Introduction
The business and human rights agenda often asks how companies can be held accountable for harms already produced. For example: contamination, deforestation, labor analogous to slavery or carried out in precarious conditions, forced displacement, and violations against Indigenous peoples, traditional communities, or human rights defenders. This question remains indispensable. But, as private interests increasingly advance over matters of public interest, it is no longer sufficient.
In the climate and socio-environmental field, a significant part of the problem occurs before visible harm takes place. It occurs when private actors participate in defining the very rules that should limit them. It occurs when business interests shape risk criteria, authorization procedures, registration deadlines, oversight spaces, and the technical vocabularies through which societies decide what is acceptable, modern, efficient, or inevitable, as in the case of Law No. 14,785/2023, approved in Brazil. This legislation represents a setback in environmental and sanitary guarantees, mainly due to the flexibilization of controls and the removal of veto power from the technical bodies responsible for health and the environment.
Moreover, its approval reflects the influence of corporate interests linked to Brazilian agribusiness, politically represented by actors associated with the so-called bancada ruralista, a congressional bloc historically aligned with the demands of agribusiness companies and rural economic elites. In this sense, the law illustrates how corporate capture operates not only through direct lobbying, but also through the reconfiguration of institutional competences, regulatory standards, and decision-making procedures in ways that reduce the State’s capacity to prevent risks and protect human rights.
Against this backdrop, this is the starting point of this text: corporate capture should not be treated merely as an administrative deviation, an ethical failure, or an anti-corruption problem. In the context of Brazilian agribusiness, it should be understood as a form of privatized socio-environmental and climate governance, in which economic power influences the design of legal norms, weakens public safeguards, and displaces the State from its protective function.
At the outset, corporate capture can be defined as a process through which public decision-making is materially redirected by private economic interests. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines capture as a situation in which decisions cease to reflect the public interest and begin to respond disproportionately to private interests.
The Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU), in turn, describes capture as the process through which private economic elites undermine human rights and environmental protection by exercising undue influence over public institutions. Taken together, these frameworks allow the analysis to move beyond classical corruption: the central question is not only whether an illegal act has occurred, but whether the decision-making process itself has been distorted in favor of private power.
When corporate capture is analyzed as a structural mechanism that distorts socio-environmental regulation in Brazilian agribusiness, especially in the context of Law No. 14,785/2023, which reformed Brazil’s legal framework on pesticides, it becomes clear that capture is not limited to unlawful practices.
It also operates through formally legal channels: lobbying, which is not regulated in Brazil; parliamentary fronts; political financing; the production of science with a specific bias toward serving private interests; the technicization of public debate; privileged access to public authorities; and repeated participation in decision-making processes.
This understanding brings the Brazilian experience closer to international debates on regulatory capture and corporate political influence. In Brazil, however, this debate gains particular visibility in the field of agribusiness, where the relationship between the State and the agro-industrial sector is not limited to the legitimate representation of economic interests. It involves a long trajectory of converting economic power into normative power.
Authors such as Caio Pompeia show how agribusiness was politically formed through disputes over land, credit, agrarian reform, productive modernization, and international insertion. During the democratic period, the organized legislative action of the bancada ruralista and sector-linked associative structures consolidated a significant capacity to exert pressure on the Legislative Branch and on the formulation of public policies.
Law No. 14,785/2023 provides a concrete case of this dynamic. Originating from a long-standing legislative proposal and known by critics as the “Poison Package,” the law was presented as regulatory modernization. However, both its legislative process and its content reveal a deeper dispute over who defines environmental, health, and territorial protection standards in the country.
The reform introduced by Law No. 14,785/2023 replaces the previous tripartite logic with a governance model centered on the main registering authority. Under the former framework, the registration and control of pesticides depended on the coordinated participation of the bodies responsible for agriculture, public health, and environmental protection, reflecting an institutional balance between agricultural productivity, sanitary safety, and environmental safeguards.
The new model, however, reorganizes these competences by placing the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock as the central registering authority for pesticides and the Ministry of the Environment as the central authority for environmental control products, while the other bodies act primarily as technical collaborators. Although presidential vetoes prevented the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock from being granted exclusive competence, the legislative process and the normative design of the law still indicate a movement toward regulatory flexibilization, risk-management-based governance, and a reduction in the institutional weight of health and environmental authorities in pesticide regulation.
The problem, therefore, is not merely the existence of a new law on pesticides. The problem lies in how the legislative process reveals a structural asymmetry between, on the one hand, economic actors with a high capacity for political organization, technical production, and institutional access; and, on the other, populations directly exposed to the risks of contamination, often with limited presence in decision-making spaces.
This point is decisive for the business and human rights agenda. If a company or economic sector influences the formulation of rules that reduce public controls, accelerate authorizations, weaken oversight, or diminish the strength of protective institutions, the violation of rights does not begin only when a person is affected by contaminants. It begins in the institutional architecture that makes exposure more likely, less visible, or less reparable.
The human rights impacts of pesticides are broad. By flexibilizing the criteria for the control and approval of pesticides, the legislation reveals that the effects of permissive regulation are not distributed evenly across society. There is extensive evidence of environmental contamination, aerial spraying, exposure of Indigenous and traditional communities, and risks to health, food, water, and territories. Based on the work of Larissa Bombardi, Naiara Bittencourt, studies on Guarani Kaiowá communities, and documents produced by Terra de Direitos, it is possible to observe that these impacts disproportionately affect rural workers, family farmers, Indigenous peoples, quilombola communities, traditional communities, and socio-environmental defenders.
This unequal distribution of risks makes corporate capture a problem of socio-environmental justice. Regulatory flexibilization may be presented as economic efficiency, competitiveness, or modernization. But when its costs fall upon historically vulnerabilized bodies and territories, the language of efficiency conceals a political choice: who will be protected, who will be exposed, and who will have a voice in defining acceptable risk?
Business and Human Rights in the Context of Pesticides
The climate debate is not only about emissions, targets, or carbon markets. It also involves land, food, biodiversity, the use of chemical substances, territorial protection, State capacity, and the integrity of decision-making processes. If climate and socio-environmental policies depend on public institutions capable of regulating high-impact economic activities, the capture of those institutions compromises the very possibility of a just transition.
The Brazilian case of pesticides suggests that the climate responsibility of private actors should include their political and regulatory conduct. Companies do not merely produce goods, manage chains, or generate direct impacts. They also participate in constructing the normative environment that defines which impacts will be tolerated. For this reason, the business and human rights agenda must consider corporate political engagement as part of human rights due diligence.
The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights offer an important starting point. Their “protect, respect and remedy” framework affirms the State duty to protect human rights, the corporate responsibility to respect them, and the need for access to remedy.
However, it may be argued that the Guiding Principles have limits when faced with corporate capture. Although they are relevant for interpreting State duties and corporate responsibilities, they do not expressly address capture. Moreover, their non-binding character and their dependence on institutional internalization become insufficient in contexts of high economic concentration, State fragility, and political inequality.
This insufficiency becomes especially evident when the erosion of human rights already occurs during the drafting of legislation. Approaches centered only on voluntary commitments, internal compliance policies, or corporate responsibility statements do not adequately confront situations in which companies or economic sectors help shape the very “rules of the game.”
These issues were already identified in 2022 by the Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, which pointed to corporate influence in the political and regulatory sphere. When companies seek to influence political processes, such conduct must be transparent, responsible, and compatible with respect for human rights. This implies that companies should identify, prevent, and mitigate adverse impacts arising from their regulatory positions, including when they advocate for laws that may weaken human rights protections.
On the State side, the response must also go beyond the formal opening of participatory channels. The State must protect the integrity of decision-making processes. This includes mandatory lobbying registers, strict rules on conflicts of interest, control of revolving doors, transparency regarding meetings and influence-related expenditures, strengthening of oversight mechanisms, protection of whistleblowers, and guarantees of effective participation by affected communities. Transparency alone does not solve capture; but its absence makes capture easier, cheaper, and less contestable.
Applied to pesticide regulation, this means that decisions on registration, risk assessment, authorization, monitoring, and restriction should be insulated from disproportionate corporate influence. Public health and environmental authorities must retain a meaningful role in evaluating risks; meetings between regulators and industry representatives should be publicly disclosed; scientific evidence used in regulatory processes should be transparent and independent; and rural workers, Indigenous peoples, quilombola communities, traditional communities, and other affected groups should be able to participate effectively in decisions that shape their exposure to pesticides.
Current national and international instruments are not sufficient, on their own, to address corporate capture. Confronting it requires binding mechanisms of corporate accountability, effective regulation of lobbying, stronger transparency rules, robust oversight institutions, and the genuine opening of decision-making processes to democratic participation.
This has important implications for the field of business and human rights. The challenge is not only to hold companies accountable after rights have been violated. It is also to prevent legal and institutional frameworks from being shaped in ways that make certain violations predictable, normalized, or legally invisible.
Corporate capture unsettles the comfortable distinction between private economic activity and public regulation. It shows that, in many cases, corporate power is not only outside the State, pressuring it from the margins; it is also embedded within the processes through which the State defines its own capacity to protect.
In Brazilian agribusiness, this dynamic is particularly evident. Pesticide regulation reveals how discourses of modernization, efficiency, and competitiveness can coexist with the erosion of public safeguards, the invisibilization of vulnerabilized groups, and the subordination of the public purpose of law to sectoral interests. No promise of economic efficiency should justify weakening the State’s capacity to protect life, health, water, territories, and democratic participation.
Understanding corporate capture as a climate and human rights problem therefore requires broadening the central question of the field. It is not enough to ask whether companies respect rights within existing rules. It is also necessary to ask how those rules were made, who had access to their drafting, which interests were privileged, which forms of knowledge were treated as legitimate, and which communities were left outside the process.
The answer to these questions may be uncomfortable. But it is precisely there that a critical agenda for business, human rights, and climate governance must begin: by placing the public interest, human rights, and socio-environmental justice back at the center of normative production.
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