Eco-Imperialismo: Agroimperialismo, Estado e Políticas Sociais no Brasil

Abstract

The theme of this thesis is the agricultural sector, known as Agro-imperialism, the State and Social Policies in Brazil. To this end, we set out to conceptualize Eco-imperialism as: any administrative policy; economic and financial dependence; practical and ideological action by a nation, a group, company, large corporations/monopolies, whether political or financial (banks) and investment funds that expand, control, centralize and expropriate the ecological, ecosystems, natural resources, as a potentially crucial and most expressive phase and part of the global accumulation of capital. Therefore, the category of Agro-imperialism is a potential fraction of Eco imperialism, because it brings together Agro-imperialists as personifications of capital in a more advanced stage of Eco-imperialism of decentralization, centralization and economic and financial expansion. In other words, Agro-imperialism is an expanded fraction as a potential segment of the domination and structural composition of world Eco-imperialism. After these conceptualizations, we analyzed the movements, actions and mediations of the expanded Agro-imperialist fraction in Brazil, in the various social, political, financial and legal spheres and its intrinsic relationship with the state, verifying how the sector has historically reproduced itself as part of the socio-metabolic relations of capital, locally, regionally, nationally and worldwide. From the contextual problematizations, we took the relationship between agro-imperialism, the state and social policies as a basis for analysis, in order to verify the central hypothesis. In this sense, given that the agricultural sector is one of the sectors that accumulates the most socially produced wealth in economic terms, we sought to find and present its revenue collection via taxes and its contributory share of resources in the composition of the federal budget, and therefore how these revenues tend to be reflected in the financing of social policies (social spending) in Brazil. In order to show what we are proposing, we sought to compare the sector's revenues, via the National Classification of Economic Activities (CNAE), with social policy expenditure, which can be found in the Integrated Budget and Planning System (SIOP). The data sources collected also contributed to analysis and reflection on some social spending, including education. Quantitative data also showed that the contribution of the wealth produced socially by agro-imperialists to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), both from IBGE data and from the sector itself, carried out by Cepea/Esalq-USP, does not reflect the same proportion of the sector's revenue collection. In order to carry out this research, the theoretical basis was based on bibliographical sources from authors who discussed the proposed themes, as opposed to primary quantitative sources from official databases, such as: CNAE, SIOP, BCB, IBGE, among others. The conclusion is that agro-imperialism in Brazil, as an expanded fraction of global eco-imperialism, collects little in the way of taxes, so this resource is insignificant in terms of the percentage of the Union's total social spending. At the same time, we can see that this is the sector that hegemonically appropriates the state and survives supported by its institutional, political, economic and financial apparatus, with benefits, exemptions, funding and privileges, in other words, “agro” always benefits more than it contributes.