By JOSÉ RAIMUNDO TRINDADE*
The reorganization of space, the dispossession of a large territory and the commodification of land
State intervention and large business conglomerates over the territory are established as a historically ongoing economic and political interaction, with the use of violence and classic relations of enclosure over diverse populations, as we will detail in this text. The economic space is historically processed from a movement of favoring and guiding the accumulation of capital based on state-business logic.
Monitoring the intervention of Companhia Vale S/A in the southeast region of Pará and southwest of Maranhão allows us to observe in real time how the reorganization of space, the dispossession of a large territory and the commodification of lands take place.
To resume the critical analysis of this contemporary enclosure process, we will use a recently published work by Juliana Barros, entitled “The Iron Hand of Mining in the Lands of Carajás”. However, part of the considerations raised here are the result of a long period of research that we have carried out in the region, with several texts already published and which can be freely accessed.[I]
The text is divided into two sections. In the first, we address the corporate state and the contemporary formation of mineral accumulation in the region. In the second section, we observe how the “commodity consensus” has been imposed since the neoliberal order and the privatization of the former Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, establishing the enclosure and appropriation of the lands and lives of the populations of the Carajás region and surrounding areas today, very well demonstrated in the work of Juliana Barros.
The corporate state and land grabbing
State intervention establishes the most important links for dynamizing the conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital, by implementing management mechanisms, via public policies and interaction with capital in its various forms (industrial, commercial, financial), as well as streamlining and favoring the main components necessary for accumulation: the workforce, land and infrastructure as a central part of the means of production.
In the case of the Amazon, state intervention even occurred in the process of establishing a surplus population that came from migratory flows, mainly from the Northeast, which enabled the structuring of relatively modern urban centers, although characteristically swollen from a demographic point of view, something referenced by the category of “superurbanization” established by Becker (2005).
The use values that land contains can be extracted, mobilized in production as “forces of nature” or used as the basis for continuous reproduction, in such a way that land use values can be “conditions or elements of production” appropriated or made available for social or privately concentrated use, mainly enabling the appropriation of extraordinary income, something central to thinking about the speed and form of occupation of new areas and frontiers of capitalist expansion.
In the case of agricultural or mineral exploration, the availability of arable land or mineral subsoil constitute conditions and reproductive elements of capital that are heavily used in the Amazon region. Thus, the physical productivity of the labor force employed in these branches varies according to natural circumstances, which are monopolizable and non-reproducible, as Marx pointed out (2017 [1894]).
State intervention is central to the process of making natural resources available to big capital, whether linked to mineral extraction or destined for agribusiness, including with legislation[ii] favoring forms of appropriation of extraordinary income (supplementary profit) that can be extracted from Amazonian soil,[iii] whether through agricultural exploitation, especially “planting” soybean production in the cerrado region and extensive livestock farming spread throughout the eastern Amazon; or the mineral exploration of large deposits located mainly in the state of Pará.
It is worth mentioning theoretically that the State develops activities by acquiring means of consumption from department II of the economy, in the form of salary goods acquired by public employees, and acquires production goods from DI, directly exchanging State income for a share of the production of those departments.
These state expenditures are intended to provide the physical infrastructure necessary for the development of economic activities and social reproduction, and are part of the economic infrastructure necessary for accumulation, such as road transport systems, energy and electrification systems, and sanitation and water supply structures. The social infrastructure necessary both for the development of the conditions for capitalist reproduction and for meeting collective social needs in general is what we call the public equity fund, an important component of state expenditure.
The economic occupation of the Amazon over the last four decades has been based on large-scale enterprises, which have led to important areas of the region being included in the global economic strategy of transnational capital. These large-scale enterprises received support from the Brazilian government during the dictatorship through various programs: Polamazônia, sectoral programs with a business base – programs for livestock hubs, selected crops and the mining-metallurgical complex in Eastern Amazonia (Ferro-Carajás and Albrás-Alunorte), a program to harness the hydroelectric potential of the Araguaia and Tocantins river valleys (UHE de Tucuruí) and a program to develop forest resources and rational use of soils in the Amazon.
The discoveries of Carajás (iron) and Trombetas (bauxite) were milestones that boosted accumulation in the mineral sector in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. Furthermore, the State was determined to boost the economic occupation of the region and its integration into general accumulation through this strategic sector, acting not in a supplementary manner, as the law stated (reference), but directly in conducting survey and prospecting activities, to better boost activities in the mineral sector.
In 1970, the Mineral Resources Research Company (CPRM) was founded to produce mineralogical knowledge and make it available to mining companies. Among the programs created, we highlight Radam (Amazon Radar), to conduct an aerial photogrammetric survey of 1,5 million square kilometers of the region, aiming to observe the occurrence of minerals.
In the mid-1970s, several large-scale projects began to be implemented in the Eastern Amazon, such as the Ferro-Carajás project and the aluminum projects (Trombetas and Albrás/Alunorte). In the case of Albrás/Alunorte, the project was the result of an agreement signed in 1976 between Japanese businessmen from the aluminum industry and the governments of Pará and Brazil, resulting in the creation of the Barcarena/PA Industrial Complex. The Brazilian government was responsible for providing the necessary infrastructure for the project, while the Japanese government was responsible for the technology and part of the financing.
We can see that the Vale do Rio Doce Company gradually stood out in controlling the accumulation of capital in the Amazon. In the mining context, it assumes a dual role of company and state apparatus: a business state, always linked to the objective of private profit generation.
It created Rio Doce Geologia e Mineração S/A (DOCEGEO), whose work was significant, placing at CVRD’s disposal enormous rights to mineral discoveries. However, these exploration rights were made available to potential lessees. In this sense, Leal states that CVRD “became, for capital corporations, an excellent cost-bearing partner” (LEAL, 2010).
The deepening of the Brazilian economic crisis in the late 1970s further reinforced the federal government's goals for the Amazon, culminating in the creation of the Greater Carajás Program. The area of direct influence of the Greater Carajás Program reached 895.265 km², equivalent to 10,6% of the Brazilian territory and more than 240 municipalities in Maranhão, Pará and Tocantins. The mineral province of Carajás and other areas of the Greater Carajás Program record a high incidence of iron, bauxite, gold, nickel, copper, manganese, cassiterite and non-metallic minerals.
The implementation of the Grande Carajás Program took into account several factors, from the Brazilian and international situation, its mineral potential, to locational elements such as the existence of forest to burn and transform into charcoal for the production of pig iron.
The Grande Carajás Program was the most important government instrument for deepening the pattern of economic occupation based on the large mining company already operating in the region. The Grande Carajás Program was created through Decree-Law No. 1.813/80, implemented during the period of validity of the III PND (National Development Plan), establishing a special system of tax and financial incentives for enterprises located in its area of operation.
This same legal device defined its administrative structure based on an interministerial council that was responsible for granting incentives, coordinating, promoting and executing the measures necessary to make the Grande Carajás Program viable (TRINDADE, 2001).
The “conservative modernizing” project became hegemonic in the region, but this did not mean the elimination of conflicts at various levels and in various fields, within the State itself and within the power bloc. In addition to clashes with sectors of the church, the State was involved in conflicts with fractions of capital and with companies, including increasingly autonomous state-owned companies. Thus, the authoritarian-modernizing State also showed itself to be weakened in certain aspects.
The pressure of these interests resulted in the fragmentation and lack of definition of the State, which lost “decision-making power in favor of the segment of large companies and banks, while at the same time the territoriality of social groups on the border and the pressure from civil society and the international environmental community turned against it” (BECKER, 2005). However, the weakening that Becker speaks of must be relativized insofar as it responds to the logic of the reproduction of capital.
This is what makes us understand a movement of centralization/strengthening and fragmentation/weakening, the solution established by capital itself in its continuous process of appropriation and alienation of nature and labor was the privatization of the State and the establishment of the current phase of accumulation by dispossession in the Amazon region, as we will see below.
Neoliberalism and the financialization of Vale S/A
Juliana Barros' work refers us to the current financialized configuration of the former CVRD, which, when privatized in 1997, in a perspective of transferring part of the Brazilian State to fundamentally transnational private interests, complies with the current cycle of economic reorganization of the Amazon space and, as the cited work refers to, the current “consensus of commodities" and "enclosure" of the populations living in the region, thus the "research focused on the processes of land acquisition and land conflicts associated with the mineral exploration projects that the company Vale began in the 2000s in the Carajás region". The book in question resulted from the doctoral thesis developed by the author at IPPUR.
In the period from 2005 to 2011, Vale SA accumulated a profit of R$ 110 billion. In the following period, marked by the slowdown in the global mineral sector due to the decline in the world economy and excess mineral supply, Vale SA's accumulated profit was R$ 79 billion recorded in the period from 2010 to 2020 (see Borges and Trindade, 2022). A considerable part of the performance of the company is due to the gradual process of transferring the mineral exploration axis from the Southern System (Minas Gerais) to the Northern System (Pará), and in recent years there has been a rapid reorganization around the exploration of the Canaã dos Carajás mines, the S11D project.
It is worth remembering that iron mining in Vale's Northern System dates back to 1985 and is located in Carajás (Marabá, Parauapebas and Canaã dos Carajá), in the state of Pará, and contains the largest iron ore deposits in the world. The mines are located on public lands for which the company has obtained exploration licenses. Due to the high grade (66,7% on average) of the deposits in the Northern System, it is not necessary to operate a concentrate plant in Carajás. The beneficiation process consists only of measuring, screening, hydrocycloning, crushing and filtering operations. After this, the iron ore is transported by the Carajás Railway (EFC) to the maritime terminal in Ponta da Madeira, in the state of Maranhão.
Capitalists receive extraordinary profits as a form of perpetuity for the mining advantages that they have since the concession of the mining right by the State, since the subsoil becomes a mere space for the enjoyment of privately appropriable property, even though the legislation establishes mining as a public concession. Thus, mining capitalists appropriate the differential income made possible by the superior quality mines located in the Amazon subsoil, that is, in a first approximation, the total profit received by individual capital consists of two components: the average mining profit by sector plus land rent (supplementary profit in the form of absolute rent and differential rent).[iv]
The level of this supplementary profit is given by the difference between individual productivity and average productivity, and the production price that prevails within the mineral industry. However, this natural force is not the source of the added wealth (surplus value) but rather only its natural basis, with the circulation of capital being what enables this process, given the increasing appropriation and transformation into an element of the reproductive process of new mineral deposits of high grades, ease of exploration of the mineral vein and location of the mine in relation to the main centers of international demand.
The continued expansion of mineral extraction by the Vale Company is manifested both in the enormous masses of mineral exported by Brazil, as well as in the company's extraordinary gains and profits, alongside, as the author refers to, “the communities of diverse social groups, such as quilombolas, peasants, coconut breakers, settlements, riverside dwellers and indigenous people, who live in the 27 municipalities crossed by the railway in Pará and Maranhão, were excluded from the dialogue process” and subjected to an increasing enclosure of their lands.
The privatization process of the Vale do Rio Doce Company transferred large swaths of land to private capital control and consequently the appropriation of land income, not only over the areas of deposits, but also over land gradients that can be treated as “financial assets” of the company, a form of capital that also generates income.
In Juliana Barros' work, the author shows the various situations in which the Vale Company appropriates new lands and imposes a logic of increasing land concentration and land pricing in the Amazon. The author observes that in the “settlement areas of Maranhão cut through by the duplication of the railroad, the company is accused of deteriorating settlement roads, burying streams, and hindering the movement of people with vehicles”, which conditions accumulation through dispossession and the increasing appropriation of extraordinary income by this transnational company.
*Jose Raimundo Trinidad He is a professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at UFPA. Author, among other books, of Agenda of debates and theoretical challenges: the trajectory of dependency and the limits of Brazilian peripheral capitalism and its regional constraints (Paka-Tatu).
References
Aluízio Lins Leal. A historical synopsis of the Amazon (a political vision). In: TRINDADE, JRB; MARQUES, G. (Orgs.). Journal of Paraense Studies (special edition). Belém: IDESP, 2010.
Berta K. Becker Urban Dynamics in the Amazon. In: DINIZ, Clélio C. & LEMOS, Mauro B. (Org.). Economy and Territory. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2005.
Gedson Thiago and José Raimundo Trindade. Political economy of financialization in the Brazilian mining sector: the case of Vale S/A. In: Journal of Social Studies, 24 (49), 45–69.
José Raimundo Barreto Trindade; Wesley Pereira de Oliveira; Gedson Thiago do Nascimento Borges. The Mineral Cycle and the Urgency of Local Development Policies: the case of the municipality of Parauapebas in the Southeast of the State of Pará. Public Policy Magazine, Saint Louis, v. 18, n. 2,
Jose Raimundo Trinidad. The metamorphosis of work in the Amazon: the case of Mineração Rio do Norte. Belém: NAEA Publishing House, 2001.
José Raimundo Trindade. Transnational corporations, territoriality and environmental impacts in the eastern Brazilian Amazon region. In: Mining, labor and Amazonian conflicts in southeastern Pará [electronic book]. / volume organizers: Celia Regina Congilio, Rosemayre Bezerra, Fernando Michelotti. Marabá, PA: iGuana, 2019.
Juliana Neves Barros. The iron fist of mining in the lands of Carajás. New York: Routledge, 2024.
Notes
[I] Check the references.
[ii] The advantages offered by the Mineral Code (1967) and by CF 88 (Art. 176) which defines the exploration of the subsoil distinctly from the soil, and the liberality of mining rights and their control by large capital are part of this liberality that only occurs due to the dependent and peripheral nature of Brazilian capitalism.
[iii] Supplementary profit arises from the application of labor to a certain “natural force” that makes it more productive, but not from a natural force that is available to all capital in the same branch of production, but rather a monopolizable portion subject to rules of control and private appropriation by a certain fraction of capital or by the capitalist State. Capitalists receive these extraordinary profits as a form of perpetuity for the natural advantages they have, and landowners appropriate this differential, converting it into land rent without any reduction in the entrepreneur’s average profit. In other words, the total profit received by individual capital consists, under this reasoning, of two components: the average profit plus land rent (or supplementary profit).
[iv] LT = Lme+RAB+RDI [Total Profit (LT) = Average Profit (Lme) + Absolute Income (RAB) + Differential Income (RDI)]. We developed this expression in Trindade and Paixão (2024).
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
