Extrativismo e capitalismo: a manutenção, funcionamento e reprodução da economia extrativista do sul do Amapá.

Abstract

The great socio-economic transformations that occurred in the last decades in the Amazon, resulting from the entry of the Great Capital in the region, despite the fact that they overshadowed self-sustaining plant extractivism in the regional economy, did not lead to its complete disappearance, despite the marginal treatment. this type of activity, in the development model implanted in the region. Even in the mid-1980s, rubber tappers, chestnut trees, riparians, and Indians found themselves politically organizing to stop the process of forest destruction that the model of development imposed on the region. Thus, the revaluation of the vegetal extractivism, like a fight flag, that alia the "forest peoples" to the global environmental movements, leading to the creation of Extractive Reserves, as a proposal of development for the regions of extractivist tradition. The persistence of vegetal extractivism, even competing with the large agroforestry and mineral projects highly subsidized with governmental resources, has given rise to the proposal for a study in the southern region of Amapá, traditionally extractive and currently on the control and influence of a Great Project, the Project Jari. The discovery of the external and internal mechanisms that ensured the maintenance, operation and reproduction of the extractive economy of southern Amapá was what directed the field research, developed in the years 1990/91, where it was studied deeply the current production units extractivists in their functioning and in their relations with the main social agents involved with the region's "extractive wealth". It was observed that the main external mechanisms were the existence of important fractions of "Amazonian capitals", remnants of the Rubber Cycle, which, in their access to the international markets, managed to keep alive the aviamento system, taking advantage of support structures to extractivism, existing in the region, abandoned by the Jari Project; the devastation of the forest, which destroys chestnut trees in some regions of the Amazon, creating a strong demand for brazil nuts, which contributes to the persistence of extractivism, in addition to the legal enclosure of the region's lands. It is also verified that the changes that occurred in the organization of production, where the extractivist worker for a boss, transformed was a familiar agro extractivist producer; taking advantage of the existing potential in natural resources in the diversification of the production unit; the difficulties of the extractivist's access to the labor market that was constituted in the region, and their capacity for political organization were the main mechanisms that ensured in their own way the maintenance of the extractive economy in the southern region of Amapá.