Globalization and Modernized Agriculture: The Socio-Spatial and Environmental Implications of the Expansion of Globalized Agribusiness in the Brazilian Cerrado

• Grant number: 25/05091-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: January 01, 2026
• End date: December 31, 2026
• 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: 23/17695-3 - Productive Macro-regions of Globalized Agribusiness: the two circuits of the agrarian economy and socio-environmental exploitation in the Cerrado., BP.DR

Abstract

Since the 1960s, the development of globalized agribusiness has been characterized as a conservative modernization of agriculture. However, due to the fact that this production model is based on technical, economic, social and land inequalities, we can argue that this modernization is also socially unequal and especially selective. In other words, only those agents who have the level of capitalization capable of financing the biotechnological packages inherent in production can be integrated into globalized agribusiness, in addition to the fact that not all areas are of interest to agribusiness, only those with high agricultural potential, such as the plateaus of the Cerrado biome. In this sense, as the production areas of globalized agribusiness advance over this biome - the country's main grain-producing region (soy, corn, cotton, coffee, among others) - various contradictions accompany it. The new agricultural frontier areas, located in the contacts between the Amazon and Cerrado biomes (Mato Grosso, Tocantins, Rondônia, Pará and Maranhão) are seeing an increase in conflicts in the countryside resulting from the imposition of a new territorial division of labor and the socio-environmental exploitation of these spaces. Tendo isso em vista, o objetivo principal desse projeto de estágio de pesquisa no exterior é analisar e debater as implicações socioambientais ligadas à expansão do agronegócio globalizado, e seus conflitos decorrentes, nas novas áreas de fronteira agrícola do Cerrado a partir de uma abordagem geográfica da ecologia política crítica. In view of this, the main objective of this research internship project abroad is to analyze and debate the socio-environmental implications associated with the expansion of globalized agribusiness, and its resulting conflicts, in the new agricultural frontier areas of the Cerrado from a geographic approach of critical political ecology. (AU)