Abstract
Land grabbing has changed the agrarian question on a world scale, much more intensely from the first decade of the twenty-first century with the financialisation of agriculture, producing the global agrarian question. In Brazil, a new ‘administrative region’—MATOPIBA—was created mainly to meet the territorialised interests of financial capital in the production of flexible commodities.
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Notes
- 1.
A process of fraud of land titles, that include several forms of the falsification of documents, also called ‘grilagem industry’.
- 2.
Three fieldwork campaigns were carried out in the Matopiba region between the years of 2015 and 2017. In the first two, ten days each, technical visits were made to agricultural enterprises and farms, and semi-structured interviews with directors, managers and agronomists of companies, as well as with large capitalist farmers. In total, 13 companies and farms were visited, with 26 interviews. In general, visits and interviews provided primary information on: prospecting, negotiating, leasing and land acquisition; edafoclimatic and pedological conditions necessary for the development of modern agriculture; technical systems used on farms (machinery, cultivars, precision agriculture, etc.); data on productivity, financing, profit and logistics for the outflow of production; methodology (stages) of transforming gross lands into highly productive lands; major technical and edafoclimatic problems for increasing yield; technical and territorial division of the company's labor (number of employees, specialization, hierarchy, location); use of information techniques for business management and for the development of productive activities per se; relationships with financial investors. The third field work was devoted exclusively to visits to traditional communities. Ten communities were visited in the southern states of Piauí and Maranhão, with meetings and semi-structured interviews with peasants and community leaders. From the reports, we obtained a series of data and information on the problems faced by the communities: threats of expropriation of their lands; armed violence (including cases of death of peasants); environmental impacts (contamination with agrochemicals, silting of rivers, deforestation, dissemination of new pests, etc.), impossibility of raising livestock in plains areas [chapadas], proliferation of internal conflicts in the community, exploitation of peasants’ work by companies. In this way, we were able to counterpose two distinct and conflicting logics of land use and occupation. While the visits to the agricultural companies allowed to verify how the capitalist/financial logic leads to the necessity of constant technical improvement and expansion of the productive area, the visits to the communities allowed to verify how the expansionist logic entails in a series of problems and conflicts for the local population.
- 3.
The Amazon occupation was also done under a modernization discourse, with soy plantation in northen Mato Grosso and Rondônia and cattle breeding in Pará.
- 4.
- 5.
Brasilagro (2015), for example, claimed to have carried out, by 2015, the basic survey of about 30 million hectares in Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay.
- 6.
Certainly, capitalists are attracted to making larger investments in agricultural holdings that naturally offer them greater profitability, for example, those with greater water availability, allowing two crops a year without the use of irrigation.
- 7.
Generally, land is pledged as collateral for obtaining loans from financial institutions.
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Fernandes, B.M., Frederico, S., Pereira, L.I. (2022). Accumulation by Land Rent and Territorial Disputes in a Brazilian Agricultural Frontier. In: Ioris, A.A.R., Mançano Fernandes, B. (eds) Agriculture, Environment and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10264-6_11
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