Technological transition of capital in sugarcane hydroagricultural polygon and impacts on labor

• Grant number: 19/16860-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: July 01, 2021
• End date: February 28, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Antonio Thomaz Júnior
• Grantee: Fredi dos Santos Bento
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia (FCT). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Presidente Prudente. Presidente Prudente , SP, Brazil

Abstract

At the beginning of the 21st century, the offensive of capital over labor, driven by the insatiable need for accumulation/reproduction, is widening. In Brazil, among the various forms of personification of this societal model, we highlight the sugarcane hydroagricultural, which under the prerogative of the fallacious discourse of national, social, sustainable development, etc., omits its perverse face when the living conditions (labor, health) of the workers, the affected neighboring communities are put on the scene, as well as society in general, the environment, in the face of the expansionist and destructive fury of capital, which we conceptually indicate as a systemic degradation of labor, in the Hydroagricultural Polygon (THOMAZ JUNIOR, 2009; 2017). Advances in sugarcane mechanization, the effects of total outsourcing, loss of rights, associated with the chemical-dependent model that together intensify labor exploitation, as well as control of water (surface, springs), and aquifers (Guarani, as well as other more superficial ones), we have attention for the East of Mato Grosso do Sul, North-Northwest of Paraná, São Paulo, Triangulo Mineiro, South-Southeast of Goiás, being, therefore, the area that concentrates the five largest sugarcane producers, sugar and alcohol in the country. This perverse logic makes the expansion of sugarcane agroindustrial capital possible and requires us to understand the meanings of the destructive development process of productive forces in sugarcane hydroagricultural, seeking to link work and health, given that the current meanings that the degradation that covers the social relations of work and production, also rebounds to the environment and environmental health. From this perspective, in order to make such approximations, we need to point out the need for fieldwork, with the purpose of conducting semi-structured interviews and oral reports with workers in the sugarcane hydroagricultural, their representation instances and representatives of the sugarcane agroindustrial capital. (AU)