Rural producer entities reacted to the statement by Banco do Brasil (BB), which attributed the 66.5% drop in net profit achieved in the third quarter of 2026 to the increase in defaults, mainly in agribusiness.
In a statement, the Brazilian Association of Soy Producers (Aprosoja Brasil) repudiates the statements made by BB president, Tarciana Medeiros, maintaining that the accusations against medium and large rural producers transform “a serious economic crisis into a generalized accusation of bad faith against those who produce”.
During the conference call in which she announced the financial results that the institution achieved in the third quarter, the executive stated that some of the medium and large rural producers in default refused to pay debts, renegotiate operations and present new guarantees to the institution, even after the offer of renegotiation programs with easier conditions.
Shortly afterwards, the bank released a statement to the press stating that the bank's president did not attribute responsibility for the drop in its results to the entire agribusiness sector and reported that 90% of the sector's customers are up to date with their payments and that the delays are concentrated in a group of medium and large producers.
Still, for Aprosoja, BB's allegations are “generalizations that disregard the economic reality of the countryside”.
For the entity, the sector's payment history contradicts the thesis of the bank's board of directors: a survey published in the magazine of the Attorney General's Office of the Central Bank shows an average default of just 1.89% between 2015 and 2019. According to the association, what changed from then on was not the producers' willingness to honor their commitments, but the economic conditions to pay them off.
“Successive climatic adversities, crop failures, geopolitical crises, increased production costs, deterioration in agricultural prices and suffocating interest rates, aggravated by the imbalance in public accounts, have deeply compromised the sector’s margins and payment capacity”, states Aprosoja.
According to the association, in the first four months of the 2026/2027 harvest alone, traditional rural credit fell from R$144.9 billion to R$107.6 billion, a reduction in funding and investment concessions of 25.7%.
"Rural producers lost income, saw their debts become more expensive and began to face increasing difficulties in obtaining credit. It is not reasonable to transform this reality into an accusation of deliberate default", added the entity, demanding a reevaluation of debt renegotiation policies.
Default
For the president of the Federation of Agriculture and Livestock of the State of São Paulo (Faesp), Tirso Meirelles, attributing the drop in results to the default of rural producers is an “unfair attempt to reverse the logic of the facts”.
“It is a blatant untruth”, he accused in a statement. "The Brazilian rural producer does not want duty. He wants to work, produce and honor his commitments. What happens in the field is not a lack of suitability, but rather the reflection of a serious structural mismatch between official rhetoric and the suffocating reality that the farmer faces from the gate inward."
Complaining about the bureaucracy and difficulties that, according to him, some producers face in accessing the resources allocated to the Safra Plan, the president of Faesp demanded from the federal government realistic deadlines, fair rates and viable operational conditions for Brazilian rural producers to renegotiate their debts. “When credit is bureaucratic, insufficient or arrives too late, the producer is left with no way out in the face of an equation that is difficult to solve, in which factors such as lack of rural insurance, skyrocketing production costs and increasingly smaller margins add up to so many other challenges.”
Offense
In the opinion of the president of the Agriculture Federation of the State of Rio Grande do Sul (Farsul), Domingos Velho Lopes, the justifications of Tarciana Medeiros and the vice-president of Financial Management and Investor Relations at BB, Geovanne Tobias – according to whom “a part of this agro, effectively, does not want to pay Banco do Brasil” – offend the Brazilian rural producer.
According to Lopes, the justifications express "prejudice on the part of the bank's management and divert the attention of the institution's shareholders from other factors that contributed to the drop in its profits."
"Since 2023, Central Bank data shows a surge in targeted credit, and public banks were the channel for this federal government policy. What criteria did BB use to grant this volume of credit, including [to the rural] sector? The bank's lack of criteria [in this case] seemed clear to us", argues the president of Farsul.
In an alert, Lopes questions the fact that other creditor companies do not report a situation similar to that disclosed by the board of directors of Banco do Brasil, which accounts for 47.7% of agricultural credit.
"Why aren't the other 52.3% of the market in the same situation? Because the default rate [in agriculture with] the main competitors [of BB] is much lower, such as that of Sicredi, at 1.9%; that of Sicoob, at 2.1% or that of Banrisul, at 2.5%, while that of Banco do Brasil is 7%?", asked Lopes.
The director also questioned the impact of the double-digit basic interest rate on the economy as a whole and on BB in particular. “And the bank doesn’t link this fact to its results.”
Renegotiation
The Agriculture and Livestock Federation of Mato Grosso (Famato) classified the statements made by Banco do Brasil directors as inadequate, pointing out that the statements lack data to support them. For the entity, it is necessary to differentiate deliberate default from financial difficulties caused by crop losses, high costs, high interest rates and fluctuations in commodity prices.
The entity highlighted that speeches by Tarciana Medeiros and Geovanne Tobias were given on the same day that the Senate approved the bill to convert Provisional Measure (MP) No. 1,376/2026, which expands the conditions for renegotiating rural debts.
“The text approved by Congress expands the possibilities for renegotiation, makes criteria for proving losses in specific situations more flexible and includes new operations with Rural Product Certificates (CPRs), in compliance with legal requirements and expands the use of collective reports and provides for interest rates between 5% and 12% per year”, highlights the federation, which is awaiting presidential sanction and subsequent regulation of the measure.
"Renegotiating does not mean forgiving debts, but offering conditions for producers to honor their commitments, recover financial capacity and continue producing. The entity will continue to monitor the implementation of the new rules and demand legal security, access to credit and effective solutions for the sector", added the federation.
