Accumulation by agricultural extension: Freedom and financial extractivism among Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST)

Abstract

AbstractSince 1995, family farming in Brazil has been heavily financialized through the federal PRONAF program, which has simultaneously created new opportunities for third parties to capture and control financial resources for themselves. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic research with land rights movements on the southern coast of Bahia, Brazil, this contribution analyses a case of accumulation by agricultural extension, as a predatory form of financial extractivism based on asymmetrical bureaucratic and communicative power, which was carried out by a local agricultural extension firm and export company. Associated with the Odebrecht Foundation, this extension firm promoted a development project to diversify the livelihoods of rural families living in land reform communities affiliated with Brazil's famous Landless Rural Workers' Movement, or the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). The firm owner actively recruited families to cultivate palmito, or heart of palm, effectively converting them into a captive productive force responsible for almost all factors of production—land, labour, and capital—but in the service of the extension firm's business interests. The firm was thus able to decouple itself from all hazards involved in production, while the MST community members bore almost all of the risks. In the process, the project gave rise to an exploitative form of production that is barely even recognizable as capitalism.