Finance and Human Rights in Agricultural Production in the Brazilian Amazon

• Grant number: 24/18821-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Silvio Eduardo Alvarez Candido
• Grantee: Bruna Scanavachi Lourenço
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Exatas e de Tecnologia (CCET). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In order to examine how human rights regulations are implemented in practice in the Brazilian Amazon, this project aims to increase knowledge about the dynamics of the integration of Amazonian agriculture into global financial markets and the social impacts in the region. Since economic activities that illegally deforest the forest are linked to illegal land occupations and the appearance of contemporary slave labor, this research project continues the work previously developed by the candidate in a project funded by FAPESP on rural credit restrictions in the Amazon (Processes nº 2022/14238-8 and nº 2023/15439-0). The databases developed by the candidate structure studies that are in the process of being finalized and that have a working collaboration with Greenpeace Brazil. The practices of the dynamics of financialization that have reshaped the economy, society and nature in specific historical conjunctures will have a prominent place in the study of the formation of agro-financial capital, in order to add a more nuanced historicization of the entanglement between finance, agribusiness and human rights. Predominantly qualitative in nature, the research adopts a political-cultural perspective based on the premises of economic and organizational sociology. The abductive approach will be the guiding principle for the construction of narratives based on the articulation of primary and secondary data through content analysis and social network analysis. From an empirical point of view, the research will contribute to the understanding of the evolution of national policies to guarantee human rights in agricultural production in the biome, especially in terms of how state rules have been implemented in the granting of funding. From a theoretical point of view, the research has the potential to contribute to the sociology of economics and organizations by advancing the understanding of the implementation of regulations in practice, in order to understand the limits of the symbolic violence of the state in the construction of dominant logics and the influence of informal interactions in frontier areas such as the Amazon. (AU)