Agrofuel policies in Brazil: paradigmatic and territorial disputes

Abstract

The expansion of agrofuel crops challenges us to rethink policies, territories, human agency, and the paradigms used to explain them. In Brazil, policies supporting the expansion of agrofuel crops and the intensification of agrofuel production are reorganising rural land use and undermining some forms of participation in the capitalist and family modes of production. To reflect on this new reality, we study peasant movement reactions, proposals, and territorial disputes with agribusiness. Using the Pontal do Paranapanema region of São Paulo state as a case in point, the paper analyses territorial disputes between expanding sugarcane plantations and agrarian reform settlements as well as biodiesel production projects developed by the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the Western São Paulo Federation of Settlement and Family Farmer Associations (FAAFOP). It also analyses the agrofuel policies of other peasant organisations, including Via Campesina. The production of agrofuels has changed the processes of land acquisition and use by both agribusiness and the peasantry, provoking new insights into the nature of territorial conflicts and thereby stimulating the need to revise perspectives on the agrarian question in Brazil.

Keywords:

• agrarian question
• agrofuels
• territory
• MST
• Via Campesina
• CONTAG

Notes

¹For years, the disappearance of the family farm has been addressed by the literature and by policy adaptations in First World countries like the United States (Vogeler 1981, NIFA 2010). The expectation in these settings is the Jeffersonian ideal of self-governance arising from land ownership. As the contract system developed, however, the literature emphasised the farmer's loss of autonomy and discounted the significance of land ownership. In the Third World, small farmer land ownership has been historically precarious and any force that helps preserve or expand it can be said to contribute to peasant autonomy. The definition of a proletarian is a worker who does not own the means of production. A farmer or peasant who owns his land cannot therefore be a proletarian even though his loss of control over the exact way in which the means are employed certainly constitutes a loss of autonomy. But from the basis of his or her territorial control – his or her ownership of the land and thus the means of production – other possibilities can be constructed. Finally, because of the mechanical and chemical inputs typically employed in conventional farming in the First World, many small farmers find their debt load so great that financial institutions actually secure their land titles. In the Third World, these models of agricultural and financial practices are less common and thus contract farming can help prolong tenure.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bernardo Mançano Fernandes

The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.