Uma nova safra de propriet?rios rurais? O caso dos investimentos da Universidade de Harvard em recursos naturais no Brasil

• Autor(a) principal: Vicente, Jessica Siviero
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRRJ
• Texto Completo: https://tede.ufrrj.br/jspui/handle/jspui/6210
• topic: financeiriza??o; investidores institucionais; grilagens; fronteiras; Harvard Management Company; financialization; institutional investors; land squatting; frontiers; Sociologia; Economia

With how much wire is a fence built? How many titles are necessary to invent a property? In the case in question, or put another way, in the cases of the ?questions? that shall be discussed, beyond those well-known fraudulent titles obtained from grilagem (land squatting), properties are also being fenced by ?new financial titles?. Combined they form an apparently unheard-of opposition between professors, students, executives and financiers of Harvard University against rural workers of Bahia?s sert?o (heartlands). This research was constructed and born from my perplexity at the clash of these distant worlds, starting from a localized case of land squatting involving 140 thousand hectares in western Bahia. There I found an articulation between local agents, national agrobusiness managers and executives of a company that administered assets and funds belonging to Harvard University (Harvard Management Company, HMC). Thus the question: who is the owner of these lands? Afterall, is there something ?new? in this case? I defend that the ?new? is the result of an effort to establish the so-called ?financial market of natural resources?, whose frontiers globalization has been producing in order to appreciate capital in different countries. In this process, Brazil has become especially attractive, having been represented as the world?s largest frontier for new investments in land and agriculture, which has led to rise and resurgence of ?new frontiers? within the country; the encounter between national and political actors, financial and transnational capital, rural workers, traditional communities and rural populations has produced these spaces. In this dissertation, I shall attempt to unravel who are the financial agents obscured by these events and provide a sketch of the complexity of political arrangements and landholding conflicts in which they are inserted.