has not bought land from land grabbers, TIAA is still contributing to displacement of local communities and human rights abuses just by continuing to make farmland deals in sensitive and conflict-prone regions. In regions of Brazil like the Cerrado, where TIAA owns hundreds of thousands of acres, land grabs and land conflicts are widespread. TIAA cannot possibly acquire lands there without benefiting from or incentivizing fraud, abuse and corruption.

In September 2017, over 30 international human rights organizations visited Brazil to investigate how speculation with farmland was impacting local communities and the environment. What they found was systemic fraud, environmental destruction and human rights abuses. Local communities described loss of land, threats of violence, and loss and pollution of water sources. The situation is so bad that the Brazilian government is investigating and canceling fraudulent land titles, particularly in the Cerrado.

The Cerrado is one of the world’s most important ecosystems. The agribusiness expansion that TIAA is financing replaces the Cerrado’s rich biodiversity with a plantation model of agriculture that is destroying the region and planet. This model of agriculture relies on chemicals that pollute the water, and farmland in the Cerrado is created through deforestation. TIAA has a “zero deforestation” policy for its Brazilian farmland, which restricts TIAA from buying land deforested beyond certain dates. But the problem of deforestation is so systemic that, if TIAA wants its farmland deals to be free of deforestation, then it simply must stop the practice of buying farmland in the Cerrado.

I’m concerned that by using the retirement funds of millions of workers to promote these farmland deals and a plantation model of agriculture, TIAA is causing environmental destruction, exacerbating inequities and climate change, and exposing clients’ retirement savings to reputational and financial risk. I join TIAA clients along with concerned individuals and organizations to call on TIAA and its subsidiaries to live up to TIAA’s core values by:

1. Immediately stopping the purchase of farmland in Brazil, the United States, and globally, and returning lands already acquired to communities in Brazil;
2. Meeting the demands of community leadership to repair the damage caused by TIAA’s farmland deals to date, including immediately stopping deforestation and the use of chemical pesticides;
3. Publicizing TIAA’s response to all of its clients.

Sincerely,
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