Velhas questões sob novas roupagens: continuidades e rupturas dos conflitos socioambientais provocados pelas formas contemporâneas de expansão do agronegócio na Chapada Diamantina, Bahia.

Abstract

In this thesis we analyse the sociospatial forms of the agribusiness contemporary expansion in the Chapada Diamantina, Bahia, and its arising conflicts, with the aim to understand the continuities and ruptures caused by the restructuring of the sector in the last decades. Using the analytic tools of Latin American Political Ecology, we place the current water conflicts in the Chapada as an update of the historical ways trough which people and extrahuman nature have been produced as colonial objects of conquest. We understand the dynamics of capital expansion in the countryside within the frame of accumulation by displacement. These dynamics, besides expelling people from their living spaces, are based on the accumulation of surplus labour value and surplus nature that shortcircuit the reproductive cycles of life. We also wonder about the specific nature of this expansion in the current context of the neoliberalization of nature, pointing out two aspects: financialization and rentierism. In both of them we are able to identify continuities from previous periods, like the providing of public subsidized credit for agribusiness. In addition, we also find new elements, as the diversity of strategies for the appropriation of the rent of land developed by the sector analysed from two geographic dimensions based on territory and networksin various economic sectors and different positions in agrofood production networks. Next, we analyse the dynamics of sense productions related to this process of expansion and its conflicts. For this, we use the frame of the critical Cultural Political Economy and the dialectic between justification and critique inherent to socioeconomic processes. Both approaches are used regarding the incompleteness of the capitalrelation, with the purpose of complementing our analysis considering the ways through which the agribusiness tries to absorb the critiques directed to it and justify its own activities. Finally, we deal with the transit from government to governance, so praised in literature, as a continuity of the ways of political domination, even though it also brought transformations. We consider the ways through which the sector continues to exercise state power throughout the water and environmental governance systems. In this way, we try to enrich our understanding of the hegemonic power of agribusiness to the same extent that its expansion is assumed as a state strategic project.