ACCUMULATION, REGULATION, VIOLENCE: A historical and regulationist perspective on soybeans and competitive structures of violence in Brazilian land disputes

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ACCUMULATION, REGULATION, VIOLENCE

A historical and regulationist perspective on soybeans and

competitive structures of violence in Brazilian land disputes

Vincent Thepass

Vincent.thepass@hotmail.com Leiden University

Abstract

Throughout the 20th century, the Brazilian agricultural landscape has gone through meaningful transformations of modernization, globalization and expansionism. While increasingly concentrated land ownership and ruralist hegemony consolidated the position of rural elites, Brazilian agriculture has also progressively integrated into Global Commodity Chains (GCC), dominated by a complex of transnational agribusiness. Simultaneously, lethal violence targeting activists and local communities who seek to frustrate the expanding agricultural frontiers exacerbates, undermining those who resist the agribusiness model. Focusing on the case of the soybean GCC as a commodity complex, this Master’s thesis approaches violence in rural land conflicts as an endogenous regulatory feature of the agribusiness regime of accumulation, leading to the theorization of competitive structures of direct violence.

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1 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ABCD Archer David-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus (Grain Traders)

ABIOVE Associação Brasileira das Industrias de Oleos Vegetais ANEC Associação Nacional dos Exportadores de Cereais APIB Articulacao dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil

CNA Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock

CONTAG Confederacao Nacional dos Trabalhadores Rurais Agricultores e Agricultoras Familiares

CPT Commissao Pastoral da Terra CSR Corporate Social Responsibility FAO Food and Agricultural Organization FDI Foreign Direct Investment

FUNAI Fundacao Nacional do Indio GCC Global Commodity Chain GMO Genetically Modified Organism GURT Genetic use restriction technology GVC Global Value Chain

HMPA Historical Materialist Policy Analysis HRD Human Rights Defender

IBG International Buyer Group IMF International Monetary Fund

INCRA Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform IPR Intellectual Property Rights

ISI Import Substitution Industrialization MERCOSUR Mercado Comum do Sul

MLAR Market-Led Agrarian Reform

MST Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra NGO Non-Governmental Organization

PSE Private Security Enterprise

RR Roundup Ready

RTRS Roundtable for Responsible Soy TSR Tripartite Standard Regime SAP Structural Adjustment Package SRB Brazilian Rural Society

TCC Tropical Commodity Chain TNC Transnational Corporation UPR Universal Periodic Review WTO World Trade Organization WWF World Wildlife Fund

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INTRODUCTION

Throughout history, Brazilian land ownership has always been highly concentrated in the hands of a small group of rural elites. It was already during the era of colonization when the Portuguese king distributed large states called Sesmaria’s among rich Portuguese land owners (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007). Despite the establishment of some formal rights, the inequality inherent to the Brazilian land regime has not meaningfully changes ever since. According to the 2006 Agricultural Census, 37.7% of Brazilian land was in private hands for agricultural use (Damanesco et al. 2017: 19), while 0.83% of the rural establishments controlled 43,5% of all arable land based on data in 1996 (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007: 1504). As such, with a land Gini-index of 0.83, Brazil has one of the most unequal land regimes in the world (Turzi, 2017: 87).

This uneven playing field has produced two opposing camps with regards to the Brazilian ‘agrarian question’. On the one hand, powerful rural elites and transnational corporations (TNC’s) practice an industrial and highly modernized agricultural regime of accumulation called agribusiness. In order to accumulate more profit, these capitalist fractions seek to consolidate their market power and commodify new lands. On the other hand, the landless workers and small farmers, as well as the indigenous and Quilombola communities who inhabit the areas that are claimed by agribusiness, advocate for land reform (MST, 2018). Led by social movements like the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), these movements put forward an agenda for an alternative, more small scale agricultural and land regime that tackles the foundations of inequality, is ecologically friendly and empowers local communities (ibid; Global Justice UK, 2018). Simultaneously, indigenous and Quilombolas organizations like Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples Articulation (APIB) and the Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB) advocate for indigenous rights, and demarcations for their indigenous and Quilombola lands (APIB, 2018; Survival International, 2015).

Many scholars have established how these opposing interests form a breeding ground for political struggles (Welch, 2006; Servolo de Medeiros, 2007; Mancano Fernandez, 2013; Oliveira & Hecht, 2016; Turzi, 2017; and others). Indeed, while government frameworks as well as private initiatives voice the intention to govern and conduct agrarian practices in a ‘responsible’ fashion, this does not seem to add up with reality. Alongside its much discussed environmental and social

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impacts, the Brazilian land regime and agribusiness is also associated with violent occurrences. As reported by Global Witness (2017), at least 49 activists were murdered in Brazil in 2016. Moreover, as observable in the Pastoral Land Commission’s (2018) carefully held records on land disputes and related assassinations, these assassinations appear to be structural rather than incidental features of the Brazilian land regime.

Within this thesis, this discrepancy between regulatory and discursive promises on the one hand and the often violent reality of land conflicts on the other hand, will be scrutinized. This will be done by contextualizing the violence within the economic and regulatory realities of Brazilian agriculture. Informed by the claim of the Global Witness report that most of the assassinations of land activists in Brazil have been conducted by loggers and landowners tied to agribusiness and extractive industries, this thesis will particularly focus on the case on the Global Commodity Chain (GCC) of soybeans, looking at its social relations, relative power position and agricultural expansionism. As such, the research will seek to answer the following question:

How is direct violence within Brazilian land conflicts situated within the economic and regulatory contexts and strategies of the Brazilian soybean commodity complex?

As such, a neo-Gramscian qualitative research from the perspective of Jessop & Sum’s (2006) regulation approach will be conducted, based on the research methods of Kannamkulam and Georgi’s (2014) Historical Materialist Policy Analysis (HMPA) and Global Commodity Chain (GCC) research as explained by Bair (2009). Herein, direct forms of political violence in Brazilian land conflicts will not be approached as mere coincidences: instead, they will be regarded from the regulationist perspective that approaches modes of regulation as structures with a particular transformative or reproductive selectivity that strategically favors certain regimes of accumulation, thereby expecting a more structural nature. Analyzing both scientific and secondary literature, raw economic data and data on violence within Brazilian land conflicts, this thesis will as such aim to sketch a complex dynamic of political and economic social relations, agencies and processes.

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This research finds its relevance in updating and merging three debates. First of all, while the social and environmental, as well as the political impacts of agribusiness have been scrutinized thoroughly (Servolho de Medeiros, 2007; Elgert, 2012; Eloy et al., 2016; Turzi, 2017 and others), scholars often deal with violence as exogenous and relatively incidental events in the soybean chain. Within this thesis, violence will be approached as a structural and endogenous part of the agribusiness regime of accumulation, thereby reframing the social relations of agribusiness and its GCC in academic debates. Moreover, the research will contribute to the debates on disciplinary neoliberalism of authors like Gill (1998) and Bruff (2014), who have mainly focused on the insulation of economic policies from democratic mass politics as a result of the disciplining working of markets, rather than the structural relationship between disciplinary markets and violence. Finally, this analysis will contribute towards the debates on neoliberal structures of violence by scholars like Thomas (2000), Roberts (2008) and Jones (2016). While these authors do regard the structural relationship between neoliberalism and violence, they have mainly focused on indirect forms of violence. Instead, this thesis will theorize the notion of competitive structures of direct violence, wherein the disciplining working of markets structurally produce direct acts of violence. This thesis also has social relevance, for it sheds a new light on the agricultural status quo and its relationship with violence in Brazil. This has implications for the strategic considerations of both organizations and social movements with regards to issues of land reform and regulation in Brazil, and the way they strategize for emancipatory transformation.

This thesis will be built up in the following structure. First of all, a theoretical framework is provided based on neo-Gramscian ontologies, theories on contemporary neoliberalism, the regulation approach and particular notions on the emerge of private food law and neoliberal structures of violence. Subsequently, a loosely adopted version of Kannamkulam & Georgi’s (2014) HMPA will structure the analytical parts of this thesis. As such, the second chapter will provide a broader context by describing and analyzing the historical trajectories and transformations on economic doctrines, agricultural policies and land distribution frameworks in Brazil, thereby sketching the broader context where the remaining part of the analysis is situated in. In the third chapter, the emergence of soy as a commodity chain and powerful complex will be described and contextualized within the earlier sketched historical trajectories. This includes

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further elaborations on the relations between the different agents inside and outside this complex, as well as their interests and strategies that inform political and economic power and agency. In chapter four, the analysis will be finalized with the analysis of empirical data that seeks to connect agricultural expansionism with violence towards activists, thereby identifying a competitive structure of direct violence. Finally, the conclusion will reflect on the findings of the analysis and prospects for the broader economic debate.

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1. Theoretical framework: connecting neoliberalism and violence

In this section, a theoretical framework will be presented, built up from more abstract to more concrete theoretical adoptions. First of all, the historical materialist ontologies and epistemologies that form the fundament of the theoretical assumptions will be laid out briefly. Secondly, theory will be presented on the critical political economic analysis of neoliberalism and modes of regulation, private food law, Global Commodity Chains (GCC’s) and structures of violence. Based on this, a theoretical and methodological framework is developed for analyzing the role of political violence within land conflicts in Brazil’s soybean agrifood chain.

Critical political economy: ontologies and epistemologies of historical materialism

First of all, a short elaboration should be made on the critical historical materialist ontologies and epistemologies that form the abstract fundament of this thesis, as these inform different research choices compared to ‘mainstream’ perspectives. Robert Cox (1981, 1983) famously distinguished between problem-solving theory and critical theory. Problem solving theory takes the existing global order as its starting point, thereby accepting its characteristics as a given. Political economic structures are always time and place dependent products of political agency. Accepting such structures as a given thus implies a supportive stance for a status quo that favors certain political actions. Despite this normativity, problem-solving theory presents its theorizations and problematizations as universal and transhistorical, denying its historic-spatial specific context.

Instead, critical theory bases its ontology and epistemology on the recognition of continuous historical transformation, scrutinizing the historical structures and agencies that shaped the underlying conditions of social relations (Cox, 1981; Bieler & Morton, 2004). With the post-positivist epistemological stance, critical theory assumes that research is never neutral and should serve emancipatory means (Cox, 1981; Femia, 1983: 133-134). Moreover, the historicist feature of historical materialistic thought implies an epistemological stance wherein concepts like ‘capitalism’ and ‘state’ could never be formulated as transhistorical, and should rather be specified within their temporal-spatial situation (Cox, 1981: 135; Femia, 1983).

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The assumed mutually formative function of structure and agency is an important feature of the ontological framework. Agents are shaped by- and embedded within the material, ideational and institutional forces that make up structure. Simultaneously, the structure is created by agency in the past, and therefore reflects the power relations between different class fractions (Apeldoorn, 2002). Structure as such intrinsically produces contradictory and conflicting interests between agents, rooting ongoing struggles on the transformation or reproduction of structures (Cox, 1981, 1983; Bieler & Morton, 2004). Wat arises from this, is a historicist notion of economic and political order that seeks to identify, historicize and contextualize class antagonisms and identify openings for transformative, emancipatory agency vis-à-vis the status quo (Bieler & Morton, 2004).

Neoliberal social relations in the 21st_century

Based on the ontological and epistemological notions described above, a historic materialist theoretical framework could be developed that creates tools for situating violence within institutional, economic and discursive structures. Therefore, this section will highlight literature about some characteristics of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. It should be acknowledged that this thesis could impossibly highlight all relevant features of historic capitalist development and its impact on Brazil, like for example particular issues of colonialism, racism and state formation in Latin America. Nevertheless, the theoretical framework aims to sufficiently theorize neoliberal capitalism for further analysis.

Much critical literature has been written about the impact of neoliberalism on the global political economy since it emerged in the late 1970’s (Gill, 1998; Harvey, 2005; Robinson, 2010; Wylde, 2012). Neoliberalism is a political economic doctrine that is formed around the Hayekian notion of economic freedom, which views the free market and free entrepreneurialism as the best policy norms to achieve the goals of economic growth and efficiency (Harvey, 2005: 5-38). As such, it prescribes an expanding market sphere, free trade, private property rights protection and a retreating state apparatus, as state intervention allegedly distorts the invisible hand of the market. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, an alliance between political and economic elites capitalized on the global stagflation crisis to present the neoliberal doctrine as its structural solution in the West.

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Moreover, after gaining dominance in the West, neoliberalism’s principles have also been promoted (and sometimes enforced) in the Global South via the Washington Consensus. Originally coined by its then-proponent John Williamson (1990, 2004), the Washington Consensus was a policy package built around neoliberal principles like privatization, liberalization, deregulation and austerity. While it also notably spread via US support for anti-socialist coups in Latin American states, the Washington Consensus was conventionally promoted via Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP’s). These programs were put forward by the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury as a conditionality for loans towards heavily indebted developing states.

While neo-Gramscian literature describes various ways in which the rise of neoliberalism impacted global affairs, this theoretical framework highlights three particularly significant transformations that should be taken into account throughout the analysis. First of all, the globalizing neoliberal emergence has led to an increasingly dominant position of transnational corporations (TNC’s) (Gill & Law, 1989; Sklair, 2002; Van Apeldoorn, 2002; Van Apeldoorn et al., 2012). Van Apeldoorn (2002) describes how the neoliberal marketization of the European Union has resulted in the emergence of transnational capitalist that benefit of the liberalized European order. This went hand in hand with the process of ‘transnationalization’ that resulted from neoliberal globalization, meaning the integration of production, trade, finance and investment into a globalized economy (ibid.; Robinson, 2006). As such, these new structures provided TNC’s with a structural advantage: due to their mobile nature, power to allocate capital among states and coordinative abilities, these capitalist fractions were more capable of adapting to globalization than other social classes like labor or domestic capital (Apeldoorn, 2002; Gill & Law, 1989). Herein, the liberalization of finance was a particularly influential transformation, as it accelerated the dominance of financial capital within economies. With the high speed in which financial capital flows, TNC’s market power increased with its ability to move their capital even faster, while smaller firms and states struggle with increasingly volatile markets (Lapavitzas, 2013; Godechot, 2015). The emergence of TNC’s has thoroughly impacted global economic processes, and should be taken into account when analyzing GCC’s.

Secondly, neoliberal globalization has resulted in changing power dynamics that root regulations and governance. In his famous work ‘State, Power, Socialism’, Poulantzas (1980)

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translated Gramscian agent-structure ontologies into a theory of the state, wherein the state is considered a ‘temporal-spatial matrix’ of different pathways of class struggles, rather than a static entity with universal characteristics (Jessop, 1999, 2013). Out of this notion, the regulation approach has been developed. This school seeks to analyze how institutional and regulatory ‘modes of regulation’ function as instruments for the transformation and reproduction of ‘regimes of accumulation’, e.g. productive social relations, and as such serve certain class interests (Jessop, 1999; Jessop & Sum, 2006: 3-5). Modes of regulation thus possess a specific strategic selectivity, as they favor certain agents in terms of institutional access, favorable regulations and dominant institutionalized discourses with which they could shape economic structures that strengthen their preferred regime of accumulation (Raza, 2015). This regulation approach will be adopted as an integral theory within this thesis.

Out of this notion, Stephen Gill (1998) developed the concept of disciplinary neoliberalism. Disciplined by the workings of global competition and the emerging power of TNC’s, states have been pushed to transform their institutions in order to be deemed credible by transnational capital. A national and transnational set of regulatory frameworks (guided by institutions like the IMF, World Bank, OECD and WTO) emerged around policy norms that lock in neoliberal policies of liberalization, privatization, austerity and investors protection, and thus place economic policies outside of democratic mass politics and inside technocratic institutions (ibid.; Rodrik, 2000). As such, a vicious (or for some, virtuous) cycle emerges. On the one hand, disciplining markets always monitor states for their credibility and pro-market structures, behaving like a ‘global panopticon’ (Gill, 1995; Streeck, 2016) and on the other hand constraining institutional frameworks strengthen the strategic selectivity that further exacerbates the markets’ disciplining workings. Since Gill coined these concepts of disciplinary neoliberalism and new constitutionalism (and Bruff (2014) renamed it as authoritarian neoliberalism), critical scholars have further theorized the subordination of the state vis-a-vis international capital markets through different angles. Apeldoorn (2002), Sklair (2002) and Gleckmann (2012) for example theorized the influence of global power networks, which have increasingly established informal, ‘multi-stakeholder’ forms of governance which effectively form a corporate-led alternative for democratically legitimized state governance. Streeck (2016) theorized the consolidation state,

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whereby (at least Western European) states are increasingly submissive towards international capital and finance as a result of their indebtedness. Dauvergne and LeBaron (2014) moreover theorized how the emerge of neoliberalist social relations within the state also affected the position of formerly critical agents like NGO’s and trade unions, thereby neutralizing resistance and further empowering and legitimizing transnational corporations. As these authors claim, the continuous privatization and individualization of activism has resulted in the neoliberal cooptation of formerly critical bulwarks that become more market-friendly in order to stay politically relevant. As such, the contemporary neoliberal state and the agents it inhabits have an increasingly strategic selectivity towards transnational capital fractions.

Third and finally, Gramscian and regulation school theorists have described the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism as a dominant regime of accumulation1_{(Gill & Law, 1989; Jessop, 2002;}

Jessop & Sum, 2006). The previous Fordist regime of accumulation was built around a model of competition based on mass-production and economies of scale within the context of relatively closed domestic economies and a post-war compromise between capital and labor (Jessop & Sum, 2006: 58-63). The trend of neoliberal globalization went hand in hand with a transformation towards the post-Fordist regime of accumulation. Additional to competing on production scale, transnational businesses changed their strategies towards flexible production and consumption patterns, competitiveness based on knowledge and R&D, capital intensive production and economics of scope, e.g. the strategy to expand and diversify the types of products corporation produce (Jessop, 1993; Jessop & Sum, 2006: 76-86). Related to this regime of accumulation is a trend of globalized financialization that took place. International flows of finance and goods have become increasingly relevant, and the role for financial institutions increasingly dominant. Financially complex products like hedges, futures and derivatives have been developed as financial trade gained an increasingly dominant position in the accumulative models leading to an increasingly disintegration of business models from production itself (Epstein, 2002; Jessop & Sum, 2006: 80; Lapavitzas, 2013; Godechot, 2015). Meanwhile, financialization has led to a situation of overaccumulation, wherein surplus capital that cannot be invested in productive

1_{It should be noted that these same authors have also been critical on uncritical and generalist adoptions of}

post-Fordism (Jessop & Sum, 2006). Nevertheless, this thesis will seek to show that the concept is applicable to agribusiness.

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accumulation increasingly turns towards mergers and acquisitions (among other ends), and thereby enhancing market concentration (Wigger, 2014: 625-627). The emergence of the increasingly R&D based, financialized, transnational nature of business models with quickly changing demand and production patterns, transformed production processes and enhanced TNC power.

Neoliberal modes of regulation: private food law

The neoliberal developments of rising market power of TNC’s, market disciplining towards states and post-Fordist regimes of accumulation as described above has not only transformed economic power relations, also led to the emergence of new forms of law outside of state institutions. Van der Meulen et al. (2011) present a comprehensive and multi-angle view on private food law, which is viewed as a component of the more general emergence of neoliberalism (Busch, 2011). Private food laws are legal frameworks wherein the norms, standards and regulations on product characteristics (outcome standards) and production process (process standards) are created by non-state agents like corporations or NGO’s (Van der Meulen, 2011).

Noticeably, this competence to define problems and solutions has an instrumental value for the standard-setters concerned, as it also enables them to filter-out the controversial features of the production process. This leads to a neoliberal replacement of the state as a regulatory agent by what Busch (2011) conceptualizes as ‘quasi-states’, in the form of so-called Tripartite Standards Regimes (TSR’s). Herein, allegedly neutral third parties like NGO’s certify buyers and producers when it is assumed that they live up to the formulated standards. While applauded by liberal accounts that focus on incremental progress and measurability issues (Conroy, 2007; Van den Berg et al., 2014), this self-regulation has been heavily criticized from critical political economy perspectives (Gereffi et al., 2001; Busch, 2011; Jaffee, 2012; Molberg, 2014; Dauvergne & LeBaron, 2014; and others). Busch (2011: 63-68) highlights how these certification schemes are flawed for their lack of democratic checks, unclear accountability, limited effectiveness, lack of transparency of the standards, negative effects for small producers while the certifying third parties have a financial incentive to provide as many certifications as possible. Gereffi et al. (2001), Jaffee (2012), Molberg (2014) and Dauvergne and LeBaron (2014) mention how these

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certification schemes effectively form an ‘NGO-industrial complex’, wherein NGO’s effectively legitimize malign production processes. As such, this is a form of neoliberal cooptation of fair trade activism that obscures true alternatives (Jaffee, 2012; Dauvergne and LeBaron, 2014). De-essentializing these multi-stakeholder schemes, Garcia-López and Arizpe (2010) differentiate between top-down and bottom-up participatory processes. By focusing particularly on soy conflicts in Argentina and Paraguay, the authors underline that the success of a participatory scheme in tackling the fundamental issues within a chain depends on who organizes and coordinates the process. While transnationally organized top-down certifications are sensitive to neoliberal cooptation and more prone to dynamics of political dynamics of clientelism, community led bottom-up initiatives have a more transformative potential due to their grassroots mobilization of subordinate groups like peasants.

Global Commodity Chains and tropical commodities

So far, the literature review has discussed critical, neo-Gramscian ontologies and epistemologies, as well as a mix of neo-Gramscian and regulation approaches that described and theorized the emergence of neoliberalism and its impacts on structures and agents. For analyzing the competing regimes of accumulation and modes of regulation, methodological tools are needed for more tangibly grasping power asymmetries between different agents in a context of globalized production processes. As such, this section will adopt the notion of Global Commodity Chains (GCC’s) as described by Jennifer Bair (2009) into the theoretical framework. Bair provides a comprehensive overview of different theoretical traditions in GCC research, which originate from Hopkins & Wallenstein’s (1982) World Systems theory but branched out into GCC and Global Value Chains (GVC) analysis. A mix of these approaches and Talbot’s tropical commodity chains research will be adopted.

GCC analysis localizes and connects different steps in the productive process from commodity to end-product, contextualizing it within local, national, regional and global structures (Bair, 2009: 29; Turzi, 2017). Hereby GCC analysis goes beyond the mainstream state-centric notion of trade that merely analyzes aggregate trade flows between states, which is problematic for obscuring the complex and asymmetric dynamics behind trade flows. Gereffi, who is generally mentioned

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as the founder of the GCC tradition (Gereffi et al., 1994), updated the framework of Hopkins and Wallerstein. While the previous authors mainly focused on the unequal global division of labor leading to trade deficits and underdevelopment, Gereffi theorized the networks between different corporations that link developing countries to global markets (Bair, 2009: 9). Herein, he differentiated between four processes of interest: the input-output structure with the linkages from raw commodity to final product; the geographic configurations of GCC’s; the governance structures with which the chain drivers exert control over the system; and the institutional rules of the game (ibid.). The importance of the latter is emphasized by multiple authors in commodity chain analysis, which emphasize that the transnational nature of GCC’s implies an embeddedness in different localized social and institutional contexts that situate the different intersecting ‘boxes’ within a multi-layered social context (Hess and Coe, 2006; Hess and Yeung, 2006; Talbot, 2009; Wallerstein, 2009). This implicates the potential link of GCC analysis with regulation theory, as the localized regulatory context – and its elites – are assumed to interact with transnational structures and agents.

The Soybean chain could be described as what Talbot (2009) calls a tropical commodity chain (TCC). This term distinguishes itself from other types of chains because the ecology of the commodity makes it particularly suitable for growing in the Global South, e.g. tropical or sub-tropical circumstances, while the main markets for the (final product of the) commodity is in the north. Talbot goes beyond Gereffi’s et al. (1994) typology of buyer- and producer driven chains, which assumes that chains are mainly governed or ‘driven’ by either transnational buyers when regarding less complex products and productive TNC’s within more complex products. Instead, Talbot emphasizes the importance of a more extensive typology of all different actors that have a governing role within the agri-chain, and adopting the Global Value Chain analytical notion of ‘degrees of drivenness’ that enable a more gradual approach towards the asymmetries within a chain. This results in the acknowledgement of a more complex relation between all the different governing agents, which besides the transnational buyers, producers and traders could also concern NGO’s, social movements, government officials and other agents.

The theoretical notion of commodity chains analysis allows this thesis to regard global trade and production networks in a nuanced and complex fashion, but also permits the framework to

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develop analytical tools for operationalizing power relations between different capitalist and non-capitalist agents. Three types of power linkages that could be derived from literature should be mentioned briefly. First of all, one could look at the degrees of vertical and horizontal integration of a particular firm. Herein, vertical integration implies the degree of control it has over other steps or boxes within the commodity chain, whereby a difference is made between forward linkages (e.g., linkages that connect the firm with later processes in the chain) and backward linkages (linkages that connects agents concerned with the earlier processes in the chain). Horizontal integration implies the degree of economic concentration within a certain step in the chain, for example the concentration within the step of processing the soy, or the concentration within grain trade. More horizontal integration implies more market power, as such an agent becomes harder to circumvent by other agents and as such has a stronger bargaining position. Secondly, the strength of the linkages could be regarded. In other words, control of a TNC over another step in the chain is stronger when it takes the form of a merger or and acquisition, compared to when it takes the form of a lease contract, a future or a loan. Thirdly, the ability of different agents to persist within changing chain dynamics could be regarded, as the transition towards quickly changing features of post-Fordism produce GCC dynamics that potentially exclude or subordinate certain agents.

Competitive structures of violence

Finally, a conceptualization and theorization of political violence needs to be constructed in order to integrate the concept into the broader regulationist framework. This thesis will adopt the argument of Mancano Fernandez (2013), who claims that rural conflicts in Brazil should be approached as conflicts of territorialization. The concept of territoriality describes conflictual strategic dynamic that arises out of the need of different agents to exert control over a certain contested territory (ibid.; Anderson & O’Dowd, 1999). An influential framework on territoriality has been made by Charles Tilly (1985). As Tilly displays in his historical account of state-building in Europe, organized means of violence have played a decisive role in the obtainment of control over territories and eventually led to the institutionalization of that control in European states. Herein, the author justifiably cautions that historic trajectories of European state-building cannot uncritically be assumed to root ‘Third World countries’ in a similar fashion (ibid.: 169).

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Nevertheless, Tilly’s account on the instrumental use of violence for competitive organized groups that seek to accumulate resources and exert control and coercion over a territory could be adopted, when regarded properly within the appropriate temporal-spatial context of Brazil. Within agrarian land conflicts, this instrumental use of violence could further be contextualized within Vergara-Camus’s (2012: 1136-1137) adoption of Marx’s argument that land is always subordinate to capital. This implies that within the case of expanding capital, land that is used for non-capitalist uses is regarded an obstacle for accumulation which could only be illuminated when the land unit is commodified. Herein, capitalism has the tendency to produce laws supporting the expropriations of land from peasants in order to serve a process of ‘primitive accumulation’. Meanwhile, those who do not privately own land are increasingly dependent of those who do own land in order to find an arrangement to survive within a capitalist economy (ibid.). In the case of Brazilian land conflicts, areas inhabited by indigenous peoples, peasants and Quilombola communities are often legally defined as ‘undefined’ or empty lands (Damanesco et al., 2017). This produces a tension between the social context on the one hand, and the legal coercive context on the other hand. This could be expected to form a breeding ground for the kind of territorialist violence as described by Tilly, with as potential difference that the violence is not only asserted by a protecting state but rather by informal forces.

In the context of Latin American neoliberalism, scholars already have developed theories on structures of violence, wherein they merch security relations with the notion of class-based social relations (Thomas, 2000; Roberts, 2008; Jones, 2016). For example, Thomas (2000) and Roberts (2008) highlight that human-made power structures of class relations and social norms are selective in providing access to security. Roberts’ (2008: 5-6) human insecurity approach mainly focusses on the civilian deaths “that could be avoided, and which were not caused by guns, bombs or machetes”. Hereby, Roberts uses a similar differentiation as what Jones (2016) later conceptualized as ‘structural’ and ‘direct’ violence, wherein the former implies deaths as a result of structural features like geographic exclusion and inequality, while the latter results from direct human agency. While acknowledging the importance of investigating the types of violence which are not the direct result of human agency and are thereby relatively hidden, this thesis argues that direct violence does not necessarily need to have less structural roots. After all, when

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regarding the notion of territoriality as introduced above, direct violence could be a phenomenon where groups are structurally subjected upon based on their racial identity, class or geographic location. Additionally, Roberts (2008: 105-115) notes how severe human insecurity (e.g., the indirect violence resulting from socioeconomic marginalization) possesses a likelihood to trigger direct violence as a result of social dissatisfaction and deprivation that triggers subversive (sometimes violent) strategies asserted by those subjected to marginalization. Putting this in other words, in cases of systemic subordination of groups, those groups are more likely to select extra-legal and thus criminalized emancipatory strategies that subsequently subjects them to a greater extend to state violence (Roberts, 2008: 111)

Within these theoretical considerations, the notion of structures of violence will be adopted in this thesis with the aim to reveal the structural exposal of peasants, indigenous people and Quilombolas to agribusiness imposed violence within the context of agricultural expansion. In other words, we are looking for a type of violence within the context of regimes of accumulation and modes of regulation that could be theorized as a ‘competitive structure of direct violence’. Meant with this is a structure of violence that is either formally or informally exercised as well as structurally maintained as an endogenous feature of a regime of accumulation. In order to preliminarily operationalize the concept, some potential modes in which it occurs should be identified. The first appearance could be regarded as more straight-forward, with violence directly inserted by state-forces that are targeted at activists and communities through the channel of criminalization and sub sequential punishment. The second appearance could be found in direct agency of corporations, that either appeal to Private Security Enterprises (PSE’s) or informal paramilitary groups or death squads in order to intimidate or assault other groups for strategic purposes. Finally, the third appearance is more complex and hidden within systemic structures that enhance the potentiality for situations wherein corporations or their affiliates practice violent strategies. This could for example be expected to occur in the case of expansionism towards disputed lands, especially in the case of maintained informality when policy frameworks neglect the violence and thereby implicitly maintain it. In other words, these are the formally hidden but physically present forms of violence which are not formulated within policy frameworks but nevertheless endogenous features that maintain a

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regime of accumulation that thrives in contexts of territorial expansionism. Naturally produced by the economic and institutional structures and the way in which different classes respond to them, the informal competitive structure of violence could be regarded the most complex but yet the most focused-on structure of violence within this thesis. This informal variation is especially complex because it will be discursively hidden in policy frameworks. Moreover, it is complex for the implication of a potential strategic intentionality behind the shaping of the violent structures. A few potential indicators for this could be identified. First of all, intentionality becomes more likely when violence occurs in a continuous and frequent way and specifically targets subversive agents, while institutions, which are considered to be subject to changing social relations and as such ‘learning’ entities, explicitly do not learn from- and respond to this structural occurrence. Secondly, an overlap in the network of policymakers and those who benefit from the violence could be regarded as a potential indicator for intentional maintenance of the structure. Thirdly, a potential direct link between corporations and those who act violently is a form of smoking gun evidence.

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2. Historical trajectories of Brazilian agriculture and land

relations

In this chapter, the historical economic and regulatory transformations of Brazil will be sketched out. Specific focus will be given on the changing nature and role of the agricultural sector, as well as the ongoing agrarian and land antagonisms between agrarian elites and later TNC’s on the one hand and peasants, indigenous peoples and Quilombolas on the other hand. While considerable peasant mobilizations have led to the establishment of formal land rights, the dominant agricultural doctrines of modernization, colonization and globalized marketization as well as institutional flaws have consolidated the social reality of concentrated and expansionary land relationships. With this, the chapter provides a broader context of historical transformation and continuity wherein the soybean regime of accumulation and its violence could be contextualized.

2.1: Agricultural modernization

From the late 30’s up until the end of the dictatorship after 1985, Brazil’s main development model could be described as import substitution industrialization, or ISI (Saad Filho, 2010; Wylde, 2012: 45-54; Turzi, 2017: 8-13). Originating from dependency theory, the imperative of ISI was to make the Brazilian economy more self-reliant and less vulnerable for global shocks. Around the beginning of the 30’s, Brazil was relatively unindustrialized. Exporting low-value added products like agricultural commodities and importing high-value industrial products, the underdeveloped state had a structural trade-deficit which led to a dependency relationship with industrialized economies (Wylde, 2015: 45). Within this context, and based on experiences of vulnerability after two world wars and economic shocks, the ISI doctrine aimed to strengthen self-reliance and decrease sensitivity for price fluctuations by means of substituting imports with the development of domestic industrialized production (Turzi, 2017: 8-13; Saad Filho, 2010).

The ISI strategy had meaningful implications for the role of agriculture within the Brazilian economy. While the sector initially had a labor intensive and relatively inefficient regime of accumulation, the demand for financial capital to subsidize industrialization led to the new role of agriculture as the highly productive and capital intensive exporting ‘cash cow’ for subsidizing

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industrialization (Turzi, 2017: 8; Saad Filho, 2010: 5-8; Mueller & Mueller, 2016). As such, Brazil developed not only a strong industry for nondurable consumption goods like processed foods, textile and clothing, but eventually also complex industries like chemical and pharmaceutical sectors, electricity products and assembly lines (Saad Filho, 2010: 5-8).

Modes of regulation: modernization and colonization versus formal rights

Besides its macro-economic function, the trajectory of agricultural modernization also was both a consequence and a cause of highly antagonistic agrarian relations around land reform. Modernization did not only lead to increased agricultural yields, but also to a higher concentration of land ownership and a consolidation of the power position of rural elites. Meanwhile, the new large-scale, technologically and capital intensive regime of accumulation weakened the position of poor and landless peasants and their call for land reform, as loss of jobs and expansionary repression weakened their bargaining power and led to a vast migration wave towards the urban areas (De Janvry & Saloudet, 1989; Servolo de Medeiros, 2007; Saad Filho, 2010).

The origin of land concentration in Brazil could be found in colonial times, when the Portuguese king redistributed large properties (sesmarias) among rich Portuguese colonialists (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007). After Brazilian independence, it was the 1850 Lei de Terras or Land Law which established purchased private property as the major form of land ownership, effectively blocking access for peasants and ex-slaves to land ownership and maintaining land as a commodity for primitive accumulation (Vergara-Camus, 2012: 1139; Damanesco et al. 2017). Ever since, agricultural policies and land laws have gradually changed with mixed victories for either landowning elites or peasants, but the concentrated ownership of land and the expansionism of agriculture has remained intact. The state-support for concentration and expansionism was particularly present during two stages within the ISI era. Herein, the Brazilian state practiced colonial doctrines that led to the expansion of the agricultural frontier towards ‘empty lands’ in the western parts of the country. In 1937, the Brazilian government started promoting the so-called “March to the West” or Marcha Para o Oeste (Damanesco et al., 2017: 15; Eloy et al., 2017: 498). This doctrine enabled the organized occupation of the north and center-west areas of the Amazon and the Cerrado. By means of land survey expeditions, the establishment of colonization sites in Dourados in Mato Grosso do Sul, as well as the

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establishment of infrastructure and the eventual creation of new capital Brasilia in the 1960’s, the Cerrado was colonized and ‘connected’ with the rest of Brazil. The second colonization wave took place during the military dictatorship, which came to power after the 1964 military coup2

that has been explained as a response to the land reform policies of president Joao Goulart, the increasing menace of the peasant movement felt by the agrarian elites and general anxiety for leftist revolutionary momentum accelerated by the Cuban revolution (Pereira, 2018; Servolo de Medeiros, 2007: 1502-1503). Cheap credit and fiscal incentives provided by the military dictatorship sparked a vivid increase in occupation of lands in the agricultural frontier. The military regime furthermore established the Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), which is responsible for land redistribution and executed a settlement policy around federal roads in the Amazon (Damanesco et al., 2017: 16). While initially aiming to resettle the poor and landless peasants, the INCRA failed to deliver socially appropriate circumstances for the resettlements. Therefore, INCRA thereafter started to promote the occupation of the lands by private farming. In combination with the presence of a large mass of landless workers and the continuing invasion of indigenous territories, this led to violent clashes between peasants and landowners (ibid: 17). New regions were occupied, new crops were developed and introduced and banks and industrial agents where attracted which modernized the agricultural production process and considerably drove away smaller farmers (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007; Eloy et al., 2017: 499). Data on land privatization and subsidization further underscores the supportive position of the dictatorship towards rural elites. Between 1960 and 1980 an approximate 115 million hectares of public lands have been privatized, while rural credits meant for subsidizing modernization multiplied 504% (Vergara-Camus, 2012: 1144). These modernization and colonization policies accelerated the relevance of commodity crops like soy and sugar cane, and moved the agricultural sector towards integration into the global food system, while also making made access to land increasingly exclusionary due to its increased market price (ibid.; Friedmann, 1993).

2_{This coup was supported by the US regimes of Kennedy and Johnson as part of their anti-communist containment}

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The contradictory and internally conflictual nature of the Brazilian state is revealed when regarding the establishment of formal land rights for peasants and indigenous peoples that took place simultaneously with these colonization and modernization policies. In 1945, with the end of the fascist Estado Novo government a new constitution was established. Herein, it was defined that the state was allowed to expropriate land from private owners in the service of public and social purposes, provided this happened in exchange for market price compensation (Damanesco et al., 2017: 15). These progressions could largely be ascribed to the formation of strong peasant movements, whose influence is also visible in the Land Statute of 1964 with which even the pro-ruralist and oppressive dictatorship established some legal land rights. First of all, it defined social use as a legal requirement for private property. This concerned the preconditions that land use should promote the welfare of workers, owners and families on the property; maintain satisfactory levels of productivity; conserve natural resources; and maintained a fair labor relationship between owner and peasant. Secondly, the Land Statute introduced two land reform instruments of the expropriation of large and unused estate on the one hand and progressive taxation of land o the other hand. The rights defined in the Land Statute influenced discourse and struggle around land ownership to such a far extend that some bigger social movements like the CONTAG trade union have framed their strategy around these legal rights to expropriation (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007). The definition of these formal rights thus not imply that their implementation happened smoothly and on a large scale. For example, due to the ongoing condition of market price compensation, which implied a fairly high price, the instrument of land expropriation has been costly and thereby unattractive from the perspective of the Brazilian state, while fairly profitable for the landowning elites (ibid.). Thereby, the redistributive impact of land expropriations has been limited (Damanesco, 2017). Moreover, the precondition of maintaining satisfactory levels of productivity for private land presents an obvious strategic selectivity towards capitalist agrarian regimes of accumulation.

These contradictory modes of regulation of established formal rights on the one hand and modernization and colonization policies on the other hand have led to a double movement with regards to class antagonisms. On the one hand, the position of agrarian elites was enhanced, as they went through an ISI-informed process of modernization and colonization of the Amazon and

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the Cerrado and enjoyed considerable influence within – and as such protection by – the state. On the other hand, as Servolo de Medeiros (2007) and Mancano Fernandez (2013) describe, exactly as a result of this agrarian expansionism and in the light of the established land rights, the formation peasant movements has been sparked. Charged by the Commissao Pastoral do Terra (CPT), a pastoral movement that assumes land to be a gift of god to all humans based on liberation theologies, peasant movements like the Movimento de Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST) and Confederacao Nacional dos Trabalhadores Rurais Agricultores e Agricultoras Familiares (CONTAG) have practiced both strategies of legal land claims and extra-judicial strategies like land occupations in order to push for land reform and decreased land concentration.

2.2 Agricultural globalization

In the past section, the economic and political doctrines leading to modernization of agriculture and the colonization of the Amazon and Cerrado have been described and analyzed, while also laying out the establishment of some formal rights for the peasantry. As such, during this period the power position of agrarian elites was deepened, albeit not unquestioned. In the next section of this historical chapter, it will be described how the emergence of neoliberalism and the globalization of agriculture led to the emergence of agribusiness and reproduced the unequal and expansionary Brazilian land regime.

Despite the steady trend of industrialization and increasingly complex products produced by Brazilian manufacturing, ISI proved to be costly, inefficient and essentially unsustainable during the debt crisis of the 1970’s and 1980’s (Wylde, 2012; Saad Filho, 2010). Brazil’s industrial production was flawed in terms of quality, competitiveness, while it also remained reliant on foreign finance and capital goods in order to support industrialization. As such, particularly accelerated by the oil crisis of the 1970’s, an unsustainable situation of debt and hyperinflation in combination with the regimes general unpopularity both ISI and the military regime in an untenable position. This intersection between economic and political crises resulted in the formation of a new elite consensus in Brazil that Saad Filho (2010) conceptualized as new liberalism. While political democracy and formal political rights were introduced, a neoliberal policy and subordination of domestic industries and policies to international commodity chains and finance was established as well (ibid: 16-18; Oliveira, 2016). Already adopting an IMF

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Structural Adjustment Package in 1982 and introducing the 1986 Cruzado Plan, 1987 Bresser plan, 1988 Summer Plan and 1990 Collor plan after the fall of the dictatorship, Brazil and its agricultural sector went through a process of liberalization and privatization (Castro de Rezende & Marcio Buainain, 1994; Cassel & Patel, 2003). With the halting interventionism of the Brazilian government in the market, the gradual liberalization and deregulation of the domestic agricultural market in 1988 and international trade in 1990 established a new agricultural landscape (Castro de Rezende & Marcio Buainain, 1994: 492). Moreover, during the era of ISI, Brazil initially managed the domestic agricultural market strategically by means of the National Supply Administration and other channels. This institution had a legal monopoly to purchase crops by assigned trade licenses, stockpiling crops and establish guaranteed prices (Turzi, 2017: 50; Vergara-Camus, 2012: 1134). High costs and market inefficiency that came with the National Grain Board made the institution controversial during the Washington Consensus era, leading to the government retreatment out of the agrarian markets in the late 90’s.

Turzi (2017: 49-82) explains how the simultaneous developments of a retreating role from the state and new expansionary strategies from TNC’s particularly strengthened the effects of the neoliberal transformation. Due to their market power and scale advantages, capitalist fractions like grain traders like (most particularly Archer David-Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus or the ABCD group) became dominant agents within the agricultural commodity chains (ibid.). This was strengthened even further by global trends of financialization, quickly changing demand and increasing variety of agricultural products (Borras Jr. et al., 2014). Their entrance further strengthened the unequal situation within the agrarian sector. Brazilian crop prizes cut in half between 1981 and 1990, further enhancing the importance of scaling-up agricultural practices (Cassel & Pattel, 2003). Moreover, despite the formation of the MERCOSUR common market which gave Brazilian agriculture a strong regional position, the liberalization of trade tariff barriers as a result of the WTO Uruguay round made small Brazilian farmers more exposed to global price fluctuations (ibid.). Thanks to ongoing subsidization of large domestic farmers and their sub sequent development into capital intensive made them relatively capable for integrating into the global economy vis-à-vis smaller farmers, but the integration of Brazilian agriculture into

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globalized production was a fact. Meanwhile, 10 million agrarian workers lost their jobs between 1985 and 1995 (Vergara-Camus, 2012).

Modes of regulation: Market-Led Agrarian Reform

In 1988, the new democratic constitution was established (Demanasco et al., 2016). The constitution recognized the rights of indigenous peoples to their traditional lands, while it also enabled the demarcation of Quilombola territories and founded the land category of protected conservation areas. These new formal rights and land demarcations implied a considerable victory for those in favor of land reform that resulted from increasingly organized MST after de dictatorship. As such, between 1995 and 2002 the Cardozo administrations resettled a record height of 579,773 families, partially due to the shift of the INCRA form the elite-dominated ministry of Agriculture to the ministry of Agrarian Development (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007; Indigenous Missionary Council, 2018). Nevertheless, the ongoing power position of the landowning elite gave the expropriations and demarcations of land a high threshold. Meanwhile Washington Consensus-led privatization of land remained the main instrument for land redistribution, which also translated itself in the expansion of agricultural area of over 1,4 million hectares a year during the Cardozo administrations (Vergara-Camus, 2012: 1145; own calculations based on FAOSTAT (2018a) data). As such, a land reform doctrine emerged wherein formal rights had been established and policies where created for the redistribution of land, but the main framework was still guided by market dynamics.

Authors have described this process of land regulation as Market-Led Agrarian Reform (MLAR), (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007; Ondetti, 2008; Sauer, 2009). When this framework was established during the Cardozo government in the 1990’s, land was still heavily concentrated among agrarian elites and corporations. As this ongoing inequality led to an ongoing appeal for Land Statute based expropriations of unused properties by CONTAG and an increase in land occupations by MST, the Brazilian government complemented the market-led system with a rural credit system intending to enable the rural poor to buy private lands. These policies, which were recommended by the World Bank and strongly supported by organizations representing landowners, decentralized the responsibility for land reform from the federal government towards states and municipalities. This resulted for example in the State Land Credit Program in

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Santa Catarina State and the Cédula de Terra program in the North East, which later resulted in the foundation of the Land Bank (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007: 1505). While state governments applauded these programs as relatively cheap and speedy vis-à-vis procedurally heavy expropriations that required compensation costs (ibid.; Penciakova, 2010), claims have been made that these MLAR policies specifically served to defuse peasant movements (Welch, 2006: 43-44), which might explain criticism on the framework by CONTAC, MST and CPT. As these movements claimed, MLAR credit programs did not deal with the issues underlying land concentration, while they shifted the responsibility for agricultural reform towards the local states that were dominated by landowners (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007: 1506). Being subject to government supported acquisition of private land required the formation of an association of smallholders or landless workers to make a proposal, where after the government inspected the proposal and provided credit to purchase the private land for the market price. As the applicant has to pay back the credit, first within 10 and later within 20 years, the use of a certain share of the land for productive parts is often added as a conditionality for the loan (and a constitutional conditionality for ‘social use’ of land) (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007).

MLAR enhanced market accessibility as the core of its pro-poor intentions3_{. In accordance}

with more general criticism on this strategy (Selwyn, 2015) evaluations have criticized MLAR for its limited results and legitimizing influence on neoliberal structures. For example, Fitz (2018) evaluates that while National Program for Land Credit did increase the participation of small farmers into agriculture, a lack of access to credit, irrigation and high-value economic activities preserve the poverty. Moreover, while the Cedula de Terra policy was able to reach its quantitative goals, the policies did not regard what actually happened after the redistribution (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007; Penciakova, 2010). Often, the size of the purchased areas was relatively small, and the quality of the soil low. Moreover, the beneficiaries often ended up in debts and remained below the poverty line, while land frameworks were essentially not democratized (ibid; Sauer, 2009). Moreover, the conditional productivity forced peasant families to integrate into the commodity crop markets and accept an increasingly subordinate position in

3_{As such, it could be regarded as an early form of the post-Washington Consensus as described by Birdsall and}

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order to remain land access (Vergara-Camus, 2012: 1144). Finally, unclarities around land ownership as well as the slow institutional pace of processing land registration requests disproportionally affect indigenous peoples, Quilombolas and the rural poor (Damanesco et al., 2017). For example, over 200 indigenous lands are still waiting for demarcation and recognition in 2016 and over 1,500 requests of Quilombola communities still have to be recognized by INCRA. By some estimations, in the current speed it would take 900 years to issue land rights to already recognized communities (ibid.: 29). Moreover, the maintaining irregularity of much land and weak enforcement of recognized rights enhances the vulnerability for those same communities towards violent expansionary landowners, expropriation of privates lands within protected areas also happens very slowly and the complexity in terms of responsible institutions and the legal meaning of registered cadaster leads to an increasing information asymmetry between rural communities and agribusiness, which is being made use of (ibid.). As such, the MLAR credit program could be regarded as a neoliberal program that does not tackle the market-based land concentration in Brazil. Moreover, its voiced pro-poor language and especially the continuation of the framework under working class champion Lula has undermined pro-land reform forces by decreasing the issue salience of land-reform in public debate and the alignment of CONTAG and other unions behind the scheme (Servolo de Medeiros, 2007; Ondetti, 2008).

Modes of regulation: conservationism and the rise of the Forest Code

Additional to the MLAR framework, the post-dictatorship transformation moreover resulted in the emergence of conservationist frameworks concerning Public Conservation Units (PA’s) and the Forest Code, which add conservationist requirements to land use (Eloy et al., 2016; Damanesco et al., 2017). PA’s regulate public land. The strictness of these regulations of the land depends on the category it has within the framework. From stringent to loose, these categorizations are Integral Protection Units, Sustainable Use Units and Indigenous and Quilombola Lands. While the prohibition of resource extraction makes Integral Protection Units, the Conservation Units merely need a conservationist management plan and therefore has limited conservationist results in real life (Eloy et al., 2016: 503). Conservationist have become the most omnipresent types of land, as could be observed in figure 1.

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The Forest Code is a conversation system for privately owned lands. This system requires landowners to preserve a certain percentage of the property as forest reserves. Breaching this obligation implies losing the possibility to obtain credit from both public and private lands. The Brazil government compensates communities for the reserves they have with the Legal Reserve Compensation. While sustainable in theory and applauded by development agents as a framework that could guide sustainability (WWF, 2016), its actual consequences seem to lead to the contrary. First of all, the Legal Reserve Compensation forms a direct incentive for agricultural expansionism in the PA framework. First of all, as the PA areas could be used for legal reserve compensation, even when located in other states, provided the producer pays for environmental services. This as such result in a system wherein Legal Reserve is traded, and farmers could buy cheaper lands on less suitable areas in order to ‘compensate’ for their land exploitation (Eloy et al., 2016: 505) Secondly, as the policies have been introduced as a result of conservationist campaigns specifically targeting the Amazon biopic, both the policy and the evaluations have a spatial bias that obscures the problem of deforestation and irresponsible land use as a whole. Resulting from this, there is a policy framework with asymmetric conservationist requirements

Figure 1: changes in public conservation units

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(while Forest Code requires 80% of the land in the Amazon to be kept as reserve, it only requires 20% in the Cerrado lands) and the decreasing expansion of agricultural land use in Amazon has resulted in an obscured waterbed effect, as it directly results in increases in soy expansion on other areas (ibid.). Thirdly, conservationist frameworks have been criticized in general as they view humans and nature as separate entities, thereby wrongly considering biodiverse areas as empty lands while simultaneously enabling the lands to be exploited, but now in a limited fashion (The Guardian, 2010; McDermott, 2014; Eloy et al., 2017). While these debates are of great importance, this thesis will not further elaborate on more general criticisms of conservationism.

2.3 Brazilian economic and land policies: a continuous selectivity for expansionism

In the previous chapter, the historical trajectories that root current agrarian relations in Brazil have been described and analyzed. With the consecutive eras of ISI and neoliberalism as main development strategies in Brazil, domestic Brazilian agriculture has been modernized into a capital intensive, highly technological sector focusing on commodity crops. Hereby, it has integrated into the globalized model of agribusiness, which has been strengthened by the rise of neoliberalism that came with the Washington Consensus and the fall of the dictatorship. This has not only consolidated agribusiness and the concentration of land among domestic elites, but also subjected Brazilian agriculture to the dynamics of global agribusiness regimes of quickly changing demand, flexible and financialized regimes of accumulation and a retreating role of the state.

Simultaneous to these agricultural transformations, the legal frameworks around land reform have also been going through considerable changes. With the March to the West and the dictatorial settlement policies, the agricultural expansion and the colonization of the Amazon and Cerrado lands has been facilitated. Moreover, while the Land Statute and the consecutive constitutions of 1945, 1964 and 1988 established formal land rights for the rural poor, these rights remain hard to realize due to the nature of market-based land redistribution inherent to those same frameworks. While the rise of conservationism with the Forest Code and the Public Conservation Areas has considerably limited expansions in some Amazonian lands, it proves insufficient in dealing with the agricultural expansion in general as is especially experienced in the Cerrado and the Northern Amazonian forests. As such, the history of Brazilian agriculture displays

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a continuous hegemony for expansionist landowning elites which has been supported and maintained by strategically selective economic doctrines and modes of regulation.

ACCUMULATION, REGULATION, VIOLENCE: A historical and regulationist perspective on soybeans and competitive structures of violence in Brazilian land disputes