Brazilian Agricultural Frontier: Land Grabbing, Land Policy, and Conflicts

Abstract

This article sheds light on the forms of land appropriation in the agricultural frontier regions of Brazil in line with the concepts of land and green grabbing. With less stringent environmental laws, the Cerrado presents itself as a ‘sacrifice zone’, where grabbers and large agricultural producers have sought to register lands of the Amazon biome as ‘Cerrado’ or an undefined biome zone land. It seeks to understand what happens in territories when power technologies, that is, disciplinary mechanisms such as the Rural Environmental Cadastre (CAR), are activated and how the state has regulated land appropriation and green grabbing as a new meaning of appropriation of nature. This has created obstacles for the struggle and resistance of socio-territorial movements for land distribution, as confirmed by the growing lethality of conflicts in Brazilian frontier zones that are coveted by the grabbers.