{"id":50057158,"date":"2022-09-15T12:31:27","date_gmt":"2022-09-15T11:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stage.dialogochino.net\/?p=57158"},"modified":"2024-04-15T15:37:45","modified_gmt":"2024-04-15T15:37:45","slug":"57158-how-the-amazon-became-a-global-hub-for-agricultural-exports","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/forests\/57158-how-the-amazon-became-a-global-hub-for-agricultural-exports\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Amazon became a global hub for agricultural exports"},"content":{"rendered":"

Integrar para n\u00e3o entregar<\/em> \u2013 integrate so as not to surrender. Under this nationalist slogan stoking fears of a supposed foreign threat, thousands of Brazilians migrated into the country\u2019s Amazon in the early 1970s, in search of prosperity that the military government had promised.<\/p>\n

\n

Editor\u2019s note<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
\nThis article is a summary of episode one of Amaz\u00f4nia Ocupada<\/strong>, a new podcast series from Di\u00e1logo Chino, available in Portuguese only. Listen here<\/a>.
\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n

At that time, farmers living in poverty in the Brazil\u2019s south saw new horizons in the dictatorship\u2019s propaganda, which said that land was plentiful and accessible \u2013 even free \u2013 in an unexplored area of the Central-West region.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am from [the state of] Santa Catarina, brought up there in the south, and was generally quite excluded, financially and socially,\u201d says Elmo Leitzke, now a wealthy farmer and owner of the 7,000-hectare Minuano farm, in Sinop, Mato Grosso state.<\/p>\n

This was the beginning of a massive colonisation movement in the transitional lands between the Cerrado and Amazon biomes. And so, the first steps were taken towards an extractive and exploitative model that still defines how the country sees its forests today: as an obstacle to progress that needs to be removed from the path of agricultural production.<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil 1975, the forest was practically intact,\u201d said environmental historian Jos\u00e9 Augusto P\u00e1dua, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. \u201cSo we have to understand the [migration] movement from there.\u201d<\/p>\n

This intricate story and its characters are part of our first ever Portuguese-language podcast series, Amaz\u00f4nia Ocupada<\/strong>, launching today. Created by Di\u00e1logo Chino in partnership with Trov\u00e3o M\u00eddia, across five episodes, we recount how the world\u2019s largest and most famous forest was colonised for the exploitation of commodities.<\/p>\n

BR-163, a \u2018fishbone\u2019 highway<\/h2>\n

Listeners will travel along Brazil\u2019s BR-163 highway, an infrastructure project started by the military government that sought to boost the occupation of the Amazon. Perhaps more than any other route, the stories and sights encountered along the BR-163 illustrate how soy, cattle, mining and logging established themselves in the region.<\/p>\n

The construction of the highway, which cuts through Brazil from north to south for over 3,500 kilometres, played a fundamental role in the occupation process, since it was along the roadsides of this axis that villages emerged, some of which became larger towns and cities.

<\/p>\n
\"Ilson
Ilson Redivo, president of a rural union in Sinop, migrated from Brazil\u2019s south in the 1980s (Image: Felipe Betim \/ Di\u00e1logo Chino)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/div>\u201cImagine a fishbone,\u201d said Ilson Redivo, president of a rural union in the city of Sinop, Mato Grosso, and vice-president of Aprosoja Norte, a soybean producers association. \u201cWhat feeds a fishbone is the central column. That central column is BR-163.\u201d<\/p>\n

The results of unbridled colonisation are being felt today, with the emergence of land conflicts, the displacement and deaths of traditional populations and the deforestation of the Amazon, which has recently recorded the highest rates in the last 15 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen they opened the BR-163 highway, many people died, mainly the Panar\u00e1 people,\u201d said Krekreans\u00e3 Panar\u00e1, a leader of one of the indigenous groups displaced from their land by the road\u2019s construction. Krekreans\u00e3 explains that because of contact with newly introduced diseases, such as measles, only around 80 of their people survived, and they left for the Xingu Indigenous Park.<\/p>\n

Sinop, soybean capital<\/h2>\n

A municipality in the north of Mato Grosso state, Sinop was one of the first destinations for immigrants from the south. It is a logical first port of call in our new series. Over the last 50 years, the city has become the epicentre of Brazilian soybean production, a commodity that is now the main export for the country\u2019s agribusiness.<\/p>\n

With the occupation of its biomes for monoculture, and with government encouragement, Brazil has become the largest producer and exporter<\/a> of soybeans in the world, with over 60% of its production being sold to other countries, especially China, according to foreign trade data<\/a>. If Mato Grosso were a nation, it would be the third largest soybean producer in the world, behind Brazil itself and the United States.

<\/p>\n
\"campo
Soybean field in Sinop, Mato Grosso, the state that is the \u2018capital\u2019 of Brazilian agribusiness (Image: Felipe Betim \/ Di\u00e1logo Chino)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/div>Sinop is an acronym for Sociedade Imobili\u00e1ria no Noroeste do Paran\u00e1, the company that started to deforest the rainforest and founded the city. Today, it is home to 150,000 hectares of farming, according to official data<\/a> from 2020.<\/p>\n

Though it is a rural municipality, Sinop does not look much like a country town. In the urban centre, imported cars cruise on well-paved avenues. There are shopping malls, designer shops and expensive restaurants more regularly found in larger cities. The landscape is dotted with billboards advertising new real estate developments, aimed at the agribusiness elite that call Sinop home.<\/p>\n

The municipality has consolidated itself as an important supply centre for products, services and opportunities in the region. According to official data<\/a>, around 150,000 people live in Sinop, which recorded a per capita GDP of over 46,000 reais (US$8,860) in 2019, higher than the national average for that year, of around 35,000 reais (US$6,740).<\/p>\n

Prior to reaching this soybean zenith, Sinop saw other cycles of production<\/a>. The first, which coincided with the founding of the city, was the extraction and sale of wood. \u201cThe extraction of wood was what paid the bills for the early stages of agricultural mechanisation [often a byword for deforestation] that I pursued at the time. It was common to look for new agricultural frontiers,\u201d says Leitzke.<\/p>\n

Once the cities opened, the region experienced a cycle of cattle ranching, a way of occupying these open spaces at low cost. And finally, in the last three decades, came the soybean and corn boom.

<\/p>\n
\"auto
A central avenue in Sinop. The roads in this agricultural city are paved and imported vehicles are a regular sight (mage: Felipe Betim \/ Di\u00e1logo Chino)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/div>This increasing strength attracted multinational commodity traders to Sinop, including Bunge and Cargill, from the United States, the Chinese firm COFCO and the Brazilian Amaggi. These are the companies that act as intermediaries between farmers and buyers, as well as having brought in credit, inputs and techniques that drive Brazilian monoculture.<\/p>\n

What is rather contradictory is that the propaganda disseminated by the military government claimed that the Amazon was the target of \u201cforeign greed\u201d \u2013 especially from the United States. The colonisation of the biome would therefore serve to defend the territory from an imminent threat \u2013 a nationalist vision that still echoes through Brazilian politics today.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was great international pressure for the Amazon not to be Brazilian, for it to belong to the world,\u201d Leitzke recalls. \u201cThe idea was to put the Brazilian people in Amaz\u00f4nia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Episode one of Amaz\u00f4nia Ocupada is now available, in Portuguese only, on Spotify<\/a>, Apple<\/a>, Amazon<\/a> and Deezer<\/a>. Episode two, and the accompanying English article, will be released on Monday 19 September.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a new series, we trace the story of the Amazon since the 1970s, when Brazil\u2019s military government promoted its occupation, attracting migrants to deforest and develop agriculture<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":50058530,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[50039902],"tags":[506,531,595],"country":[50000021],"class_list":["post-50057158","podcast","type-podcast","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-forests","tag-amazon","tag-deforestation","tag-soy","country-brazil"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow the Amazon became a global hub for agricultural exports<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"New series follows story of the Amazon in Brazil since the 1970s, when military government promoted migration, deforestation and agriculture\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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