To understand the issue of land ownership in the agrarian and urban world today is an enormous challenge; there are wrinkles exposed by analyses of the paradigms of the agrarian and urban question and of agrarian and urban capitalism. The agrarian and urban are continuous spaces with issues that encounter and collide, revealing different development models. They involve corporations interested in real estate speculation, as well as common people, who only want to a place to live and work. In Brazil, these are examples of the marks of the past recorded in rural and urban territories, such as the permanence of landownership concentrated and controlled by capitalist corporations, constituting a hegemonic secular model, as well as the persistence of the struggles of farmworkers and other popular movements, shaping their small production units and living spaces in an alternative millenary model. The hegemonic and the alternative are models for agricultural development and for housing that dispute territories. The respective models, problems and disputes are analyzed by the paradigmatic debate between antagonistic positions and established positions. The incompatibility of the models can be understood by analyzing the social relations that produce them and determine their scales, technologies, territorial order and relations with nature. By constituting capitalist, community and familiar social relations, they produce different territories and therefore, distinct territorialities.
Paradigms are interpretive models composed by trends. The promotion of a paradigmatic debate is a procedure for analyzing its differences, relations and proposals. The construction of knowledge through theoretical elaborations constitutes world views, and is therefore a political option for developing alternative models and or the hegemonic model. The paradigm of the agrarian and urban question understands that capitalist relations produce inequalities that provoke the destruction of small family farming and of popular experiences, therefore the problem is in the system that, through the concentration of land ownership, for centuries has maintained the hegemonic model of large scale monoculture for export and the homogeneous production of territories of control in the cities. The paradigm of agrarian and urban capitalism defends that the problem is not in its relations but in small family farming, which is not competitive, although it recognizes that about 10% of the family farms can be partially subordinated to agribusiness. According to the capitalist agrarian paradigm, it would be necessary to deterritorialize 90% of Brazil's small family farmers, so that agribusiness or the hegemonic model could appropriate these territories, intensifying the concentration of land ownership.
In the cities, the experiences of popular struggle for housing, the occupation of buildings and land, challenge the corporate production model of a monoculture of residences. The deterritorialization of small family farmers can cause growth in the struggle for housing in the cities, encounters and collisions of spaces in dispute that are transformed in fractions of territories. Science produces interpretations of the facts that become references for the elaboration of public policies that compose the paradigmatic debate.
This is the debate that expresses disputes over development models in rural areas: agribusiness as a creation of capitalist corporations and agroecology as a (re)creation of the organizations of small family farmers. The hegemonic power of agribusiness and the discourses of its ideologies cannot impede the emergence and insurgence of agroecology, distinct models of territorial development in which for each one the use of the land and of the territory is thought of and planned in a different manner. They are worldviews that point in opposite directions and, in part, overlap, with antagonistic perspectives in which nature and society are understood as merchandise or as life, where there is destruction and construction, where the product can be a commodity or food. In this debate, the idea of consensus does not contain the sense of harmony, but an impasse generated by conflict. In the city, corporations and socioterritorial movements that struggle for housing dispute territories of permanence and change, preserving and transforming, creating distinct territorialities through permanent conflicts.
Conflict is an essential concept for understanding the territorial disputes through development models and politics that produce them. The transformation of contemporary agrarian and urban Brazil will not take place by consensus because the models are antagonistic and any possible agreement means changing both. The conflictive situation allows understanding that the conflicts generated are not impediments, because they are essential for the changes to happen, changes on micro and macro scale in the construction of technologies, resources, of public policies etc. Conflictiveness is a constant process of confrontation produced by the contradictions and inequalities of the capitalist system, revealing the need for permanent theoretical and practical debates concerning the disputes of the development models and of territories. These disputes are manifest by a set of conflicts in the field of ideas, in the construction of knowledge, in the preparation of development policies, in the correlation of forces for the implementation of the models and their results. The conflictiveness is manifest: by the positioning of the classes before the effects of capitalist globalization that produces inequalities that threaten the consolidation of democracy; by the complexity of social relations constructed in various and contradictory forms, producing heterogeneous spaces and territories; by the stimulating and non-determined historicity and spatiality; by the persistent possibility of political construction of social classes in divergent trajectories of different strategies of territorial reproduction; by the recognition of polarization between rule and conflict as contradiction in opposition to the order and to consensus; by the dispute for definitions of the contents of the concepts, theories, meanings and directions in which the oppositions and incompatibilities will be exposed.
The inequalities of agrarian and urban Brazil have been well analyzed in this excellent issue of Revista Katálysis. The territorial disputes are cartographed in the overlapping of the agriculture of small family farms and large agribusiness, even with the predominance of each model in Brazilian territory, as is the case of the Northeastern and Midwestern regions. Both are territorialized in the direction of the agricultural frontier in the Amazon, where the largest number of violent conflicts with rural workers is concentrated. To overcome the intensification of the inequalities it will be necessary to face issues such as: the territorial impact of large scale monoculture for export, the concentration of land ownership, agrarian reform, forest preservation, qualification of labor, food sovereignty, food quality, appropriate technologies, modes of production and different types of markets.
This overcoming will not take place with homogeneous agrarian policies because agriculture is diverse. The struggle over land is an expression of the conflictiveness in the disputes for development models. Overcoming the issue of land ownership in the agrarian and urban world today will be possible with the effective participation of the population. Not only the population directly involved, such as the landless and the homeless, but all citizens must be concerned with rural and urban development, because eating and living are essential conditions of quality of life. To overcome the persistent concentration of land ownership is not impossible for those who want to build a more democratic, just and promising Brazil. For this reason, people must consider food and housing as rights and not only as goods. These are, without a doubt, paradigmatic postures that shape development models.
Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, September 2016.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jul-Sep 2016
