Questão agrária e pobreza nos assentamentos de reforma agrária de Roraima: resistência e (re)criação da identidade camponesa

Abstract

The agrarian question and the poverty in the Roraima agrarian space are studied through investigation in two settlements of the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA): the Jatobá Settlement Project (P.A. Jatobá) and the Anauá Directed Settlement Project (P.A.D.) Anauá), located, respectively, in the municipalities of Caracaraí/Cantá and Rorainópolis. It aims to: (1) configure the agrarian question and poverty in the Roraima agrarian space, in the context of the Brazilian Amazon; (2) map the role and strategies of the state and peasant workers in addressing the agrarian and poverty issues in P.A. Jatobá and P.A. Anauá in the period from 2003 to 2018; and (3) identify impacts of public policies on addressing land issues and poverty in the land reform settlements surveyed. We study the period from 2003 to 2016, marked by: the contradictions of the development of the capitalist mode of production in the country, intensified in the countryside by the processes of territorialization of monopoly capital in agriculture and monopolization of peasant territory; and, by state regulation in the fight against poverty, particularly under the governments of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), through the implementation of compensatory public policies. The research and theoretical-methodological analysis of the object is based on the historical-dialectical materialism of marxist theory. It seeks to articulate the concrete phenomena with the theoretical foundation, considering the conflicts and contradictions of reality. The study is based on the bibliographic investigation of the theoretical categories, the documentary research of secondary data in printed material and internet, and on the empirical research carried out at P.A. Jatobá and P.A.D. Anauá between 2017 and 2018, through participant observation and interviews with 26 peasant families. In the analysis of the agrarian question in the state of Roraima, we highlight the conflicts that involved the dispute for agrarian space in the main historical periods of the contradictory and combined development of capitalist accumulation in Brazil and the Brazilian Amazon. The first period is characterized by the non-indigenous occupation of space until the creation of national farms in the Vale do Rio Branco. The second expresses the process of consolidation of a local bourgeoisie in the Vale do Rio Branco region. The third results from the processes of expropriation and exploitation of mineral wealth and goes until the creation of the Federal Territory. The fourth is shaped by the context of conservative modernization in the Brazilian Amazon, which begins mainly in post-1964 and goes to the redemocratization of the country. The last period characterizes the contemporary agrarian issue in Roraima, driven by the movement of agribusiness expansion into the Brazilian Amazon and its impacts on peasant agriculture and the indigenous issue. The article discusses poverty in the agrarian space of Roraima, presenting a theoretical reflection on the conceptions of the phenomenon of poverty and highlighting its meaning from the foundations of the Marxist tradition, the liberal and neoliberal tradition and the multidimensional approach. These are the manifestations of poverty in the agrarian space P.A. Jatobá and P.A.D. Anauá. Peasant families who migrated to Roraima from the late 1970s to the 2000s are considered to find in rural settlements a space of resistance and (re) creation of peasant identity, as they guarantee access to land and enable production agriculture and diversified food. But peasants lack health, education and infrastructure policies to stay on land and produce. Settled and non-settled peasants living in P.A. Jatobá and P.A. Anauá are considered to be constantly tense by movements of territorialization of capital and monopolization of territory, which intensify the manifestations of absolute and relative poverty in the agrarian space. Contradictorily, they collectively organize, resist and (re) raise themselves as peasants facing absolute poverty in INCRA's rural settlements in the Roraima state agrarian space