A chegada das águas: conflitos socioambientais e mudanças no mundo do trabalho rural provocadas pela formação de lagos artificias.

Abstract

In Brazil, the study of the impact of large dams construction is something recent to economists and social scientists. The growing number of these constructions is part of the process of the globalization of capital and of the increase of what we call an energy intensive society. Their vast lakes flood large land areas that were used by men for agriculture and by villages formed mainly by peasants. This process, driven by development policies of the electricity sector and water resources brings great impact on the organization of family farms producing units, due to the flooding in agricultural lands and to the expropriation of productive resources. This is where the social movements linked to the populations directly affected by this State action for modernization that, almost always, occurs in an authoritarian way, come in as a reaction to this. The compulsory abandonment of these lands and the consequent transfer of the villages to areas that in turn, present most of the time partly or typically urban characteristics leads to the transformation of their inhabitants into consumers according to the demands of the energy intensive society. But this process is not linear and cannot guarantee this new social condition to all people affected, for most part of them end up developing resistance strategies to maintain their situation as peasants, while the others succumb to selection test of new consumers. The main condition imposed by the market to the affected populations reach the new consumer status, is the conversion of their labour power then immersed in the logic of peasant agricultural reproduction into commodity, in Marx´s narrowest sense of the term .The transformations the peasant families have to go through during the compulsory relocation from their lands results in a new structure of spendings and consumption, in the absence of occupations, in the transformation of peasant into urban resident (where the peasants now have to buy what they once produced) and in problems of adaptation to the labour market, which jeopardizes the bases of peasant autonomy. The attempts of reconstructing the old social and economic organization that “disappeared” with the flooding of hundreds of family lands constitute the most dramatic aspect to those who deal with such situation, for them, is extremely hard to accept and recognize the complete loss of their lands and of the reproduction of their community life conditions. It is on this context that the movements for the return of the peasants’ previous lifestyle act. But these attempts stumble on the conflicts that involve family agriculture members and landowners over the lands that were not affected by the floods, the not fulfilment of the government´s promises to resettlement and even on the conflicts and misunderstandings that are set within their own movement for the affected ones, fact that rarely the academic researches can see. This issue has taken to intense discussions about one of the oldest thesis on peasant agriculture, its disappearance caused by the advancement of modern capitalist agriculture. Would it be the growing process of construction of large dams contributing to the end of peasant agriculture? Judging by what happened in Acauã, the possibilities of survival of the peasants are scarce, but we must comprehend that the capacity of resistance and political organization of the peasants is an evident and objective reality and that there are no proofs or apparent tendencies that the building of these dams adds to its disappearance.