Brazil’s place in the global coffee market is often treated as apolitical. Large producers doing what large producers do and working with scale and efficiency in mind. That framing, however, is wholly misleading. Brazil’s coffee economy has never been neutral. It has always been shaped by politics, land ownership, and whose interests the state chooses to defend when markets and climates turn hostile.
Over the last decade, this has become increasingly explicit.
When Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing neoliberal advocate, came to power in 2018 it followed years of political exhaustion: mass protests, recession, institutional collapse, and a corruption scandal that damaged the Brazilian left. Lula, who had left office with approval ratings above 80 percent, was jailed on charges later annulled by Brazil’s Supreme Court, clearing the path for Bolsonaro’s rise (BBC). Bolsonaro capitalised on that moment, assembling a coalition that cut across business interests, conservative evangelicals, sections of the police and military, and voters simply desperate for change (BBC). His project followed restoring the political power of agribusiness elites and rolling back the redistributive and regulatory gains of the previous two decades.
Geopolitically, Bolsonaro aligned himself closely with Donald Trump. The two shared a worldview hostile to environmental regulation, dismissive of democratic norms, and comfortable with inequality as a by-product of growth. Bolsonaro publicly backed Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020 and delayed recognising Biden’s victory. Trump, in return, openly endorsed Bolsonaro’s re-election bid, calling him a close ally (A Pública). Under Bolsonaro, Brazil positioned itself firmly within a US-aligned, extraction-first political order.
That alignment had real consequences for land and agriculture. Bolsonaro’s presidency coincided with the hollowing out of environmental agencies and a sharp rise in deforestation, which reached a fifteen-year high (BCIU). Agribusiness interests were emboldened. Enforcement weakened. Land concentration and frontier expansion accelerated. This was not incidental policy drift. It was the predictable outcome of a government structurally aligned with large landowners and export agriculture.
In coffee, this translated into a system tilted toward scale rather than resilience. Larger estates, designed for yield and volume, benefited from permissive regulation and reduced accountability. Smallholders, who produce a significant share of Brazil’s coffee and face the greatest exposure to climate volatility, were left far more vulnerable. Industry analysis at the time noted that Bolsonaro consistently favoured large-scale operations, even as climate change began to erode the very land base those systems depend on (Coffee Intelligence).
Even Bolsonaro’s government, however, could not fully ignore the limits of this model. When coffee prices fell to a thirteen-year low, it explored direct market intervention through price-support mechanisms that would allow producers to sell coffee to the state at a fixed floor price (Reuters). The proposal sat uneasily alongside Bolsonaro’s stated commitment to austerity, but it revealed an uncomfortable truth. Market fundamentalism was tolerated only while it did not threaten collapse. When it did, state intervention became unavoidable.
Throughout this period, Brazil exported record volumes of agricultural commodities while hunger and food insecurity worsened at home. Family farmers produced much of the food Brazilians actually consumed, yet received a fraction of the public credit and political protection granted to export agribusiness. Coffee sat squarely within this contradiction: profitable for the trade balance, precarious for those growing it (IPES-Food).
Lula’s return to office in 2023 marked a decisive break with that trajectory.
His third presidency placed hunger eradication, social protection, and environmental repair at the centre of economic policy. Policies that had already proven effective in the 2000s were reinstated, including public food purchasing from small farmers, expanded social transfers, and the restoration of national food governance bodies dismantled under Bolsonaro (IPES-Food). Within days of taking office, Lula also reinstated environmental protections and recommitted Brazil to net-zero deforestation by 2030, reversing the permissive approach of the previous administration (BCIU).
This was not symbolic politics. It was a material shift in whose interests the state prioritised.
Internationally, Lula moved Brazil away from Bolsonaro’s pro-US alignment and toward a more independent, multipolar foreign policy. He re-engaged with regional integration and South–South cooperation, signalling that Brazil would no longer subordinate domestic priorities to ideological alignment with Washington (Geopolitical Economy). Bolsonaro, facing legal accountability for corruption and his handling of Covid-19, left Brazil for Florida before the transfer of power.
That break did not go unchallenged.
In 2025, the United States imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods in a move widely interpreted as political retaliation rather than economic necessity, closely linked to Trump’s support for Bolsonaro and hostility toward Lula’s government (Al Jazeera; LSE). Coffee was directly exposed. Brazil exports the majority of what it produces, and the US is its largest buyer. Family farmers, already dealing with climate-driven drought and falling arabica prices, stood to lose the most (Al Jazeera).
Those tariffs have now been removed. But the episode remains revealing.
It showed how quickly coffee can be drawn into geopolitical pressure when a producing country pursues policies that challenge entrenched interests. And it showed, once again, where the costs of that pressure tend to fall. Not on political elites or large exporters, but on farmers and rural communities least able to absorb sudden shocks (LSE).
Brazil’s coffee sector is now emerging from a period of deliberate extraction and political abandonment and entering a contested phase of repair.
Lula’s approach does not promise an easy or immediate transformation. But it re-anchors coffee within a broader food system, one that treats land, labour, and climate not as externalities, but as political responsibilities. It recognises that resilience cannot be built on deregulation and that food security cannot be sustained by exports alone.
Coffee will continue to flow from Brazil. The question is whether it does so through a system designed to concentrate value and power, or one that begins, however imperfectly, to redistribute both.
