Family agriculture and the globaization of agricultural production: regional formation and socioeconomic development in the modernized countryside of MATOPIBA, Bahia (Brazil)

• Grant number: 22/02593-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: September 01, 2022
• End date: February 28, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Ricardo Abid Castillo
• Grantee: Matheus Dezidério Busca
• Supervisor: Martin Coy
• Host Institution: Instituto de Geociências (IG). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Innsbruck, Austria
• Associated to the scholarship: 21/01327-0 - Globalized scientific agriculture and family agriculture in the municipalities of MATOPIBA baiano: relations and contradictions in the agricultural use of territory, BP.MS

Abstract

The current paradigm of globalized scientific agriculture, which emerged in the early 1990s, represents the improvement of the previous paradigm - the green revolution - and adds new technical, technological, and informational densities to agricultural production, in addition to the central role taken by financial capital. The hegemonic vectors that impose themselves on the national territory increasingly seek new areas for the expansion of monocultures of soy, corn, sugar cane, coffee, cotton, among others, fragmenting the territory through a productive regionalization. The Northern-Central Cerrados - a portion of Cerrado belonging to the states of Bahia, Maranhão, Piauí and Tocantins - are currently one of the main areas in the country where a new territorial division of labor based on globalized agribusiness is being established. However, this apparent homogenization of the territory, through the capitalist modernization of the countryside, tries to obscure the processes of productive regional specialization and the deepening of the territorial division of labor derived from it. The small and medium producers who do not have a sufficient degree of capitalization to modernize and integrate the new superior circuit of the agrarian economy are marginalized and prevented from exercising their economic and social functions. The modernization of the countryside, therefore, is selective and conservative, and generates an overlapping of divisions of labor, where, on one side are the hegemonic agents that force productive regional specialization and the deepening of its territorial division of labor, and on the other, the non-hegemonic agents, such as family agriculture. Having said this, the objective of this research project is to analyze and propose a debate about the possibilities of a socioeconomic development of family agriculture in the West Bahia region, which requires us to understand the regional formation of this agricultural frontier through the advance of the pioneer fronts of globalized agribusiness. (AU)