O território usado entre manifestações culturais e firmas transnacionais: O caso da territorialidade da monocultura do arroz na região dos Eixos Rodoferroviários - Maranhão (Brasil)

Abstract

This research aimed to analyze the territorialities related to rice monoculture in the region of the Eixos Rodoferroviários, located in the center-north portion of the Maranhão state, with views to demonstrating the importance of studies on the territoriality of social phenomena, by addressing the essential aspects to explain reterritorialization and social recomposition. In order to reach an understanding of the researched realities, an approximation with the qualitative approach was sought, using the case study as a methodological procedure. Thus, in the area under consideration, it was found that territorial metamorphoses were mediated by the State, mainly through the adoption of development models for different agricultures, with targeted public policies, including the credit, infrastructure and logistics, the favoring some groups over others and, thus, configuring an agribusiness that opposes family/peasant agriculture. The scope of the investigation portrays the importance of rice farming in the appropriation/spatial modification, contemplating different times and scales, but, above all, focusing on the period from 1970 to 2018, when the expansion and retraction in the production of this cereal is observed, following the capitalist logic. Until the years 1980s, the investigated region became one of the largest rice producers in Brazil, but it declined in the following decades and currently has about 90% of its production controlled and sold by a transnational company. The modernization of the means of production in agriculture had an impact on agrarian spaces, with repercussions on the use of the territory, and was, therefore, based, on the move away from traditional modes of production in favor of the modern and mechanized, which processed the development of the rice farming’s in the Eixos Rodoferroviários creating and/or aggravating problems of the most diverse orders (land, labor, urban, social, etc.). In view of this, capitalist accumulation and the validity of institutional mechanisms maintain the conformity of society in the status quo, composing dependent 'geographies' that remain in peripheral areas, and that need intervention, namely, through regulatory programs.