Sérgio Pereira Leite

Agrarian structure, foreign investment in land, and land prices in Brazil

The recent global rush for farmland in Latin America has produced a dramatic increase in the level of foreign investment in land in Brazil. The current trend accentuates the ongoing process of foreignization of agriculture associated with the production of grains, sugar, ethanol and other commodities, increasing land prices. In response, the Brazilian government reestablished a legal mechanism for ‘controlling’ land-based foreign investment which has proven neither efficient nor effective in solving land concentration. This paper examines this issue by analyzing the causes of the increase in investment as well as the consequences of this process with respect to land prices, critically situating land-based investments and the governments policy response in a broader discussion of the demands of agrarian social movements.

Expansão agrícola, preços e apropriação de terra por estrangeiros no Brasil

The recent “rush for farmland” in the world has made of Latin America and Brazil targets in the process of land deals with a great increase of foreign investments on the agribusiness including land purchases by financial companies, among others. Despite the low liquidity, land deals and foreign investments in agribusiness are not new in Brazil, but have increased considerably after 2002, as it is possible to be seenin the registration system of the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform. According to some field researches, most of the recent investments are related to production of grains (especially soybean) and sugarcane (to produce sugar and ethanol), but also for mining,resulting, among other consequences, in a great increase of land prices in some Brazilian regions.Such rush for land has led the Brazilian government to reestablish a legal mechanism to “control” these foreign investments in land deals. This article discussesthe recent process of foreign investments in purchasing land in Brazil, focusing inmain causes for such investments and its consequences, including possible influences on land prices and social and political impacts over disputes to access land in Brazil.

An analysis of the regional impacts of land reform in Brazil

This article aims to portray short, medium and long-term change processes brought about by the establishment of rural settlements in Brazil. The goal was to apprehend the transformations in the lives of the settlers, in the settlements and in the regions where these are located. The article is based on a study that carried out in some of the Brazilian regions that had the greatest concentration of settlement projects and number of families of settlers per unit of territory (termed zones). The basic premise was that this concentration stemmed from struggles, and that the proximity of several projects has served to multiply their effects.

Um estudo sobre o financiamento da política de desenvolvimento territorial no meio rural brasileiro

The aim of this paper is to present the budget execution performance of the financing of territorial policy referring to the Sustainable Development Program of Rural Areas (Pronat) and Territories of Citizenship Program (PTC). To perform this study actors’ strategic programs were interviewed and data on the performance of politics until 2009 were systematized. We analyzed the composition of resources that allow it, as well as issues that will enable or hinder the flow of resources required to finance operating expenses and investment in different subfunctions that compose programs. Results of this study show the complexity and, at the same time, innovations that institutional policies at territorial level budget brings to the scene, whether regarding lifting and ballasting sources of allocated resources, whether regarding the form of application of these resources according to geographical areas and lines of programmatic action.

State, pattern of development and agriculture: the Brazilian case

This article analyzes transformations in Brazilian agriculture in the light of the relations between the rural sector and the Brazilian model of economic development during the last 50 years. The article aims to distinguish the period prior to the crisis of the 1980s with that prevailing in the last two decades, focusing on the State’s intervention in the rural context. Particular attention is given to the way in which the Brazilian State incorporated specific interests from different rural segments, both in the developmentalist phase and the subsequent period marked by fiscal crisis. The characterization of the pattern of development adopted by Latin American societies from the mid 1940’s to the early 1980’s has been denominated in the specialized literature the national-developmentalist project in an attempt to understand a common trajectory in the various national experiences. The term certainly embodies contradictions, particularly if one confronts its ECLA inspired theoretical matrix with the military-nationalist project, which was dominant in a good portion of these societies for considerable time. 1 Few countries maintained the national development project throughout the entire period considered. The international crises that shook the interventionist structures of European and North American capitalism during the 1970’s, also placed in check the Latin American recipe for industrialization, with the exceptions of Mexico and Brazil. The latter was able to maintain, in a certain form, the basic