Ecologia política da soja e processos de territorialização no sul do Maranhão.

Abstract

Soybean expansion in the Southern Maranhao has been a process marked by contradictions, demonstrations and conflicts, apprehended by the analysis of disputes among different political strategies conducted by agricultural activities that articulate social actors and environments, which are called territorial projects. Territorial projects express intentionalities, more or less explained by social actors, referring to the desired forms of appropriation of space and to the definition of forms of access and uses of natural resources to be prioritized. These projects inform standards of distribution of power among different social groups that mobilize institutions to implement livestock models, and make effort to legitimize their intentionalities, anchored in broader social goals, thereby achieving the adhesion or sympathy from a wider spectrum of society, extrapolating even the regional boundaries. What is called territorial soybean project will be confronted with two other territorial projects that, between 1977 and 2010, showed varying degrees of institutional mobilization: the livestock project and the agricultural family project. The evaluation of different degrees of institutionalization and legitimation of territorial projects was guided by use of the scales of socio-environmental factors: the local, the regional, the national and the global. Political ecology complements the notion of territorial projects because it enables the analysis of conflicts and processes of environmental change related to the productive reconversion experienced in rural areas, rejecting the idea that nature is a neutral environment. The study of socio-environmental conflicts stemmed from the intensive analysis of historical cases at Gerais of Balsas in order to elucidate how social actors in dispute were bound together by specific modes of mutual dependence, interlined by a moving equilibrium of tensions, which resulted in territorialization processes, understood as transformations in the forms of appropriation of space and their natural resources, which are constantly structured, unstructured and restructured by the practices of social groups and the established interdependent relationships, that bind them to each other by networks of interests relating to social figuration. It is proposed therefore a figurational political ecology that assume the idea that environmental changes and territorialization processes are equivalent, because they reflect transformations in the relations between society and nature. The difference is that the focus on environmental changes prioritizes environmental transformations caused by the practices of social actors and the territorialization processes, the interweaving of practices of social actors and their effects on space.