Abstract
The political-economy of the agriculture frontier in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, in the southern sections of the Amazon Region, is analysed in order to question the productivist argument commonly presented by the agribusiness sector. The assessment makes use of the category of rent considered as a proportion of exchange value diverted from production for the payment to the landowners and its class-based allies. The frontier in Mato Grosso has had basically three main rent extraction periods: a first moment when rent was forged by the state apparatus (1970s-1980s), a second period with serious turbulence and a macroeconomic transition (1980s-1990s) and a third phase with more complex flows of rent due to the neoliberalization of agribusiness (since the late 1990s). At the frontier of agribusiness, agricultural activity depends on combined strategies of rent creation and rent extraction. Empirical results suggest that rent is more than just the extraction of value from the use of land, but there is a wider capture of value from the network of relations that maintain land in production. Rent derives from land through the formation of a powerful network state-landowners-private agroindustrial sector that provides the conditions for rent extraction.
Highlights
The Amazon is nowadays one of the most disputed frontiers of the advance of a Western-type of modernity over new territories, peoples and ecosystems previously beyond the reach of mass markets
In the 1970s/80s, the prospect of rent extraction worked as an incentive for the opening and consolidation of new private properties with the strategic help of the state; later, since the 1990s and under an increasing influence of the private agroindustrial sector, regional agribusiness became highly integrated into the national economy and connected to globalized markets
The new farming land was primarily concentrated in large properties, a pattern that was maintained almost unchanged during the expansion of the frontier and despite the fact that more than 400,00 migrants moved to the state, excluded from decisions that affected their own interests (WOOD and WILSON, 1984): between 1970 and 1996, the total area of properties with less than 100 hectares in Mato Grosso remained the same (3.3% of the total agriculture area), while the area in properties with more than 1,000 hectares reduced marginally from 85.2% to 82.2%
Summary
The Amazon is nowadays one of the most disputed frontiers of the advance of a Western-type of modernity over new territories, peoples and ecosystems previously beyond the reach of mass markets. Marx’s main insight was to more directly relate rent to production and profitability (both involving the payment to landowner or not, as in the cases where the producer is the landowner) and, crucially, refer to the ways in which the mobilization of land and other resources affects the value of commodities and the redistribution of surplus-value (SWYNGEDOUW, 2012). Rent can be a drain on immediate capital accumulation (as it diverts value extracted from the exploitation of labour-power), it plays other very important roles in capitalist relations of production and reproduction. In the 1970s/80s, the prospect of rent extraction worked as an incentive for the opening and consolidation of new private properties with the strategic help of the state; later, since the 1990s and under an increasing influence of the private agroindustrial sector, regional agribusiness became highly integrated into the national economy and connected to globalized markets. The persistent relevance of rent extraction in new areas of agriculturecum-agribusiness in Mato Grosso is analyzed
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