Rent of agribusiness in the Amazon: A case study from Mato Grosso

The article analyzes the political-economy of the agriculture frontier in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to question the productivist argument commonly presented by the agribusiness sector. The assessment makes use of the category of rent considered as a proportion of exchange value diverted from production for the payment to the landowners and its class-based allies. The agriculture frontier in Mato Grosso had basically three main rent extraction periods: a first moment when rent was forged by the state apparatus (1970s–1980s), a second period with serious turbulence and a macroeconomic transition (1980s–1990s) and a third phase with more complex flows of rent due to the neoliberalization of agribusiness (since the late 1990s). At the frontier of agribusiness, agricultural activity depends on combined strategies of rent creation and rent extraction. Empirical results suggest that rent is more than just the extraction of value from the use of land, but there is a wider capture of value from the network of relations that maintain land in production. Rent derives from land through the formation of a powerful network state-landowners-private agroindustrial sector that provides the conditions for rent extraction

Encroachment and entrenchment of agro-neoliberalism in the Centre- West of Brazil

From being a net food importer in recent decades, Brazil is now considered a successful case of agricultural production and export. However, this image of triumph and efficiency helps to conceal growing socio-ecological impacts and mounting uneasiness. The complex and contradictory landscape of contemporary Brazilian agribusiness represent a relevant example of the advance of agro-neoliberalism, which is both an economic and technological process of agriculture modernization and intensification, in accordance to liberalizing pressures, and also a politico-ecological phenomenon centred on market-based solutions to old and new production, innovation and justification questions. Based on qualitative research and three fieldwork campaigns, the article discusses recent politico-economic adjustments particularly in the State of Mato Grosso, in the Centre-West region, which is fast becoming the main area of agribusiness activity in the country. Empirical results demonstrate that agro-neoliberalism has been promoted through inventive public-private associations not for the purpose of domestic food security, but primarily for capital accumulation and to support sectoral interests and macro-economic strategies

Environmental governance at the core of statecraft: unresolved questions and inbuilt tensions

The state is not only a main environmental player, but its involvement in environmental regulation has major consequences for the dynamics of statecraft. Environmental governance is the expression that better summarises the ongoing transformations of state interventions and the search for more flexible, adaptive approaches. A growing body of scholarly work has tried to establish the connections between the failures of environmental governance and the wider commitments of the state. What is largely missing in those studies is the synergy between environmental governance and the statecraft model put forward by Hegel in the early period of the industrial, liberal capitalism. Recent environmental policies have been particularly influenced by the Hegelian constitutional theory, especially considering the pursuit of legitimacy and flexibility. Consequently, the central challenge for geographers and other scholars of environmental governance is still to identify the changes in the rationale and configuration of the state apparatus and relate them to the wider political ecology of state action

Latin America’s large-scale urban challenges: development failures and public service inequalities in Lima, Peru

Beginning in the early 1990s, neoliberalizing reforms have significantly impacted the urban space of Lima in terms of an increase in business activities and the intensification of sociospatial asymmetries. Considering the modernization of urban political economy along neoliberal lines as an important dimension of contemporary disputes, this paper treats urban neoliberalism as a lived experience shaped by multiple sociospatial interactions, politico-ecological tensions and creative reactions. For instance, uneven performance of public water services across social groups and different urban zones seems to be consistent with the nature of neoliberal urbanization, in that the persistence of inequalities represents an active mechanism for the functioning of economy, politics and society according to market-friendly priorities. In that context, the marginalized, low-income urban periphery is the main space where promises, protests and dissatisfaction with neoliberalized public services occur, and actively contribute to the reconfiguration and contestation of the neoliberal megacity

Indigenous labor and land resources: Guarani-Kaiowa's politico-economic and ethnic challenges

The article deals with the meaning and the management of land-based resources by indigenous peoples, which are analyzed through an assessment of the lived spaces of the Guarani–Kaiowa indigenous people in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul. The discussion follows an analytical framework that is focused on land, labor and ethnicity. These interconnected politico-economic categories provide the basis for understanding the violence and exploitation perpetrated against indigenous groups, as well as their capacity to reclaim ancestral territories lost to extractivism and agribusiness development. Empirical results indicate that ethnicity is integral to labor and land management processes. In the case of the Guarani–Kaiowa, not only have they become refugees in their own lands due to racist discrimination, but also their labor has been incorporated in the regional economy through interrelated peasantification and proleterianization tendencies. The result is a complex situation that combines major socio-spatial asymmetries with the strategic, exploitative use of land and labor and the growing political contestation by the indigenous groups

Brazil's and Scotland's water policies: a North-South comparison

Water management is a main public policy issue and an important matter inside of the political context of any nation. The comprehension of water policies is directly related to national development strategies. This paper examines the water policies aspects of two different but emblematic national experiences (in Brazil and Scotland) and address multidimensional and territorialized questions. Brazil has the largest stock of surface freshwater in the world and the country’s development increasingly depends on adequate water policies and improved technical and managerial strategies. By its turn, Scotland is famous for high water quality and for recently implemented of the most ambitious institutional water mechanism in Europe. Our analysis contrasts the two national water policy frameworks through a consideration of their political and territorial particularities. This comparative analysis is undertaken by the use of common matrice that helps to showing the outcomes of each country policy. The text contributes towards the international debate on water institutional reforms and their associated political-hydrological challenges

Agricultural Frontiers as Controversial Place-making Territories

The intricacies of one of the most relevant agricultural frontiers in the world today – the State of Mato Grosso, in the Brazilian Amazon – are considered through an examination of place-making. Vast areas of rainforest and savannah were converted, since the 1970s, into places of intensive farming, to fulfil exogenous demands for land and agricultural production. Instead of merely studying the constellation of interconnected places, we examine the politicised genesis of the emerging places and their trajectory under socio-ecological disputes. Empirical results reveal three main moments of place-making characterised, respectively, by displacement, replacement and misplacement. In order to understand those intricate processes, it is necessary a qualitative intellectual jump: from place-making on the frontier to place-making as an ontological frontier in itself. Mato Grosso remains an unsettled frontier between a new socio-spatiality (shaped by fast economic growth) and the perpetuation of old practices (marked by exclusion and tensions)