El polo industrial de Barcarena en Pará, Brasil, como principal generador de externalidades económico-ambientales negativas

Abstract

The municipality of Barcarena, in the State of Pará, located in the northern region of Brazil, promoted large companies in the mineral sector such as Alumina do Norte do Brasil S.A. (ALUNORTE) and Albrás-Alumínio Brasileiro S.A. (ALBRÁS). At the current juncture, however, Barcarena's industrial pole must be seen as a transforming agent in its parsimonious, social, economic, and environmental endeavors, above all with the generation of affecting economic-environmental externalities. The present article, therefore, aims to understand this problem, based on the vision of local leaders and the identification of the existence (or not) of negative environmental externalities arising from the large - scale production of Barcarena industrial pole. From the methodological point of view, the data collection was divided in two stages: in the first moment, through bibliographical research, that is, the present article used qualitative research; already in the second moment, an in loco field research was carried out with the main local leaders of Barcarena, obtaining a response of the vision of the same ones on environmental, social, economic impacts and types of mechanisms of awareness and solution of conflicts in question. The main conclusion is that the industrial pole of Barcarena has a significant share of responsibility for the generation of negative externalities to the environment, and the on-site research can verify that the biggest problem faced by the leaderships analyzed was the lack of compliance on the part of the companies of this industry in the face of environmental accidents. Finally, Environmental Education can act as an important tool to support and solve problems among the agents involved.