https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3821-9695
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ABSTRACT
In this article, we analyse strategies of accumulation of agribusiness corporations specializing in the land market. More specifically, we examine the processes and actors involved and the connections that global financial capital makes in order to access the land market and agricultural production in the Cerrado biome in central-northern Brazil (Matopiba region), which we refer to as ‘circles of cooperation’. We present case studies on two financialized corporations engaged in real estate farmland speculation, Radar and SLC LandCo, to illustrate the technical and political dimensions of ‘operations of capital’ and the grilagem (falsification of land titles) scheme used in the Matopiba region. Our focus is on the role of the intermediaries, namely colonels and grileiros, and the legalization of land grabbing by corporate investors.
Geolocation information
Cerrado biome in central-northern Brazil (Matopiba region). Specifically, the ‘Intermediate Geographic Areas’ of Southwestern Piauí and Southern Maranhão (according to Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics [IBGE], Citation2017).
Acknowledgements
This work was possible thanks to the support of the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), under Grants numbers 2016/24186-4, 2016/08587-9, 2017/00346-5, 2017/12100-0. The authors thank the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) and the Social Network for Justice and Human Rights in Brazil (Rede Social) for their collaboration in logistics and contacts with peasant communities. The authors also thank Karen Lang for her help with the revision of the English version, as well as the anonymous referees and the guest editor Gustavo Oliveira. Responsibility for the text is entirely ours.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Supply of Brazil (MAPA) created the acronym from the abbreviations of the states that are part of this region: Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia.
2 Financialized corporations are corporations controlled by financial capital.
3 We use the term ‘liquidity’ to refer to how easily and rapidly a given asset can be converted into cash.
4 This method dialogues with the works of Margulis et al. (Citation2013) and Mills et al. (Citation2019), who use the concept ‘transnational land investment web’.
5 The difference between the terms ‘local elite’ and ‘national bourgeoisie’ is the scale of their actions. For example, we refer to local colonels who do not have influence at the national or international level as ‘local elite’, and to the ones with considerable power at the national level as the ‘national bourgeoisie’. Local colonels or 'political chiefs' are individuals who have considerable power in their region. They generally own large amounts of land and have special connections to public authorities, such as mayors, city councillors, and congressmen.
6 ‘Companies specializing in land deals’ are ones that negotiated the purchase and sale of the group’s farms to take advantage of increases in land prices in the 2000s and 2010s.
7 In 2012, Radar obtained a second number from the corporate taxpayer registry for a new company: Radar II. There is strong evidence to suggest that Radar I was created with resources from TIAA’s earlier investments in land in Brazil (in 2008), whereas funds for Radar II came from the investments of the TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture I (TCGA I) and TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture II (TCGA II) funds (Levesque & Terzon, Citation2015; Rede Social, Citation2015).
8 ‘Free float’ refers to all shares that can be publicly traded on the market and are not restricted. They include shares belonging to shareholders and the ones held in the company's treasury. In the Brazilian capital market, companies listed in the Novo Mercado segment have the obligation to free float at least 25% of their total shares (BM&F Bovespa, Citation2019).
9 Information from the said companies’ website. Grain (Citation2019), Rede Social and Chain Reaction Research (Citation2019, Citation2020) have recently published new data revealing farms belonging to TIAA that had not been mentioned in earlier publications, as well as deforestation on these farms.
10 Information obtained from an interview with a director of an agribusiness corporation in 2017.
11 Information confirmed in the field work conducted in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.
12 Calculations performed on data from SLC Agrícola's website (2018) by Saweljew (Citation2019), which confirm information we obtained from an interview with a director of an agribusiness corporation in 2017.
13 Information obtained from an interview with a director of an agribusiness corporation in 2017.
14 Ibid.
15 According to Santos (Citation2008, p. 121), ‘Each company uses the territory in accordance with its power. Thus, it creates production circuits and circles of cooperation as a way of regulating the production process and guaranteeing the production of capital. Production circuits are defined by the circulation of production – that is, by the flow of materials. The circles of cooperation associate the flow of materials to other flows that are not necessarily material: capital, information, messages, orders’.
16 On February 22nd, 2016, TIAA-CREF announced in Fortune magazine that it was shortening its name to ‘TIAA’. As we are describing the deals carried out in the past, when the subsidiaries still used ‘TIAA-CREF’ as their legal names, we have maintained this nomenclature.
17 Changes in regulations in this area are currently in the making. On December 11, 2019, congressional commissions approved bill no. 2963/2019, which makes it easier for foreign individuals and legal entities to acquire land. For details, see Agência Senado (Citation2019).
18 We have used official documents, such as Cosan’s Formulário de Referência ao Investidor (Investor’s Reference Form) (Cosan, Citation2017) and the Official Business Gazette (Diário Oficial Empresarial, Citation2012), to validate the data mentioned in this section. The latter confirmed that Tellus issued the debentures and their purchase by Nova Gaia and Radar. The data were also confirmed by cases no. 54000.000167/2016-75, 54000.000472/2016-67, and 54000.000473/2016-10 in the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) Electronic Information System (SEI). Access to these files was obtained legally through the Access to Information Act (no. 12.527/2011). These cases specifically address the issue of the foreignization of land belonging to Radar and Tellus, among other firms.
19 An executive of an agribusiness company revealed in an interview in 2017 that a key factor in the creation of Radar was the development of a meteorological crop yield forecasting system by the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture of the University of São Paulo (ESALQ) in partnership with Cosan's geotechnology department.
20 The International Financial Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank Group has invested in farmland in the region through SLC group and Vision Brazil (Grain, Citation2010).
21 Recent data (from fieldwork carried out in March 2020 in collaboration with the CPT) reveal that in response to public criticism, World Bank, the state government, and INTERPI have made changes to the said program and are seeking to include the territories of peasant farmers in the land regularization process.
22 On May 2020 converted into bill 2,633/2020 it promotes changes to laws no. 11,952/2009 and 13,465/2017, also known as ‘Grilagem Laws’. Lawsuits have been submitted to the Federal Supreme Court to challenge their constitutionality (Carneiro, Citation2018).
23 In December 2019, the state of Piauí passed a new law (7,294/2019) on the regularization of land titles. One of the Among other important changes, one was the recognition of the concept of ‘traditional territories’ (that is, territories of peasant communities, such as ‘brejeiros’ and ‘ribeirinhos’).
24 Terra devoluta is public land for which public authorities have not determined a specific use and that has never been officially recognized as part of a private individual’s estate, even if the land is unofficially in an individual’s possession (Ferreira, Citation2013).
25 Government offices out of which notary offices, public registries, and court registrars operate and where files are kept.
26 Information obtained from interviews with an agrarian court judge (2017 and 2018).
27 Documented in the peasants’ reports submitted to the regional agrarian courts and the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the state of Piauí (MPPI), and in the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office’s Civil Inquiries no. 27.000.002013/2016-90, 27.005.000203/2017-11, 27.005.000206/2017-47, 27.005.000199/2017-83, and 27.005.000111/2018-12.
28 Information obtained from interviews with an agrarian court judge (2017 and 2018).
29 Ordinance no. 002 of July 25, 2016 of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the state of Piauí (GERCOG & MPPI, Citation2016) and reports of the Grande Portal de Notícias do Piauí (Rodrigues, Citation2016).
30 According to Agência Lupa (Marés, Citation2018) and Repórter Brasil (Camargos, Citation2018a), the president of Cosan’s board of directors was one of the biggest donors to election campaigns in 2018. He funded the campaigns of the current (April, 2020) Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply and the Minister of Citizenship.
31 In their defense, both Radar and SLC LandCo claim that they did not know that the land titles of farms that they own in Matopiba region had been forged before they bought them. Information obtained in an interview with the judge of the Agrarian Court of Bom Jesus do Piauí in 2018.
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Notes on contributors
Bruno Rezende Spadotto
Bruno Rezende Spadotto is a Ph.D. candidate in Human Geography at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, and was a visiting researcher (2019) at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, Netherlands. His doctoral research explores the transformation of farmland into a financial asset in contemporary capitalism, with an emphasis on analyzing the relations between the local and the global in the Cerrado biome in the central-northern region (Matopiba) of Brazil. He has a Bachelor of Geography degree (2012) from the São Paulo State University (UNESP) and a Master of Geography degree (2016) from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). While pursuing his master's degree, he was also a visiting researcher (2014) at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY Graduate Center), United States.
Yuri Martenauer Saweljew
Yuri Martenauer Saweljew has a Master of Geography degree from the São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil (2019). His research investigates how information and communications technology systems influence rent capture in areas of the agricultural frontier. He has a Bachelor of Geography degree from the same university and was a visiting researcher (2015) at the National University of San Martin (UNSAM), Argentina. He also contributed to research efforts of the Social Network for Justice and Human Rights in Brazil (Rede Social) and Aidenvironment, Netherlands.
Samuel Frederico
Samuel Frederico is an adjunct professor at the Geography Department of the São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil. He holds a Master of Geography degree from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and a Ph.D. of Human Geography degree from the University of São Paulo (USP). His research interests include the territorial dynamics of the modernization and expansion of agriculture in Brazil, especially soybean and coffee production and large global corporations' regulatory power. More recently, he has extended his research to the relationship between the global financialization of the economy and land grabbing in areas of the agricultural frontier in Brazil.
Fábio Teixeira Pitta
Fábio Teixeira Pitta is an assistant professor at the Geography Department of the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil and was a visiting researcher (2019) at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He holds a Ph.D. of Human Geography degree from the University of São Paulo (USP) and he is currently conducting Postdoctoral research on the following topics: the financial crisis, the sugarcane agroindustry, the overexploitation of labor, critical modernization, and fictitious capital. He has bachelor degrees in history (2001) and philosophy (2006), as well as a Master of Geography degree (2011) from the University of São Paulo (USP). He was also a researcher at the Social Network for Justice and Human Rights in Brazil (Rede Social) and collaborates with Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN) and Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN), among other organizations.