Amazonas river channel: transformations, crises and agribusiness

• Autor(a) principal: Passos, Messias Modesto dos [UNESP]
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Goncalves, Diogo Laercio [UNESP]
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Texto Completo: http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/confins.44024; http://hdl.handle.net/11449/218801
• topic: Amazon river channel; GTP; family farming; mechanized agriculture; land use

In this paper, focused on the Amazonas river's channel, that is, on the geographic slice where Para state's municipalities Santarem, Belterra and Mojui are located, some projects will be presented as priority (Henry Ford's project, with the foundation of Fordlandia (1928) and Belterra (1934) and the implantation and bankruptcy of TECEJUTA), short term projects, here called ostrich flights; and the arrival of the agribusiness in these lands of the north of the country. The methodology is supported by the application of the Geosystem-Territory-Landscape (GTP) model, which associates the source geo-system to the resource territory and the identity landscape, that is, a geographic attempt to simultaneously shade the globality, diversity and interactivity of the whole environmental system. Since 1997 soy agribusiness advances in Para's west region, chiefly due to government incentives and support from Banco da Amazonia (BASA), which supports mainly large rural farmers, leaving family farming on the sidelines. First, the mechanized agriculture will take possession of already deforested areas, because the occupation in the Amazonasriver channel region was already consolidated, - due to Instituto Nacional de Colonizacao e Reforma Agraria (INCRA) settlements, in the beginning of the 1970s. However, in the following years, deforestation of patches of the forest existing in the area was observed. Soybean producers adopted/adopt the strategy of deforesting from the borders of these patches, as recorded from Landsat images and also with photos taken in the locations. It is clear that the arrival of the agribusiness in the Amazonasriver channel brought significant socioenvironmental impacts; (b) increased deforestation of significant existing forest patches (which still exist, though reduced); (c) brought a culture totally different from that of the region; (d) and, worst of all, created needs for INCRA to collect forest areas to implant 'Corta Corda Settlement Project' in forest areas.