The foreign capital is expanding in some areas where agribusiness is stronger. The state with more foreign investments is Mato Grosso, followed by Sao Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul.

The public attorneys confirmed that the law, which provides a special registration of lands purchased by individuals or legal persons from abroad, is not being enforced.

For this reason they sent documents to federal bodies emphasizing the need to control the selling of lands to foreigners, for the sake of sovereignty and national interests.

In one of the documents, they even express their concern about the creation of territorial enclaves controlled from abroad: “independent political groups within national territory, as it happens in other countries that cause political problems”, reads the text, according to Brazilian newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo.

The National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform has officially registered 572million hectares of land, of which four million are in the hands of foreigners.

However it remains unknown exactly how many Brazilian lands are owned by foreign corporations. The figure could be three times higher, according to data provided extra officially by INCRA experts.

At the end of last year, the General Attorney’s office tried to carry out a survey of the land transactions carried out by the government with foreigners and discovered the lack of information about this.

Back then, the attorney Marcia Neves Pinto, asked an expert for an investigation into the number of foreign people and legal persons that own land in Brazil, together with a map of those plots of land, state by state.

The investigator did not find the exact data neither at the INCRA nor at the real estate registry, and when he tried to compare data provided by two different sources, he found out they did not match.

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