Por uma outra pecuarização: incremento técnico e produção do espaço agrário em Pacajá/Pará/Brasil

Abstract

Agriculture and livestock farming in the Amazon have been the subject of much criticism over the past forty years, as it’s identified as the main culprits for deforestation and fires. However, current technologies enable more sustainable agriculture, reconciling the supply of raw materials and income generation with the conservation and preservation of the Amazon, without the need to open new areas. Although agricultural activities have intensified with the construction of the Transamazon Highway in the early 1970s, and Pacajá only became a municipality in 1988, the cattle production model has not changed much, remaining extensive. Thus, the demand for new pastures continued year after year, putting the municipality in a situation of near unsustainability and under the pressure of deforestation control policies, such as the actions of the fire arc, initiated in the early 2010s. To understand the formation of the agrarian space in Pacajá, it is necessary to clarify some points, as it is noted that there is a process of production of the agrarian space in the municipality caused by the State and other agents, through public policies that imposed productive systems that require high work intensity, little invested capital and that use a low technical and technological level. These productive systems that have been repeated over the last decades, it is necessary to understand if the production systems have had technical advances over time and what impact these processes have had on the production of the agrarian space of the municipality. From the analysis of the historical factors that occurred since the opening of the Transamazon Highway, addressing from the colonization project of the region, through public credit and rural settlement policies, this work proposes to describe the natural environment understand how production systems have consolidated, identifying the sets of productive practices used by rural producers. After the typification of the producers, the detailing of their trajectories, of their production systems and their agricultural practices, it was concluded that there was a low technical increment over the years in the production systems and the impact on the production of a disordered space is significant.