Date/Time
Date(s) - 12/11/2025
11:30 am - 1:00 pm

Location
MUSC 318

Research in Progress Seminar (RIPS) 

The State of Agribusiness: The Politics of Rentier Strategies of Brazil’s Agribusiness (2003 – 2025)

Dr. Leandro Vergama-Camus
Associate Professor and Department Head
Department of Economy and Social Innovation
Université de l’Ontario français (UOF) Toronto
leandro.vergara-camus@uontario.ca

Building on recent political economy discussion around the category of rent, the paper proposes a conceptualisation of the state as a space for wealth accumulation where fractions of the ruling classes form hegemonic coalitions and deploy rentier strategies by not only building a discourse that aims to maintain or re-articulate hegemony, but also by striving for the control of key sectors of the state to better defend the economic interests. This conceptualisation is mobilised to analyse the political strategy of Brazilian agribusiness from its alliance with Luis Inacio Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party in 2003 to its backing of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, and its current ambivalence towards him since Lula began his third presidency (2023).The paper focuses on the evolution of particular agrarian and environmental policies to demonstrate how they are shaped by the growing power and influence of agribusiness within the Brazilian state.

Leandro Vergara-Camus is Associate Professor and Head of Department of Economy and Social Innovation at the Université de l’Ontario français (UOF) in Toronto. Before joining the UOF, he was Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London (2012 to 2021) and Assistant Professor in international political economy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands (2008-2012). His area of specialization is Latin America, and his fields of expertise are political economy of development, alternative development, social movements, extractive industries, energy transition, and sustainable development. He has published two books and numerous articles and book chapters in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, some of which have been translated into German and Turkish. His current research focuses on renewable energies, extractive industries, and the global energy transition in the context of climate change, with a particular focus on global South regional powers.