PATH dependency e a transformação agrária do bioma amazônico: o sentido econômico das capoeiras para o desenvolvimento sustentável

Abstract

The “capoeiras” - altered soils by antropic action that are in expontaneous process of regeneration of its forest covering - are component of the rural landscape of great meaning in the Amazonian. In the last Agricultural Census, the areas of capoeira amounted 4,5 million hectares in the whole North Region of Brazil. A increasingly important literature considers such areas indicator of decadent and unsustainable rural economies, on which rises a pressumably efficient and sustaintainable livestock for meat production. This article tries to establish the different capoeira’s types that exist in the Amazonian’s rural economy, relating them to the different production forms, whose systems are dinamicaly expressed as competitive technological paths. On that base it demonstrates a) that part of those areas results of positive changes in the productive systems that produce “capoeiras” with great regeneration capacity - being associated, therefore, to important innovations for the development of the Region in a perspective that incorporates criteria of environmental sustainability; b) that the types of “capoeiras” that indicate land degradation, because of their low regeneration capacity, associate to the cut livestock, which has been presenting structural difficulties of technical modernization. The article indicates also that the prevailing institutional environment, favoring the systems that produce degraded “capoeira” in detriment of those that produce “capoeiras” of fast regeneration, can arrest (to take it into a lock-in) the agrarian economy of the Region in the worst solutions in economical, social and ecological meaning.