Estrangeiração de terras: área e destinação produtiva no Brasil

Abstract

The acquisition of land by foreign investors has been debated by several educational institutions and by Brazilian government agencies. The debate involves the effects of this practice, the risks it entails or the benefits it could bring to the country, which has been influencing legislators to rethink the Brazilian legal framework that governs the matter. As a result of this recent debate, the academic literature has been using the term land grabbing to encompass the forms of land appropriation by foreign investors around the world, since it presupposes different types of control over land: acquisition, lease, possession, merger of companies, investment in capital shares, investment funds, appropriation of natural resources, etc. Brazil, as a developing country with an extensive territorial dimension and capacity to expand the agricultural frontier, has been targeted by foreign investors from different origins. As a result, the present work aims to analyze the occurrence of the phenomenon of foreignization of land in Brazil, in order to identify the areas of Brazilian land that are currently registered under the possession or ownership of legal entities composed of foreign capital and the destination productive given to them. From the analysis of data made available by the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária – INCRA, it was possible to identify that legal entities with foreign capital have land areas in almost all states of the federation and that the main productive destination declared by investors is reforestation, followed by permanent agriculture and livestock, and it was also identified that there are Environmental Conservation Units owned by foreign legal entities in the country. It was also possible to demonstrate the amount of hectares acquired by foreign companies in each Brazilian state and some transactions carried out that may have ignored legal limitations. In the end, it was concluded that there are weaknesses in the database provided by INCRA and that foreign investors seek the country in order to produce on their land.