The collapsed roof of the barn, once the shelter for 500 pigs, is a constant reminder to Gustavo Lorenzon of the catastrophic floods that hit his farm, and much of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, in May 2024. A year later, he still cannot afford to fix it, even if it means a 30% reduction in his annual turnover. “Refurbishment would be expensive and we thought it prudent to wait. It’s not the time to take on another debt,” Lorenzon told Dialogue Earth in April.
The third generation of a family of pig farmers, Lorenzon said that in 2022 he invested 1.3 million reais (USD 233,000) to modernise his sheds. The government’s rural credit scheme provided for a two-year grace period, which he began paying back in 2024. However, the floods of that year drastically reduced his production, forcing him to tighten the family budget. “We’ve taken from our own salary to honour the 210,000 reais [USD 38,000] annual instalment,” Lorenzon explained.
A year ago, torrential rains caused the worst climate tragedy in Rio Grande do Sul’s history. The Taquari valley, a rural area north-west of the state capital, Porto Alegre, and home to the Lorenzon farm, was one of the regions most affected both by the overflowing of the Taquari River and its tributaries, and by landslides.
The disaster, driven by the El Niño weather phenomenon and exacerbated by climate change, devastated the agricultural sector in Rio Grande do Sul, which is among the country’s largest producers of rice, soya and pork. Figures from Emater, the federal rural technical assistance agency, show that 206,000 properties lost crops, animals and facilities.
Since 2020, the La Niña weather pattern caused three years of drought in Rio Grande do Sul, and increased rainfall in Brazil’s North and Northeast regions. Under La Niña, Pacific waters cool, intensifying winds and altering Brazil’s rainfall regime.
The phenomenon’s counterpart, El Niño, arrived in 2023. The warming of the ocean, intensified by climate change, boosted the winds and caused four major floods in the far south of Brazil, in June, September and November 2023, and in May 2024.
In 2024, the Dialogue Earth team travelled through the regions most affected by the rains – the plains of the Taquari and Caí valleys, and the Porto Alegre metropolitan region. We came across devastating losses, stories of resistance, and urgent calls for support.
On returning almost a year later, the team found traumatised farmers, in debt and afraid to invest in their production in the face of climatic extremes.
“I kept cleaning the house, fixing things, seeing how to get back into production because I didn’t want to stop and think about what had happened,” said farmer Roselei dos Santos Porto, as if she were reliving what had happened.
For 15 days, the Porto family’s house and allotment remained submerged. They live and work in the municipality of Eldorado do Sul, in a settlement belonging to the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), a nationwide agrarian reform and land distribution movement.
In the municipality of Encantado, 150 kilometres to the north, farmer Mauro Vieira Marques and his wife, Ivete Justina, looked out on their property’s fallen trees and plots left churned by the force of the flood. It was only in April this year that the local government sent in machinery to finally level the land and remove the debris.
They now plan to replant their orchard with oranges, limes, papaya and persimmons. After the tragedy, only one banana tree survived.
The deluge also destroyed the facilities in which the couple produced artisan cheeses and eggs to sell at the local market. They have not been rebuilt. “I only managed to plant pumpkins, some spices and a few corn stalks to make flour. We’re coming back little by little,” said Marques.
To supplement her income, Justina started working as a carer for the elderly. The couple still live in the house that was flooded, restored with the help of donations, but are waiting for support from the state to build a new home on a hill.
Making agriculture climate-resilient
A year after the rains, the region’s residents are still coming to terms with the catastrophe, and clouds remain over the enormous task of making local agriculture resilient to the next climatic extreme. On the heels of the flood, 2025 brought another challenge: brittle soils due to lack of water. Under La Niña, drought and heatwaves have led 60% of municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul to declare a state of emergency.
The swing between droughts and floods has become part of the reality in the state since 2020. The Federation of Agriculture of Rio Grande do Sul (Farsul) estimates that the state’s losses in the sector linked to droughts between 2020 and 2024 will reach more than 106 billion reais (USD 19 billion).
Experts interviewed by Dialogue Earth agree that this debate has not yet been taken seriously enough by the state government. “From a certain moment on, there was a ‘naturalisation’ of the hecatomb we suffered,” said Sérgio Schneider, professor of postgraduate studies in rural development at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).
Schneider pointed out that the reopening of the airport on 21 October 2024, following a seven-month closure due to the floods, gave the feeling that everything was back to normal, that the flood had only been an exceptional event, and “not part of the new normal”.
Given the scale of the tragedy in Rio Grande do Sul, it is likely that the issue will feature on the agenda at COP30, the UN climate summit scheduled for November in the Amazonian city of Belém. The disaster, Schneider said, could serve as an example to share lessons learned and reinforce the urgency of actions involving climate justice, funding for losses and damages and support for vulnerable communities. But he added that the state has missed the chance to become an example of climate governance at the Belém summit.
“We haven’t learnt our lesson,” he said. “We could have done much more and better, such as creating a climate change secretariat [at the state level], which would bring together academia, government and companies to plan public policies, but these bodies are still not aligned.”
Schneider likened the inaction in Rio Grande do Sul to that of the COP meetings themselves. There is good will and critical mass, but “procrastination” prevails. “We’re dealing with an emergency very slowly,” said Schneider, who is also a consultant for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
The Rio Grande do Sul government told Dialogue Earth that it has created a committee of scientists to advise its Reconstruction Secretariat on analysing climate resilience projects. Among these is a water management proposal to reduce the impacts of constant droughts and floods. The project, however, is still being drawn up.
In addition to guaranteeing food production, a vital and strategic priority for the country, analysts have highlighted the need for Brazil to rethink its agricultural model if it is to meet its emissions reduction targets. Today, agriculture accounts for almost 74% of the country’s emissions, mainly due to the conversion of soil into monocultures, according to the Climate Observatory, a civil society network that monitors Brazil’s emissions.
Inadequate management also reduces the soil’s ability to retain carbon, and can turn the land into an agent of the climate crisis. A study by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam) shows that soils cultivated for more than a decade with a single species lose 38% of their carbon stocks – double the losses felt by soils suffering recurring forest fires.
“There’s no point in having more drought-resistant plants if we don’t manage the soil correctly,” says agronomist Francislene Angelotti, a researcher specialising in climate change at Embrapa, a federal agency focused on agricultural research and innovation. She cites, for example, techniques such as alternating crops to preserve nutrients, planting different species in the same space, covering the soil with plant remains to conserve moisture and cultivating without ploughing the land to prevent the loss of nutrients.
According to the researcher, Brazil already has a policy capable of meeting this challenge, in the form of the ABC Plan, whose initials stand for “low-carbon agriculture”.
The state government told Dialogue Earth that it is committed to the ABC Plan and has equipped technicians to measure emissions from crops, and plan for reductions. However, serious debt struggles in rural Rio Grande do Sul have postponed these long-term actions.
‘The countryside’s problem is financial’
After the tragedy of 2024, Rio Grande do Sul raised billions for its reconstruction. At the time, the national congress suspended for three years the repayment of 11.7 billion reais (USD 2.1 billion) of the state’s debt to the federal government. Most of the funds so far have been invested in emergency support for the victims, and in building new homes and infrastructure works: the floods left ten bridges collapsed, more than 8,000 kilometres of roads were damaged, and there were also impacts on the state’s network of waterways.
The federal government has also committed 6.5 billion reais (USD 1.1 billion) for works to adapt to climate change, such as the construction of flood dykes in the most vulnerable areas. So far, state governor Eduardo Leite’s administration has put out to tender the first such project for Eldorado do Sul. However, the proposed dykes do not reach the neighbourhood where the seven Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) settlements are located, and farmers report living in fear whenever the river level rises.
“We run the risk not only of losing our production, but of losing our lives,” said Marcia Riva, an agroecological producer of shimeji mushrooms and a partner in the Pão na Terra organic bakery, based in the same MST settlement as the Porto family.
When the floodwaters receded, there were cracks in the hills, cracked soil and farmers in debt who didn’t know how to resume production. With the support of her brothers and resources raised by the movement itself, Riva rebuilt the industrial kitchen to make bread and cakes. The shimeji greenhouse, however, has come back smaller.
“I can’t afford to invest any more,” she said. “We don’t have access to any public policy because we’re still in an area that could be flooded again,” she said, referring to the precariousness of the flood-protection infrastructure which, a year later, has reportedly barely got off the ground.
In 2024, a committee formed by ministries in Brasilia renegotiated 140,000 credit contracts under Pronaf and Pronamp – federal programmes aimed at family farming and medium-sized producers – with discounts that reached almost 1 billion reais (USD 180 million). However, farmers and technicians from rural assistance agency Emater interviewed by Dialogue Earth maintain that the financial aid is still not enough.
The state government estimates that local producers’ debts due in 2025 will reach 28 billion reais (USD 5 billion). “The biggest problem in the countryside right now is financial,” said Márcio Madalena, deputy secretary of the State Secretariat of Agriculture. He added that the outlook for the next harvest, between 2025-26, “worries us a lot”.
The state government has also suggested to the Ministry of Finance the use of the Pre-Salt Social Fund to support its recovery. This fund was created to distribute part of the revenues of oil production from the deep pre-salt layers of Brazil’s offshore fields to areas such as health, education and the fight against poverty, but also provides support for states affected by extreme events. The fund’s resources are available and would have no fiscal impact. Negotiations, however, have not yet progressed, according to Madalena, and the agricultural sector’s recovery remains at risk.
For farmer Riva, more than the debts, it is the farmers’ trauma that requires more attention: “We’re still very shaken up. Thankfully we’re a united group, but we need all the help we can get.”
Most of the producers interviewed by Dialogue Earth said they had needed psychiatric medication for anxiety and depression after the 2024 tragedy. A recent study published in the Lancet points out that extreme weather events are linked to worsening mental health – an impact that can be even greater among low- and middle-income populations, including a large part of the Latin American population.
A landscape transformed
In rural areas, the landscape is beginning to change following the tragedy of 2024. In the Taquari Valley – where small properties predominate, averaging 16 hectares – corn and vegetable crops are being set back from the banks of rivers and tributaries, under the guidance of Emater technicians.
The idea is to no longer use the flooded area to let the riparian forest recover. Nature has already taught us what not to do
The deforestation of hillsides directly contributed to worsening the tragedy, according to an analysis by Eduardo Vélez, from the Mapbiomas platform. Data shared with Dialogue Earth showed that the Guaíba River basin, where the greatest damage from the flood was concentrated, has lost 26% of its native vegetation since 1985. The reduction in cover has made it difficult for water to infiltrate the soil, facilitating runoff and worsening the flooding.
“The idea is to no longer use the flooded area, to let the riparian forest recover,” said Cristiano Carlos Laste, Emater’s manager in the municipality of Lajeado. “Nature has already taught us what not to do.”
The region’s dairy industry, which was hit hard by the flood, has not recovered. Properties that lost all or part of their facilities have reportedly stopped breeding dairy cows, with livestock areas converted to growing grains and fodder to feed the herds of less affected farms.
In the medium term, Emater and Embrapa plan to set up “technological reference units” (URTs) in the most affected regions. The URTs function as model farms, where sustainable agricultural practices adapted to the climate are tested. The aim is to promote dialogue with farmers and encourage the construction of landscapes that are more resilient to extreme events.
For Ernestino Guarino, a researcher at an Embrapa unit focused on Brazil’s temperate climate regions, the emphasis on URTs reflects the need for recovery to involve a redesign of the rural landscape – “a new agreement between man and nature”, as he puts it. He stressed, however, that “this inflection takes time”.
The Porto family, from Eldorado do Sul, managed to keep the organic certification of their plantation, despite its submersion in last year’s tragedy. According to the farmers, analyses of the soil carried out by UFRGS professors and technicians from the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock did not identify any contamination by pesticides or other residues.
A month and a half after the flood, the soil on the property was ready for replanting. “We got 15,000 seedlings from partner restaurants and started all over again,” recalls Roselei Porto.
To ensure customer confidence, the family displayed the results of their contamination-free soil analyses next to the prices of organic produce at a traditional market in Porto Alegre. Whenever someone stopped by their stall, they took the opportunity to explain the situation further. “You can’t imagine how happy I was when customers started coming back,” she said.
But the resumption soon ran into a new obstacle: yet another drought. In the MST settlements in the Metropolitan Region of Porto Alegre, the summer drought jeopardised the production of vegetables and spices.
“The impression I get is that we no longer have a full agricultural year, planting all year round,” commented farmer Marcia Riva. “We need new production alternatives and a lot of help.”
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