As duas faces do espelho do “agro-negócio”: terra de vida - terra de fome na subsunção do trabalho e da terra ao capital

Abstract

The São Francisco Valley, especially the Sertão region, has been captured by the modernizing logic of market-driven agriculture. The semi-arid climate served as the justification to implement irrigation policies under the banner of food production to alleviate hunger. The government invested in Public and Private Irrigation Projects through various national and foreign companies focused on the fruit sector, which established themselves in the region, taking control of land and peasant labor, subjecting them to the commercialization of fruit farming. In this context, the objective of this dissertation is to reflect on the contradictory reality of the "agribusiness" in the process of subordinating labor and land to capital, a choice already made in production, and its corollary - consumption. In this context, agribusiness conglomerates expropriate land and labor from family farming units in the municipality of Lagoa Grande, Pernambuco. Under the guise of the discourse of local/territorial development, the ideological discourse serves to conceal the entire process of labor subordination, land expropriation, and, evidently, nature itself, through the incorporation of the GVS FRUIT COMPANY Group in the Submédio São Francisco region, making it clear how capital, supported by the state, reproduces itself through predatory relations in the countryside, turning everything into raw material for value generation, in contrast to peasant reproduction resisting the productive restructuring established since the 1970s, intensified in recent years with the financialization of the agribusiness model. The research results show that industrial complexes intensively provoke land expropriation, under the functionality of the state through the discourse of "development," through government policies such as the Titula Brasil program, which guarantees the legal end of land reform settlements; land reform, land concentration, total political control of land, the mass transformation of settlers into rural and urban laborers as commodities free to offer their labor power, and the increase of the reserve army ensuring more relative surplus value for capitalist profit. This dissertation was developed using the historical-dialectical materialism method, which ensures the analysis of reality in its totality within the interdependence of phenomena, in a broad set of interrelations. To conduct the research, we employed bibliographic research, documentary research, fieldwork, structured and semi-structured interviews, and photography.